Hello all! Small Thursdoid this week with just a little progress update, everyone’s very tied up today with various things both Zomboid and non-Zomboid, so we’ll just cover a few points.

NEXT BUILD

We’re currently hard at work on the next IWBUMS build, 41.24. Fixes and additions in the build include: combat changes to stop zombies standing up if the player is standing on them as well as general fixes to swinging distances for weapons, stopping players climbing through windows with a zombie on the other side (instead the player falling back into the room), shooting at windows, quality of life additions or pouring dirt/gravel/sand, balance changes for falling out of upstairs windows, changes to the weight system, and various zombie AI fixes when dealing with fences and windows.

Another thing that’s been added in finally is the zombie alert animation which we demoed a long while back but was faulty, now issues with it have been resolved. This should make zombies reaction times a little more realistic, as well as provide a bit more of a spooky atmosphere when a zombie notices you. A little sneak peek at it follows:

BEYOND

Meanwhile we still are trying to get the last few bothersome issues with the zoom build sorted, we apologize its taking so long but it is quite a significant change to how the entire game world is rendered and whenever we think we’re ready to go, lingering issues keep cropping up. When this is sorted, we hope it will go some way to ease the out of memory crashes some low end GPUs are seeing. To those who can’t run the IWBUMS properly, you’re not forgotten and we’re working on it.

Multiplayer is still some way off with the devs able to work on the revamp preoccupied with more immediate compatibility concerns with people not being able to run the game, the zoom build needs to be polished off before we can dedicate the resources to the multiplayer systems. It’s coming though! And we will get the first MP tests in the new year.

Looking further ahead, Lemmy meanwhile has been continuing his eternal work on REDACTED (you know what) and has been sharing some really cool progress videos within the team that, due to us learning our lessons from the past of showing progress prematurely in that department, we’re forbidding ourselves sharing at this point until they are more imminent (despite us really wanting to!)

However with the new animation system in-place, progress has been great and sexy looking, and things are looking really exciting and progress has been very swift due to leveraging the animation overhaul’s data driven systems. We can’t wait to share once build 41 hits stable!

This week’s image by Tiarv. 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!