Alright, listen up guys. ‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring — except for the four zeds coming in the rear in standard one-by-one shambling formation.

And, this year, on an internal test server for Build 41 MP to boot…

There’s not a huge dev blog today, what with it being Christmas tomorrow, BUT we thought we’d share a few comments from the testers who’ve been on our internal server in this past week.

(PLEASE NOTE THESE COMMENTS WERE MADE IN-BETWEEN BUG REPORTS, THERE IS STILL A FAIR AMOUNT OF WORK TO DO!)

• Keep in mind I had around 320 ping when I joined, and I can still play the game somehow, so this is amazing.
• I played MP yesterday and today and the experience is damn good.
• Fighting zeds is just like SP (except the occasional bugs). Driving is also really nice, almost as good as SP. Both of these things are so much better than B40.
• This feels unreal smooth compared to 40 overall. T’is beautiful lol. Like really smooth feeling.
• 10/10 to be honest, smoothest login and connection I can recall?
• It seemed like I had zero issue to join the server and felt no lag.

So yeah: feels like we’re well on our way to stuffing something special down your chimneys.

Examples of the sorts of bugs we’re looking at currently:

• Zombies repeatedly dying on the spot
• Crawlers weirdly snapping up/down when changing from client to server control, and the reverse.
• Zombies walking inside players during combat
• Zombies repeatedly climbing through windows
• Player clothing not being properly saved

There’s lots of other stuff too, but as you can probably tell the foundations are in, playable and working well. Yuri and Andrei have also put in a bunch of stat-tracking and graph-creating functions into debug so we can analyse more and more stuff once we have more players online.

Oh, and we also released patch 41.49 into the IWBUMS Public Beta on Tuesday. Changelist here. (Worms no longer work in traps, we’re afraid, we’ll have to fix that in the New Year.)

Have good times over the holidays to all those celebrating!

This week’s Chrimble scene from Melnikxv. 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!