How do all. Now, for the past few weeks we’ve been working on general polish and fixes for the Public IWBUMS Build 41 beta while the MP Strike Force get on with their work – so as not to change anything fundamental to get in their way.

To keep the wheel spinning, however, we thought that for the 41.44 patch we could be forgiven for widening the net a little – and add in two side projects that we knew would be features that wouldn’t mess with the game or the foundation code too much.

(Quick note to say that there are more involved and foundational new features also being worked on that will 100% be build 42 features. RJ and Turbo have also solemnly sworn to keep their polish and fix tasks going in simultaneous to these additions)

EXERCISE

The first, of these is exercise and a fitness system – which is a good example of the relative ease in which the anims system allows us (and modders) to slot in new functionalities.

Once upon a time players shoved trees to raise their physical skills – a bug/feature that was removed, but made us aware that an ‘official’ version of this was most likely required.

The new system, then, is a way to boost your fitness and strength stats – taking into account various factors like fatigue, nutrition, exercise regularity etc.

The more you do an exercise, the better you get at it – but the harder you train the more fatigue and pain you’ll feel a few hours later. This will lower combat abilities if your arms are aching, or impact on movement if you’ve been too strenuous with your leg exercises.

THE FOG

The second thing we’ll be allowing in, meanwhile, is a new way of rendering our foggy scenes. Our current fog system does the job fine, but obscures all characters and objects in the same way – all dependent on the opacity at a certain spot. It doesn’t really allow for that classic ‘zombies lurching at you through the mists’ feeling.

Taking inspiration from the excellent Graveyard Keeper, however, in a recent side project Turbo has worked out a way to adapt a more layered and atmospheric fog for our game.

The new system also means we can play with the height of the fog, as well as the opacity. It’s great in motion, and made for a fun addition to the game that wouldn’t mess with the ongoing MP fix-up party. Speaking of which…

MP STRIKE FORCE

In the MP Strike Force, we had a productive catch-up meeting on Tuesday with grand overseer TEA/Bitbaboon Mark – while Yuri and Andrei have been continuing to busy themselves in the surrounding times.

Yuri’s work on syncing player characters between clients is progressing nicely – building them up at a point at which he can start mixing in some zombies and start debugging the combat itself.

He’s also been modifying player clients to reduce their frequency (to reduce bandwidth requirements for them) as well as fixing some issues with characters weapons not matching between clients. Here’s the latest vid he’s shared with us this week.

Andrei, in the meantime, has been continuing his investigations into the memory usage of the servers – adding in more and more diagnostic systems and checking in with many and varied graphs and tables that dish the dirt on the various things we need to clamp down on.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week – although perhaps worth adding that other smaller polish and fixes that have gone into the next IWBUMS patch (41.44) include: bloodied and dirtied backpacks now washable, general tidy-up of drinking and water supply functionalities, scrap metal now obtainable from car wrecks, nerfed foraging exploits and quite a few polished/smoothened anims from Martin.

This week’s vision of 2020 from MachuPikcuinta on the reddits. 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 you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!