Lots of good progress from the MP Strike Force again recently, so let’s start with them once more. Hopefully the week-by-week visual progress in this will be evident to everyone.

This week Yuri and Andrei have been concentrating on syncing event-based animations (so, non-combat), player death, window entries/exits, inventory issues, representing zombie collision and a general tightening and polish of the systems as a whole.

Here’s a vid that shows where we were last week, and where we’ve got to now. It’s super cool stuff.

(Still some bugs and unsync-ed stuff in here we know btw)

NEXT IWBUMS 41 BETA PATCH

We’re currently looking at releasing version 41.44 to the IWBUMS public beta early next week – there’s a few things we need to revert, and a few things we need to balance in there before it’s punted live.

As mentioned in last Thursday’s blog this contains the new fitness system, some decent optimization for built up areas from EP, emotes that work while walking, a drinking systems tidy-up and some gun bug fixes.

Other stuff that’s gone in over the past week includes:

• Some new hair-styles from Martin. Side-partings, centre-partings and a few more – so you can do a full 90s Backstreet Boys routine should you ever need to.

• Replacements for some missing 3D models that couldn’t be seen in the player’s hands – jars, bottles and gas cans.

• Improved targeting outline around zombies, and the option for you to select it for when you are melee fighting as well as when you’re using guns.
• Some work on how your survivor chooses to target prone zeds, or those getting up.
• A brightening of our overly dark daytime storms.
• Lots of polish for 41’s cutaway system coming in from Fox. This should hopefully be a lot smoother now, and with less occasional jags.

As we’ve mentioned before, fitness and a new fog aside, we’re not currently looking at adding anything else that’s ‘big’ to 41. Stuff has been set aside now for 42, though work does continue on it, so as not to complicate the MP work which is now at its most critical point.

We’ll be talking more about what else is coming along once MP is out and 41 is fully on its way to public release.

This week’s snow scene from General Shepherd. 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!