Hey all, here’s the latest.
WEATHER BETA
Overall we’ve been getting some great feedback from the weather beta, with a few favourable mentions of it feeling a bit Silent Hill which is nice, and we’re looking forward to getting it properly into IWBUMS testing.
In the mean-time though Turbo has just updated the public test beta of his current weather, climate, fog and precipitation work. This primarily fixes issues with disappearing fog, and also always keeps the ‘visibility radius’ around the player constant when shifting the camera view – and also carries some optimizations of the new system with it.
An extra feature within the new beta update, meanwhile, is an improved approach to how the temperature impacts on the player and the player’s moodles – something that’s needed tightening up for a long time.
Turbo’s work takes into account clothing, hunger, indoors, outdoors, thirst, being wet etc – all of which have a combined impact on the player body temperature. This will no doubt need a lot of balancing – so please drop feedback into the thread.
FORTHCOMING IWBUMS BUILD
Work continues under the hood for the next round of public testing – with EP getting down and dirty doing a full C++ rewrite of our Zombie Population Manager. This system is what governs the placement and movement of zombies when they’re not directly on your screen, and this updated version should be an optimization for SP and MP – hopefully helping out lower spec machines and busy servers.
EP has also added a system to convert objects placed by mappers (both our own, and those in the community) so they can be used as functional game objects. Right now this covers items like barricades, campfires, and rain barrels but will be extended further.
Over with our friends at General Arcade, meanwhile, Yuri has been implementing the ability for players to injure each other with vehicles – enabling hit and run incidents in MP. (This will clearly also be a server option, as griefing opportunities could potentially run high with it).
On top of this Stas continues to improve our gamepad integration – working on new calibration and key-mapping options screens and the like.
OTHER STUFF
Today’s trip to the mall from togogo33. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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 open for chat and hijinks too. The CBOIT would like to point out that Zomboid contributor, tester, server-runner, tech support chap and all round good-guy Rathlord has released his own game. It lives here on Steam if you’re interested. Fanx!