Hey all, a dev blog in a similar vein to last week’s really – with Build 41’s internal dev server having the player/vehicle/server stuff pretty stable and consistent, but with the core members of the Multiplayer Strike Force off in another room hammering away at a better approach to the way client and server treat the zombies themselves.

The first part of this work, which places control of the zombies and their placement on the individual client rather than the server (details here) has been opened up to limited internal testing today – albeit with known issues like zombies showing incorrect behaviours after changing target, zombies not reacting to player sounds etc.

So far so good on this, though we haven’t had multiple players on the internal server yet – as it only went up a few minutes before this blog was posted. More next week on that front, then.

We have, meanwhile, been carrying on with our Wednesday Night Tests – as the rest of the team have continued to add stuff to the usual internal test beta while Yuri and Andrei work in their separate chamber.

Last night we used the opportunity to bug hunt in a few new map locations that will be added at a later date, while other new stuff in the test build were:

• Equipped bags, and bags carried in hands, impacting on player speed.
• Fuel stations no longer having unlimited fuel, and also having varied amounts of gas stored when you discover them.
• Improved sneak and player LOS functions from last tests.
• Park Ranger and Lumberjack finally getting their tree-walking bonuses.
• Many and varied MP/sync issues that needed tying together – removing bullets, disinfection, nutrition values not being synced etc.

Here’s a quick vid of last night’s playtest. General changelist here.

Meanwhile, although anything new to show will probably have to wait till next week, Noiseworks continue with their sound overhaul and Turbo’s chatbox improvements rattle onward also.

(The latter is also now being coded with its potential dual use as an original Fallout style ‘event info’ box for SP to get textual messages and descriptions over to the player that we have always wanted in the game – though this element of it certainly won’t be a 41 thing).

Apologies for not being an all-star Thursdoid this week, now the larger scale local client work has started to be fed in for testing things will hopefully start to pop again. (Pesky Russian public holidays notwithstanding).

Finally, a quick shout out to the return of our Mod Spotlight blog – which we’ll be doing on a monthly basis from nw on. This month Pat_Bren discovers that there is nothing (absolutely nothing) half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

Finally finally – we also very much agree with this sentiment. Y’all rock.

This week’s reclining hero from Frank. 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!