Hey all, it’s been another week of fixes on the Build 41 internal build mainframe. As examples of what we’ve been nixing it’s like death screens not triggering, zombies snapping down on death, balancing speeds, removing ‘pet zeds’ that would follow you and never die, stopping crashes and stopping carrying a spear two-handed making your character look like they’d shit themselves.

Here’s a few more interesting nuggets of dev, though, beyond the more everyday corrective tasks.

CHALLENGES

We received the latest versions of the Film Studio and paradise island Kingsmouth map from Xeonyx, which have been fully zoned for zeds in appropriate costumes. After some quick work from Martin swimwear was also provided, so we can now have summer scenes such as this within Zomboid. Huzzah for Bikini Zeds – and indeed hunky Swimshort Zeds.

(Please note that in these screens Yuri’s new water shader has not been fitted yet.)

NU-GAMEPLAY

In amongst other stuff this week we’ve added in:

• Improved walking/running through tree anims.
• Balanced the consequence of heavy load/exhausted moodles on walk/run speeds and animations.
• Added in glass shard injuries on feet if you choose to walk on the new broken glass barefoot. Allowing for some fun John McClane scenarios at some point in the future, we’re sure.
• Added Hunter and Fisherman outfits, dumbbell and barbell weapons, a Hunting Vest item and removed the floppy wedding hat from roaming zombies (thought to be a sombrero on PZ Discord) after more internal debate than is strictly health. A floppy wedding hat would not stay on a zombie after a period of several weeks, no matter how much the Frenchman pleads.
• Improved defending against zed bites if you’re attacking them back, and taking into account your weapon skill, surrounding zombies, fitness & strength.

STEALTH NEXT

In the coming week we plan to be improving on the already implemented basic elements of the stealth system. While the significant full cover system we have plans and anims for will be implemented post 41 (so as not to delay the build too much) the crouched walk / run has been added and seen in previous videos.

This will lower your profile as well as reduce your footstep volume, so will lower your chance of being spotted by a zombie. It’ll also have other features, such as if you crouch walk or run alongside a fence, you will get further bonuses to visual stealth to reduce the chance of a zombie spotting you from beyond it.

This will obviously become a lot more interesting mechanically in future builds, but we hope this will make stealthy play more interesting, allowing players to plan routes along fences to help them stay hidden from the zombies about town.

LOUISVILLE SNEAK-PEEK

Seeing as there’s no vid this week, we’ve instead prised a new image from the Louisville map expansion from the iron cage of the Art Department. Please note though, as ever, that our version of Louisville is a HUGE undertaking and won’t be released in any of the forthcoming releases. It is still a long ways off.

This week’s featured image from the floppy wedding hat obsessive Frenchman. 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!