A bit of a three steps forward, two steps back week on the MP front. After a largely successful 20-tester Wednesday Night session last week, and a moderately successful smaller/unplanned affair on Friday Night – last night was fairly disrupted.

Some of the testing apparatus caused memory issues on clients and crashes, freshly discovered server instabilities created lag and map-load cones, and this spilled out into being a generally less fun experience for all participants.

This also meant that we couldn’t really get a decent grasp on whether the improvements we’d added in since last time were firing correctly, incorrectly or not at all.

So, good news! We’ve got data on all this stuff and know where to look to fix it! This is the way the process goes, and it isn’t unexpected especially when we’re doing these as stress tests after all!

Bad news: it makes for a prettttty shit Thursdoid blog. Sorry.

Here’s the changelist of what we were testing last night.

Here’s a vid of stuff going right:

Here’s a vid of stuff going wrong, in amidst the crashing.

Current plans are to fix up all the instabilities, and then go again as soon as we can.

NOISEWORKS

Okay, we said we wouldn’t do this – but also didn’t want to post a blog with a bum note.

As mentioned in previous weeks we are working with some friends of ours at a company called Noiseworks to completely redo the PZ soundscape. The fruits of their labour are starting to trickle in, so we thought we would share the following.

This is a 24 hour cycle focusing on the world sound including weather, wildlife, wind etc. They are also adding more details into the world like different surface rain details, the world reacting to wind, more bird sounds and other bits.

We are also going to cut back on the change in sounds that occur when zoomed in vs. zoomed out – as we want zoomed out to feel just as intense as when you are close-up.

Play with volume up, and be sure to catch all the different sections!

Please note: this is all set up and playable in Noiseworks’ build – but it remains a work in progress, and hasn’t been playtested yet at all. Intensity of sounds can/will be dialled back, certain wildlife noises might be held back if they lead to too much player expectation that they are about to see a moose when there currently is no moose etc.

That’s all for this week, hopefully news on a smoother MP internal test next week.

This weeks ambulance sex zombies from KPKPlays on the Discord. 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!