Hey all. Simmering in the background the fundaments of our vehicles and animation branches are being tied closer together, Martin’s car and truck models continue to pop into the communal directory to surprise/delight, and the map continues to expand. And while all those cogs and gears are whirring, the following bizness is occurring:

BUILD 37

Build 37 should be out this week, it’s content-locked but we’re also having a real bug purge at the moment – and are dead set on getting a clean version out for our upcoming bigger features to then build on.

This is extremely boring and frustrating (we know) but we’ve had a bunch of persistent bugs in the main game build for a while now and they needed attending to. It also does feel good to have put some regular villains to the sword, all of whom have been really tough to track and duplicate.

As such, much as it all sounds like a terrifying cheese dream, we think that bugs like saucepan rain, self-opening de-synced co-op curtains and windows, several server crashes and a myriad of gamepad/split-screen eccentricities have been fixed in the next IWBUMS public beta build.

Additionally, while fixing the persistent black screen flicker you experience in MP when another player wakes up or falls asleep, we also used the opportunity to fix up some sleep mode logic requested by servers that prefer to keep player-sleep active – meaning that players can now wake up independently of each other, wake up if they press the move keys and have a visible sleep clock. This may well need some more polish, but we’re intrigued to see how the system fares online.

NU-TOOLS

The maps and annotated maps of Build 37 were made possible by a tool made by TurboTuTone – and in amongst his current devices work in the main game CartoZed has now been revamped.

We hope its additions will be of a benefit to our map makers, and to aid the creation of in-game maps for the many community-created custom maps that PZ players survive on.

It’s now easier to use, scroll and pan, allow mouse selection of specific areas and can be used with user maps. So, for example, here’s a top-down of some of  Xeonyx’s New Denver.

Meanwhile CartoZed will also now export an isometric version showing cells of 300×300 tiles, should you crave your own downloadable chunk of the overall PZ map or your own map creation.

Turbo has also updated ItemZed to version 1.2 using feedback from the modders who’ve picked up its mantle, which can be found here.

BUILDING HERO

A quick shout out to the redoubtable Blackbeard06 who has gone about the laborious task of polishing up, fixing up and categorizing hundreds of user-created buildings that were left with errors after 2x sprites became part of the main game. He’s clearly put a lot of work in, and this means that there are now even more potential new industries and abodes to be added to user maps.

REDBOID REFORGED

There seems to be a bit of a spurt of new PZ servers appearing at the moment (and if you’d like yours to get some spotlight then please get in touch) but just a brief mention for that hoary old stalwart Redboid – the server of the PZ subreddit. Now under new management and with a few rule changes amidst the familiar faces, it’s a major organ in the online contingent of PZ and it’s good to see it continue to flourish.

A BRIEF NOTE

In terms of general PZ output – we are listening, wanting to get the ‘good stuff’ out to you and are (hopefully) improving both behind the scenes and in terms of release frequency.

Our recent collaborations with General Arcade in the vehicles branch have shown us how fruitful it can be to have fresh faces working at our many different coalfaces, and as such are looking to expand our bank of coders with AAA or indie game dev experience.

We already have an iron or two in the fire, but if you have a good, established programming CV in the games industry and enjoy our game (and especially if you’re in NE England) then feel free to give us a shout.

This week’s ‘Cheers’ vibe from Duncan. 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 now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here. Please also note that the CBOIT will be back mid-week with the return of our Mod Spotlight blog on the main PZ site, with a wheel-y good guest star.