Rejoice, for the rotation demons have been banished. Zac and Martin’s hammering away at the system has resulted in a fixed up box of cleverness, with only a few mild blemishes that still need to be addressed. Right now all anims relevant to the system are being wired up (sneaking, attack while rotating etc) while videos like the following can also be conjured up.

We hope you agree that it’s looking somewhat awesome.

Here’s the rotationals after-match report from Zac:

“Conquering these rotations has been a series of puzzles that needed solving. At its core, we had a visual disparity between what Martin animated, and how it looked in game. We had snaps, glitches, casper-legs, the whole gamut. Some were already issues with the system, others were related to the new things we’d introduced with character movement and rotation.”

“There was no single cause, but rather a whole family of them. So, like Matt Damon, over the past few weeks we’ve been solving problem one at a time, until we got it to behave properly. Some tech took tweaks, some heavier changes, and some had to be pretty much uprooted. We got there in the end though.”

Also of note this week:

• The new Kentucky-themed soundtrack from our music maestro Zach Beever is now entirely in-game for build 41, working with the sadistic music director and has drama calculations tweaked too. The 36 new tracks span 2hr:41m in all, and also come with the gift of a new ‘level up’ noise, for those fed up with the singing lady.
• Survivor Zeds have been added to the roads of the area. They’ll spawn with a bunch of other zombies, but will always carry a good rucksack filled with survival goodies and an annotated map to lead you on elsewhere.
• Stas’ improved controller work is going to be left until Build 42 (see below) so the current gamepad support has been improved to cater with the new movement and combat. L3 (pressing the left stick) toggles sneaking. Right-trigger while moving makes the player run, similar to the gas pedal in a vehicle. Right shoulder button is reload firearm. Left shoulder button is rack firearm.

41 vs Beyond

This week we’ve also been shaking down what features will land in the Build 41 IWBUMS, what will appear during the testing, and which will appear in Build 42 or beyond.

Due to bit of extra work being required on them, and them currently being tied to the renderer improvement work Bitbaboon Steve is currently embarking on, Stas’ gamepad improvements will be left on the shelf till the next version.

When 41 goes into IWBUMS there will be countless bug reports, instabilities and individual issues on different systems, so we don’t want to be distracted by anything we know isn’t 100% – and for this reason we also won’t be including mid-dev features like Turbo’s character temperature improvements or EP’s car doors that open and in-car animations when the beta is first released. They may, however, be added as the beta test goes on – potentially also joined with Yuri’s new fire visuals.

Something else from (far) in the future, meanwhile, is our version of Louisville – the mapping marathon currently being undertaken by Mash. Although still incomplete, this week we have been testing out its current iteration for internal feedback – as we wanted to be sure people found it’s as large as we wanted it to feel, its buildings varied, its different districts different in flavour and that our current seven storey building height limit didn’t detract from things.

Current internal feedback is that it passes all these tests, which is a relief given the size and length of this gargantuan art challenge – although for some reason the sign outside Spiffo’s HQ isn’t visible currently. This will be remedied.

NEXT

We’re not going to give any indication of a countdown for an IWBUMS release, but eagle-eyed Thursdoiders will have noticed that we have finally toppled one of the biggest barriers to it this week.

Gameplay connected to the system, however, does need to be wired up – and optimization still needs to be fed into the machine to improve performance with large zed hordes and also bolster lower-spec PCs.

Something we are considering, however, is releasing the IWBUMS beta in SP form first – before wiring up the MP during the beta process. Not only would this speed up a release (as there are likely gremlins waiting to jump out on us as there always are) but it will make a lot of sense to test and improve MP on a community server – and to restart all the usual Community Megatests and such to aid with the testing.

Exciting times! Thanks for being with us!

This week’s boardroom meeting from Sedna. 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!