Once upon a time Mondays were exclusively reserved for comic strip cats to make snide observations about while discussing lasagne and/or their owner’s love life.

Well, no more. Monday’s now for Mondoid – your one stop shop (Hi Mathas!) for everything that’s happening deep inside Project Zomboid development.

Stabilisin’ / Bug fixin’ / Beta build releasin’

Fixing up for the next Steam beta build is still progressing, and we’re hoping for a public beta to go out today. It’s possible it already has by the time you read this. We’ll see where we are before this Mondoid is posted and if it’s already been released then we’ll say ‘Yes! Released!” here and link to its thread on Steam: [sorry, not released yet].

This past weekend has been awash with bugs fixes, and we launched this upcoming beta branch build build to our internal testers for feedback.

Bug fixes relating to farming, carpentry as well as some UI polish have also been completed. You can read the complete upcoming beta change list (along with the current beta features that are still new and upcoming to non beta and Desura peeps) in the following thread: http://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/648812305221475882/

As always work on performance, plugging up memory leaks and other important tasks are still going – and going well. With this coming beta build  we hope to see some improvement on most systems. As we say in the beta thread though, it may take a few versions to get where we want to be – so if you still have problems, have hope.

We’re also looking into auto-detecting the need for Compatibility Mode to avoid the black screen issues, and already hope to have reduced the number of instances dramatically. Then again we’re unlikely to have gotten them all, so again – this will be an ongoing effort throughout the next few patches if necessary.

Buildin’ hordes

We got lots of enthusiastic ‘thumbs up’ motions from our internal testers when we gave them the upcoming build – especially in relation to its rebalanced (read: raised) zombie counts. New survivors should beware… hordes are coming back, and they’re not pleasant to deal with.

We’re braced for a torrent of ‘OMG too many zombies’ forum posts when the build hits, but we think it necessary to get the zed-count and difficulty levels back to what it was in pre-Steam Muldraugh. You’re gonna get munched, but that’s how things roll in and around Knox Country…

Repairin’ weapons

In and amongst his bug hunt RJ (Romain) has crafted a new weapon repair system that’ll be part of the upcoming beta build. This involves a bunch of the new items that we’ve recently added to the game, weapon condition stats and a couple of new traits. You can find details in this forum thread: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/3735-the-fixing-system/

Designin’ long awaited NPC / Meta-Game stuff

Okay we’re not ready to go into too many details, as we’ve run into the issue of blowing our load way too early and hyping everyone up a little too much on the NPCs issue in the past.

BUT…

This week we’ve made some massive strides in terms of designing the high level meta-game in such a way that it should dramatically ease the work that’ll be involved when it comes to restarting full-scale NPC development.

It’s also safe to say that the approach we’ve opened up can potentially open up better, more interesting results – as well as open up some ace future gameplay possibilities for the Sadistic AI Director component. Especially when it comes to… erm… multiplayer.

Oh man, so many PZ excitement buzzwords in once place! Please don’t get in too much of a tizz over all this just yet, this is all a fair ways off, but we’re building the NPC metagame framework again – and it feels good.

Love y’all.

TIS

PS: we still get quite a few questions about how to get a Steam key if PZ was previously bought from Desura (or Google Checkout, way back in the day), so if you’re wondering about this, please check out this page: http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2013/11/returning-to-pz/