Morning/evening/afternoon all. Let’s make our first stop today a check-in with the Multiplayer Strike Force as they continue their work in Build 41’s MP.

Yuri and Andrei are continuing their work on the multiplayer, and its getting super exciting to see the videos they are sharing. There are still issues to resolve but its getting there, as hopefully you will see.

Andrei has been syncing up actions such as climbing through windows, over fences and up and down sheet ropes. Here are the results this week.

A QUICK NOTE since some people misunderstood what these videos represent last week’. In these videos the left represents what player 1 sees on their own machine, and the right is what a remote player sees with player 1’s movement transferred over the network with simulated ping and packet loss, showing how the character’s movement is reconstructed and mirrored on other client’s machines.

First thing to notice is WOAH how nice and smooth it is. This would be a rubber bandy disaster on B40 and we’re extremely excited to see nice smooth and immersive MP experiences for all.

As you’ll probably also notice, the remote player climbing up the contraption’s AI/prediction stuff gets confused and delayed and thus ends up permanently lagging behind the character’s real position locally. This is going to be the next area the guys look into, trying to make sure that the system ‘catches up’ any characters that lag behind, without resorting to noticeable rubber banding or Benny Hill style skits to get them into the right position.

Next up is Yuri’s continued work on polishing up zombie syncing, vid follows – and explanation follows that.

Here Yuri is making sure that zeds are in the correct places on all clients, ensuring that adjustments to the system cater for differing zombie speeds, as well as making sure third party zombie combat looks right when both the remote player and the zombie could be slightly differing in position between clients.

The goal is not to make everything absolutely 100% accurate as it would need to be in an FPS competitive multiplayer, but to make it close enough to look believable, smooth and immersive on all clients, with little enough divergence between clients to not adversely affect gameplay.

Finally, from MP land, Andrei has been working on getting fitness and fishing synced up between clients too:

IWBUMS PUBLIC BETA PATCH 41.45

While the MP Strike Team busy themselves – polish, balance and general additions continue for the general IWBUMS beta branch.

Turbo mixed the new fog we’ve been showing recently into the internal test build this morning so, as long as it doesn’t break anything unexpectedly, we can probably look toward a patch release next week. (Fingers crossed)

Theres a lot of more general fixes and improvements in .45 too – alongside crowbar anims for tearing down barricades, fitness balance and polish, some decent optimization and UI polish.

Here’s what the new fog system looks like when it’s mixed into a tropical storm with a bit of added coloration. Pretty cool, non?

This week’s fog scene from Turbs. 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!