Greetings citizen. Here’s all the latest from the latest isometric dips into undead anarchy…

BUILD 37 PUBLIC BETA

In keeping with this year’s focus on getting regular builds out rather than sitting on ever-growing changelists, today we’re releasing what’s currently in the can for Build 37 out into an IWBUMS public beta. You can find out how to join in and test here.

Edited highlights run as follows:

• Lootable Map Items. Maps of urban locations within the Knox Event Exclusion Zone can be found in relevant towns, in particular spawning in gas stations. Current maps you can find cover Muldraugh, West Point, Rosewood and March Ridge.

• Using the new map UI you can zoom with the mouse wheel, add your own notes and a bunch of provided symbols in four different colours – if you have the relevant coloured pens. Annotated maps can be shared with friends and faction members in MP. Last week’s vid here.

• Improved ovens and microwaves. You now have access to a new oven/microwave settings UI upon which you can change the temperature, and use the timer dial. Ovens will ‘ding’ when the time is up, microwaves will turn off. Metal in microwaves can cause fire.

• Some food will become less edible when microwaved, increasing character sadness. Eating food hot/cold will have relevant impact on character happiness/sadness.

• Smaller stuff: ‘Always run’ toggle added to Key Bindings Screen. ‘Version info’ button added to menu screen.

• Bug fixes: Rosewood player spawns resetting spawn region remedied. Evolved recipe cooked food additions bug fixed, weapon reload in normal/hard reloading difficulties fixed.

ANIMERTRONICS

Renewed work on the SP anims release continues, intermingled with a successful and fun day last week melding minds with Animator Martin so that he could get to work on an issue that we felt could vastly improve the capabilities of our reanimated zeds.

Right now, in every build of the game, zombies can only move backwards and forwards. This is fine, but severely limits what’s possible in the long run. Proper turning animations have never been possible (survivors and zeds slide in a circle unless they’re moving), and likewise zombies stumbling in a realistic way and being able to move from side-to-side as well as their traditional PZ bee-line.

As of last week, then, we managed to work out a way to implement rotational root motion and Martin could return to his animator’s den and get to work on the visual side of it all. In more technical terms we’ve now opened up the opportunity to have deferred rotation within anims, which in turn means that animations will be able to drive a character’s rotation just as much as movement.

Behind the scenes Martin has been working on a bunch of the other features/visuals that the animations system will open up to us, and this expansion will give him even more options from refinements and improvements (extra wall-hugging stealth stuff fr’instance) while we continue to get the SP anims branch into operation for testing back at TIS Towers.

TOOLS N’ TUTORIALS

To accompany the exciting new set of mapmakers that seem to be springing up on the forum, and clearly the old hands too, this week EasyPickins released the latest versions of the PZ map-making tools – alongside a full tileset updated with stuff from Build 35’s March Ridge and Rosewood. As such, aspiring map-makers can find the latest versions of TileZed and WorldZed here.

RingoD has also compiled and collated a comprehensive guide to map modding using TileZed on our forums – taking you from initial dabblings all the way to uploading onto Steam Workshop. It has also been hosted on Steam, while Paul will also generally be tidying up the relevant sections on our forums in the coming week.

While we’re on the subject we also wanted to flag up PZ community member Blackbeard06 and his extremely in-depth video guide to how to make a PZ map. It’s worth noting that the Workshop channel on the PZ Discord has become quite active of late, and if you’re thinking of making your own Zomboid mods or dipping your toe into map-making it’s definitely a great and useful place to hang out.

Featured image from Joe. 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. Also of interest: Atoxwarrior’s cinematic Spiffo shenanigans.