Stable Build: 41.78.16 | IWBUMS Beta: 41.78.16 | Version history | Wiki
Follow us

News

News & Dev
February 4, 2021

Flight of the Zumblecar

Hi all, here’s the latest from the internal test build of the Build 41 MP beta – which we’re working on and fixing up until it’s of a standard appropriate for wider testing.

Our current routine is for a playtest of 10, or so, players every Wednesday night – with a report the next day for the community. Which is where you find us today!

First off, here’s the changelist of everything that had been added for the seven days previous to last night’s test.

Second off, here’s a brief highlights reel from proceedings.

Last night’s test had a Prison Break theme, with a cross-country dash intended to test vehicles. It was a lot of fun, and again very valuable in terms of exposing bugs and showing what’s improved – and would could do with further refinement.

Key areas we need to focus on are:

  • There are still some occasional zombies that we have dubbed ‘superzeds’ that tend to teleport straight in front of the player and attack. Some players seem to get this more than others, irrespective of their own personal ping.
  • Vehicle sync, player sync within vehicles and ‘player name drift’ during transit are all improved – but not completely. Physics bugs (video seen below) are also still present, but not quite as insane. Yuri is also still looking into ways to improve memory use and optimize map loading, as we suspect ‘traffic cone blockages’ on new map chunks will become more of an issue on higher population servers.
  • Zombie death and corpse placement is still an issue – which Andrei will hopefully put in a fix for in coming days.
  • We need to tighten up players in your local area, as sometimes the teleport we’re using to ‘catch up’ is too aggressive. This works fine, but will cause issues for PvP.

Here are a few screenies from last night too:

NON-MP STUFF DONE THIS WEEK

  • Shift+double click can now be used on clothing items in the inventory to wear the item
  • Newest earned skill level is now highlighted when the skill panel is opened
  • New hair styles and hair functions
  • Improved movables system – movables can now be dismantled from within the inventory.

SPIFFO’S FINAL THOUGHT (AGAIN, AGAIN):

Although everything is looking very positive with the MP stuff PLEASE note that we still have a pretty long ‘to do’ list before we can consider a public IWBUMS beta release and Community Megatests.

We are sorry for being such massive teases with this stuff, but we hope you’ll agree it’s better than some sort of radio silence.

As an apology here’s an amusing compilation of the vehicle bugs that we’ve been stamping out recently.

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 hereOur Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

PREVIOUS

Tinker, Tester, Server, Zed

News & Dev | 28 January 2021

NEXT

The W.N.I.T.S. Report

News & Dev | 11 February 2021
Stable Build: 41.78.16 | IWBUMS Beta: 41.78.16 | Version history | Wiki
Follow us