Greetings from balmy blog-writing Britain. Let’s start with an update from the MP Strike Force, where Yuri and Andrei continue to do God’s work for the online cause.

41 BETA MP STUFF

As we reported last week, the Strike Force have been working on light ownership, allowing zombies interacting with players to be simulated on the clients of the players they are interacting with, to remove latency from zombie combat.

Work continues in this regard, with plenty of bug fixes and tweaks to the system.

Yuri has prepared a video showing it all in its current status with large crowds of zombies, to show how the system performs with around 180 zeds that he picks up along the way.  Stick around till the end for some lovely graphs showing the network traffic.

As you can see, at this point, there is very little if at all separating the zombie movement from single player, which is highly impressive given the zombie counts.

Next up, the guys are going to continue tuning the system, and look for a nice trade-off between smooth player tracking by client zombies, and getting as low traffic as possible by tuning the frequency of zombie target updates and light ownership ranges.

41 PATCH 41.40

We released Build 41 Public IWBUMS beta versions 41.38 and 41.39 this past Friday and Monday respectively, and already have a few things in the pot for 41.40 in a week or two’s time. Items of note are as follows:

• Hotbar improvements, including the ability for items that aren’t held in the player’s hands to emit light – allowing for flashlights attached to the person, as a part of a helmet etc.
• ‘Clutter’ jewellery, both existing and new items, can now be worn. This includes necklaces, earrings and nose jewellry. Examples as seen below.

• A change from Turbo to the way that the radio and WordZed operates, to help out this awesome mod project that’s looking to record audible radio broadcasts from PZ’s various doomed media outlets. Deets on the mod in question can be found here. 
• A fix for the longstanding issue of not being able to directly grab heavy items like corpses and generators out of vehicles.

OBJECTIVE MARKERS

In the development of the new tutorial we weren’t altogether satisfied with the toolset available to us in terms of directing the player around the map – and we’re more than aware that it’s something we’ll need to improve in future builds when more solo content is being built.

As such, Turbo went off to his rendering labs and came back with the following.

(It’s work in progress still, but we feel it looks pretty good already!)

Alongside this we are also looking to improve general item/container highlights, and RJ is currently tying them into the new tutorial as a part of its general polish for 41.40.

Plans are also afoot for a more involved and open secondary driving/skills based tutorial, which will also let us get more and more foundations like this in place for when we bring back Kate and Baldspot in the builds that lie beyond 41.

AND FINALLY CONGRATS TO…

We’re big fans of anyone and everyone who chooses to stream and youtube Project Zomboid, and will happily toot their horns upon request.

A horn that we’re giving a BIG unrequested toot to today, however, is Ambiguous Amphibian who recently hit the big 100k subs. Well done mate!

This week’s Silent Hill-scape from Harbinger. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. 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!