Hey everyone, quite a bit in this week’s Mondoid. Just a quick note before we dive in though. It’s sometimes tricky to ascertain what’s in upcoming builds (and past ones)  from a browse of our weekly blogs – so we’ll be now be maintaining a ‘PZ Status and Build history‘ page on our website from now on. Everything from our launch on Steam up until the present day will be covered there, so it should also be handy to let returning players see what’s been added during their absence.

ANIMS

Work in the anims branch continues – tying up loose ends and making sure the entire game is playable and makes sense visually in terms of character action and behaviour. An example of this can be seen in the second half of the following video, to prevent the fairly odd sight of the player character sprinting at full pelt through thick woods. The following are just two of the many animation sequences we’ve implemented over the past week.

VOIP

After our successful first test of in-game VOIP, positional player voices and volume we have just received the second updated drop of General Arcade’s fiddlings with the PZ mainframe. It’s got added server options, configurable voice audibility over distance, better microphone boost and voice volume control and now supports all our various supported platforms.

We still need to spin the build up on an internal dedicated server and give it a proper test, but GA are hopeful that we’re now not far from integrating VOIP into Build 35 – or at least to open up the VOIP build to a wider brigand of testers on the TIS forums. We’ll keep you updated on that front.

RJ’S COMMUNITY REQUEST QUEST

RJ has spent the last few weeks amassing a vast number of new features, tweaks and smoothenings requested by our hardcore playing community – all of which are now playable in our open IWBUMS public beta. This week, however, he’s turned his attention towards the fine folks who host servers for MP play, and who have needed more control and player-inspection powers for a long old time.

The model we’re using is that of the awesome, wonderful and rightly revered Ultima Online and introduces Server Access levels for Admin Staff with different levels of power and responsibility. Full details of Observer, GM, Overseer, Moderator and Admin roles can be found here on the TIS forums.

Added into this are better recorded spawn/death coordinates, a teleportation command and other ways to deal with cheatiness. There’s also a new UI that’ll let moderators and upwards modify player traits, professions, names, usernames, XP and whatnot.

Right now RJ is working on an info sheet of sorts so admins can track player activity better, but he’ll be returning to the ever-growing pile of main game player suggestions found here on the forum in the near future, so if you want to add your thoughts then please do so!

MAP

Mash continues work on Build 35’s second big new map location, as well as filling in a bunch of the nowhere-zone cells currently on the PZ map with detail and traces of civilization. She has, however, performed what we call a ‘Mash Smash’ as to revealing what the new area is – wanting it to be a surprise to beta testers when it hits IWBUMS.

TURBO TRANSLATIONS

Turbo has tied his implementation of our community’s fine narrative content translation work (Russian, German, Spanish, Turkish Polish and French right now) to finalising a public version WordZed for the modding community – our in-house radio and TV writing/editing/timing and wavelength broadcast tool.

It wasn’t hugely user-friendly formerly (which is why it wasn’t released) but now comes with an added Search functionality, options and a general smoother edit process.

We want to tweak it further, and to write a decent manual, but intend to beta release it in our Community Translation it for feedback as soon as we can. In the mean-time Writer Will has also been editing existing narrative content for use on VHS tapes and CDs for character entertainment and boredom relief after most broadcasts cut out, and is also tapping up some new home-taped content too.

This week’s zombie stick-up from Original Nickname of Steamton, Steamshire. 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. There are many cats that live in there, and all of them are cool. Oh, and check out the new PZ Status and Build History page if you’re so inclined too.