Hot on the heels of last Thursday’s 41.42 patch to the public IWBUMS 41 beta comes this Thursday’s… 41.43.

As we’ve mentioned before, we’re mainly concentrating on bug fixes and polish for Build 41 at the moment, and keeping our work on big features and more structural stuff for 42. The main intention for this is to make the MP Strike Force’s life a little easier, and to avoid added complications.

(Though with this said, there are a few coder side projects stacking up that we could potentially drop in to keep things fresh. We’ll see how we go on this one.)

With that all in mind, then, 41.43 contains:

• Performance improvements. You should find areas of high zombie density more playable – so that’s stuff like Six Months Later, the prison etc. We still intend to bring in skeleton-sharing for zed animation that will further improve things, but this change to pooled objects will hopefully recoup some of the ground we’ve lost in performance over recent patches to 41.
• New controller icons for controller users.
• Improvements to zeds climbing through windows – if you’re closing a window and a zombie isn’t over the sill yet then it’ll no longer get in. Likewise if a zombie is halfway in, over the sill, then you won’t be able to shut the window either.
• An ‘Automatically drink water’ option toggle, and a ‘always leave key in ignition’ toggle – for those wanting to adapt their game to their liking a bit more.
• Re-enabled floorboard stashes.
• Increased accuracy indicated by the aiming outline going green. Greater chances of coming across annotated maps and survivor zeds, and more guns left with clips inside – or next to them.
• Many and varied other fixes, model tweaks and balance things.

MP STRIKE FORCE

While we flounce about and polish stuff elsewhere in 41 then, or muck around in the framework of 42, what’s happening with the MP kids? Strike Force report is as follows:

Yuri’s been continuing his work on syncing players, including combat animation. You can see a video of his latest progress here:

As ever, please note that this is all work in progress – you’re seeing all the moving parts being slotted together, but not them being tightened. Likewise you’ll notice at the end, that there are still a few kinks to work out of the combat syncing – with zombies not falling to the floor on both clients.

Andrei, meanwhile, has been continuing his investigation into memory issues on high population servers with our new virtual fake clients, which is proving a difficult thing to sort out. He’s got a few tricks up his sleeve to try and reduce the memory overhead and GC pauses, but work is still ongoing to figure out the snarl-ups that occur on Build 40 servers that we’d dearly like to see eradicated.

This week’s imperilled raccoon from FoXL33T. 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!