Hi all, something of an intermediate dev blog this week as the work outlined in this coder-speak blog to remedy zombie teleportation in the internal build of 41’s multiplayer is still underway.

The tldr of this is that we’re moving the ownership of nearby zombies to the client rather than have it governed by the server – and in the following vid you can see the work-in-progress functionality of this.

Here you can see two clients connecting to the server, the server determining which client owns the zombie, and then the server changing the ownership between them. When it swaps the first client sends its prediction of the zed’s movement to the server, and the server then sends this information to the second client.

It seems to be working well, but has also has bugs that need addressing like incorrect ownership changes, some static zeds and some attacks not causing damage. Yuri is pleased with the progress so far though.

This isn’t part of the main internal MP test build yet, it’s being fixed up elsewhere, so we haven’t been doing any high population tests this week – so no Naruto run videos today we’re afraid.

Elsewhere Turbo has been further improving our chatbox – picking up the baton from General Arcade’s Stas a few years down the line. Quoth the Turbo:

“I’ve been restructuring the underlying chat system to accommodate for the various new features that have been suggested by testers: this includes a different way of handling the streams, adding new features, and fixing up some things that were broken such as radio.”

“The chatbox UI is getting a complete overhaul, most UI elements are new and tailored specifically for it – for example the text pane is now a javabacked UI element specialised in handling chat messages.”

“This new pane has fast paginate and caching methods so it can more easily handle a big history of chat messages then its lua variant. It also has new features such as text selection, links, timestamp indentation to name a few. I’m also adding various options to let folks customise how they want it.”

Meanwhile SFX development continues apace over with Noiseworks, with tying new noises to footsteps currently on the agenda (each different depending on what footwear you have on, and what you’re walking on). RJ meanwhile continues to work on the player-vision systems and stealth described last week.

Finally, as it has been a little bit of a drydoid this week while we wait for the new client zed structure to be ready for the main MP test branch… our mappers have reached a point with our version of Louisville where it would be sensible to do some more testing for feel, bugs, look and performance.

It’ll be a big task both testing and zoning (adding foraging/zed story/etc areas) the map, so we want to be doing that simultaneous to its construction rather than in one big lump at the end.

And for testing, really we need zombies – so this week we extended the current map’s zombie heat map to make sure they can spawn. The whiter the area, the more zeds will appear.

(USUAL CAVEAT: Our version of Louisville is still heavily in production, and isn’t going to be releasing any time soon. That said, it is now in the middle distance – rather than just peeking over the horizon)

Here’s also a nice little gif Nasko cooked up for us to show the existing map underneath better.

Thanks everyone! And, again, a big welcome to all the new players who’ve been getting into PZ recently.

What’s more a MASSIVE massive thank you to all our existing survivors who have been so supportive and helpful in providing hints, tips and answering their many questions. Times like this really underline that our community really is rather special.

This week’s renovated motel from Razor. 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!