ChangeLog


Changes:
- Performance optimization in multiplayer


Bug fixes:
- Various bug-fixes in the maps
- Shapeshifter and Arachne bugs fixed
- German description in the journal is now displayed correctly
- The difficulty is now also displayed for the other players in the analysis after the mission
- Fixed fullscreen/window mode bug

In this update, it's time for some medieval weapons - The Bow!



The new weapons include:

• Crossbow - Can be shot 3 times, shoots regular arrows that curve downwards (space works funny in this game). Regular arrows bursts bubbleshields in one hit!
  
• Tripple Bow - Shoots once, but fires 3 arrows simultaniously in an arc.
  
• Bomb Arrows - Same as Tripple Bow, but explodes after 0.5sec & on impact.
  
• Ice Arrows - Same as Tripple Bow, but freezes players on impact. Frozen players cannot move, and must tap their buttons fast to unfreeze!

That's it for this weeks update! Enjoy the new weapons space archers!

• Added button to open and close doors
  
• Select and swap out different components of the door
  
  • 4 door frames, 5 panels and 5 handles to choose from, for a total of 100 different combinations
    
  • Individual components can also be used independently
• Bugfix: No more lagging when drag-adjusting a co-ordinate in the UI panel for a door or window

Hello Mercenaries,

Did someone ask for a dev stream? That’s right we’re going to showcase our next update with a dev stream before our Community mod event this Friday starting at 3:30 pm EST and ending at 4 pm EST.

• Starting at 3:30pm EST Friday Aug 19
  
• We’ll cover what’s upcoming in the latest build and a sneak peek of the live ops schedule

Now let us dive into the Friday Mod Event!
This deadly mod has been created by TH_Mrow, where we’re armed with 1 shot only. Equipt with a deadly golden pistol everyone will be given one bullet only, so make your shot count.

• Friday (Aug 19) event will run from 4pm EST until 5pm EST
  
• Players will be given a golden pistol and 1 bullet
  
• If you’re shot by the bullet it’s an insta death
  
• For each kill you’ll recover 1 bullet
  
• If you’re out of bullets you can melee a player which will result in insta death as well and you’ll be refunded a bullet for the kill
  
• HAVE FUN!

• A 2x Contract Bonus

If you can't make the event but want to watch the action we'll stream live on Twitch: LEAP on Twitch




If you want to LEAP into the Discord, we have an active community taking part in events and hosting ones similar to these. So if you'd like to join some really cool Mercenaries, head on in by clicking the image above!

• GZDoom engine updates, mostly fixing the shell folder open. Now works the same on all platforms and should be more secure.
• Sword is now flagged as a melee weapon for mods/bots that need access to this info

Long story short I had taken a breather from Wild Europe and I'm now looking into making new games. Don't worry though, wild Europe will still be in development! In the time I've been away I have discovered a wealth of info on how to create flying/swimming AI, so you can expect flocks of birds and schools of fish coming soon!

In other news, if you didn't know already I am a huge dinosaur/prehistory geek. so future titles might include a blast from the past!

-added character selection btn in settings
-updated character selection ui
-updated clock ui
-fixed music

Development continues on the full game and it is going really well, currently testing the final area!

Meanwhile a lot of changes has been made to the game and many of these also affect the demo which warranted another update for it as well.

This is quite a large patch which is why it took some extra time to complete and we hope you will enjoy these changes. Please let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions, either in the discussion forum for the game here on Steam, or in our discord.

Thank you!



The game is now more responsive when the player tabs in and out of the game during loading. Previously the player would sometimes have to wait for loading to complete entirely before being able to tab back in.

Greatly reduced loading time for when starting a new area. More than 30% reduction of loading time during tests!

Players can now highlight important locations on the map by hovering over the name of the location while viewing the map. This also includes the players' lost items that they drop on death.

Objectives will now show additional information when the player hovers over them while viewing their current objectives.

When an objective is completed the player will now be notified of it and be able to see the name of the objective that was just completed.

When the player gets a new objective they will also be notified of it and be able to see the name of the new objective that was just added.

The house with the car is now displayed on the map.

Added feedback texts for when the player tries to equip items and all equipment slots are full.

Added feedback texts for when the player transfers items but the target container is full.

Added feedback texts for when the player tries to equip an item that can't be equipped.

Added a small blinking light to the players backpack so it can easier be found once it is dropped.

The transition point to new areas will now be marked on the map once the player finds it.

Updated loading screen descriptions to further improve the granularity of the loading screen.


Reworked monster behaviors on roads to stop players from having to wait to progress due to monsters walking slowly on the roads. They will now appear for less time on the roads, but instead move faster (so watch out!)
A new animation was also added as part of this change.

Added "otherworldly fragments" to the demo. The otherworldly fragments can be found scattered through the woods. The player can equip them in their suit and gain attribute boosts. There are different kinds of fragments and each fragment has unique effects. However the demo is quite early in the game and at this point the player hasn't found the suit yet so it is more like a teaser of gameplay mechanics from the full game.

Added additional effects to when the player strays too far off the road with the car.

Added something scary to the car

Added short animation for when the player lowers their equipment if they are too close to a wall to make it look a lot smoother.


Added motion blur to post processing (you can ofcourse disable it in settings if you do not like it).

Updated loading screen screenshots since daytime have been reworked to be much darker and because of graphical improvements made since when they were taken.

Reworked fog so nights will be a little less dark when facing away from the moonlight.

Added more (rocks/branches/leaves) to the roads.

Improved visual effects for when the player looks at the infected light.

Improved the looks of several of the house models as well as the underground bunker area.

Readjusted the brightness on a lot of textures to make environments look better in the dark.

Improved the model for the torch.


Slightly reduced damage from monsters on all difficulties.

Monster attack cooldowns slightly increased on all difficulties, attack cooldowns now also scale with the chosen difficulty setting.

Monster sight range has been reduced and now also scale with chosen difficulty settings with "Hard" now being the previous default range.


Fixed a bug which caused some equipment to disappear when the player tried equipping it with their equipment slots full.

Fixed a bug which caused a small area near the center of the map to behave as a pool of water, preventing players from running while inside of it.

The reception to Farthest Frontier so far has been fantastic and we’re glad to see so many of you enjoying the game, providing feedback and reporting issues. The game will become the best version of itself thanks in part to your support and contributions. It’s the very reason we wanted to do early access again for our second title; the community is showing us that it was the right decision.



We’ve been busily reviewing your feedback, getting bug reports to TOP MEN, and we’re now ready to talk about some of the changes and improvements you can look forward to in the near future, and throughout early access. You can expect this to be the first of many updates we post during early access to keep you in the loop of how things are going and where we are headed.

This is in no way a comprehensive list of what will happen in early access, but we’d like to address some of your top concerns.

So let’s dive in on our official forum.

 

Hey all, we’ve had our heads deep in MP stuff this past ten days – so please excuse a blog that’s heavy on busywork and housekeeping.

We released 41.73 to stable last week, which came with an unanticipated issue that saw Linux servers (of which there are many) having frequent crashes – generally when multiple users tried to connect at the same time.

This wasn’t great, to say the least, so a lot of the B41 team’s bandwidth has gone into investigating, testing and finding a solution for this over the last ten days.

We’ve recently released version 41.74 to the Unstable beta, which has fixed the crash issue at our end – and we would ask that anyone who hasn’t been able to play due to linux server crashes to try it out. This includes a full update to Valve’s latest Steam API.

If you continue to experience crashes on the Unstable branch after this patch, please head to our Discord techsupport channel or forums and send us your hs_err_pid**.log file (you’ll find this in the server installation folder) in addition to a download link to a .zip file of your Home/Zomboid folder (remove the “Saves” folder from it to save space).

Doing a wholesale update to the Steam networking interface like this isn’t small beans, and it has thrown up a few issues that we will be remedying in the coming days – but in the interest of getting folks missing out on their PZ ASAP we have released the fix to Unstable to get people back on-board, and report back on any other misbehaviour.

We will also be making some of the new anti-cheat additions far less twitchy, as these too caused issues for some people on 41.73 launch.


Slightly logjammed behind 41.74 is a wide-ranging patch full of many and various things. To minimise future disruption to B41 players we are thinking that it may well be the last major patch before all coders are moved to B42 and more feature-based development.

Clearly there will still be fixes and maintenance where necessary. We’ll be wanting to leave 41 in the best state that we can, and with as many annoyances removed as possible. Plans can change of course, but this currently our direction.

Some of the logjammed items ready-coded and awaiting internal integration and testing are:

• New flatpack model for movable icons. Cleared up plastic/metal bucket confusion. New watering cans.
  
• Added compass support for the forthcoming compass item. When an item with the Compass tag is in a player’s inventory, the tooltip on mouseover will include text indicating which direction the character is facing.
  
• Recipe improvements: – more food items capable of being added to tacos and burritos.
  
• Rebalanced weights/encumbrance of: walkie talkies (for French speakers: talkie walkies), fire extinguishers, branches, spears, more.
  
• Adjusted the capacities of pistol and revolver cases from 7 down to 4. Changed the sawed off shotgun recipes to only use the hacksaw, and not the garden saw.
  
• Longstanding bugbear that using lighters with Molotovs completely drains them fixed. Also when a Lighter is equipped it will no longer automatically become lit, instead it will do so only if activated using the flashlight keybind or radial menu, or using the inventory context menu option to activate them.
  
• Several new zed and building stories.
  
• Added a new sandbox setting “EnablePoisoning” which has the settings “True” (default), “False”, and “Bleach is Disabled”. It governs if poison, or only bleach, is disallowed from being added to foods. Although this is primarily intended for MP servers, as an anti-griefing/no-PVP allowance, it has been requested for singleplayer as well, thus why it is a sandbox setting and not a server setting.
  
• Building keys spawn on zombies and corpses when they spawn inside buildings, when appropriate, instead of when they die inside of one. (WIP – may be B42)
  
• Set some traits to be mutually exclusive to remove exploits or illogical combinations: Brave & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic; Adrenaline Junkie & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic/Cowardly.
  
• Rebalanced the maggots that spawn on corpses so that they spawn less often in spring and fall, and also so that the maggots that spawn on zombie corpses have a poison value of 5 instead of 3.
  
• Improved how current fakedead zombie spawns function.
  
• Improvement to buffs and debuffs in terms of XP and moodles shown.
  
• Fixed issues that involve spawning in barricaded/burnt/randomized locations.
  
• House keys will no longer spawn with a long string of numbers in their display name. (Should’ve improved this previously – apologies)
  
• Added attachments to most food models so they appear in the player’s hand while eating
  
• /gunshot command can now target a specific player
  
• Some work-in-progress changes to zombie behaviour. Random offset to where zombies think a sound came from for unseen squares. Rain increases zombie hearing random offset range and decreases chance for zombies to react to player sounds. Zombies wander more during heavy rain. (Potentially B42 content)
  
• Fixes and improvements to the admin tile picker system in MP.
  
• Some logical improvements to clothing items. Motorcycle helmets protect from head fractures, firefighter gear protects from fire etc.
  
• A fix to how you’re unable to claim a safehouse unless standing on the ground floor, and how game currently doesn’t check upper floors for other players or zombies when claiming.
  
• “Streamer Mode” audio option which changes vehicle siren sounds to avoid bizarre copyright strikes.
  
• Various improvements and fixes to the cutaway system.
  
• Colour-blind friendly accessibility addition – letting you add:another variant to red/green in aiming outline – and also to reduce difficulty when zed is standing on snow.
  
• Added highlight to crates so it’s easier to differentiate which one player is interacting with.
  
• Optional Sandbox Setting To Disable The Tainted Water Tooltip/Warning For Hardcore Play
  
• Improvements to level of damage burnt food does to players with weak stomach trait
  
• Changes to how car alarms function in-game, seeing as currently they are an extremely rare threat.
Although its early days yet, and unconfirmed for B42, we are also currently spending some time doing some backstage experimentation with basements and improvements to our loot/inventory UIs. If these are successful we may well see them surface in future blogs. Thanks all! This week’s supermarket camping trip from 지혁. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. 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 you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.