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

ANIMATION/COMBAT/CLOTHING/STUFF

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

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

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

VOIP

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

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

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

OTHER STUFF

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

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

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

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