It had to happen. We always knew he’d come for us.

Anyway, onto the dev news.

MULTIPLAYER

Work continues on the MP Strike Force’s smoothening out of the client zombies transplant. Early this week we had a few serious bugs that resulted in the player being teleported inside the bodies of zombies, which are fixed now but we’re mentioning as it was a WEIRD TIME.

This week’s Wednesday test was another positive one as it turned out. Still some issues, though after a few weeks where bugs introduced with the client zombie work were getting in the way, it was clear the testers were having a lot more of a fun experience.

As stated before, the client zombies are the last ‘big piece of tech’ to fall into place before we’re vaccuming up the last few game breakers and looking toward getting it out there. The client zombies will allow servers to leverage the cpu of the clients in order to handle the expensive zombie AI. They will not only heavily reduce the amount of server load zombies will cause, but also reduce latency in combat to zero, and provide a close to single player experience for one on one zombie combat. Any unavoidable lag or glitches that do occur will only ever affect zombies that are not interacting with the player.

It’s been a tall order but issues are increasingly being patched out. On this week’s fix list are improving the zombie synchronization, working out why some zombies appear at the last minute in fog or the dark, some zombies duplicating on death and a variety of lesser issues and broken things. Car physics also still need some work to ensure that climbing in a car isn’t risking being bounced around like a pinball due to some unexpected lag.

After a few weeks that felt a little disheartening with new bugs getting in the way, we’ve been feeling much more positive this past little while – and hopefully this will continue as we scale up the number of players on the server during our Wed/Fri test sessions. Here’s a vid of edited highlights from last night’s 4-5 player sesh.

OTHER STUFF

The Noiseworks sound revolution continues apace. This week they are primarily looking at our music implementation, but they also dropped this little treat off last Friday. Behold! A vehicle that sounds far less like ass.

(STANDARD WIP WARNING: Not all sounds integrated. Sound balance not final. Etc etc.)

While the zeds-on-clients MP work is being bedded in, RJ has been ticking off various smaller MP issues and QOL improvements. He has also implemented the first pass of Martin’s new car wrecks – which will provide a halfway house between our current burnt out cars, and our usual more beat up / rusted vehicles. While these will largely be cosmetic and non-drivable, you will be able to go under their hoods, into their trunks and to siphon out their gas.

As mentioned two weeks ago, Kukrapok’s initial mission after joining the PZ mapping team is starting to bear fruit – as he is getting involved on the main map files to bring bendier roads to the masses. Less broken bones from ninety degree turns in future perhaps? Well, hopefully not all of them.

This week’s modded tank engine image from xseif_gamer on Reddit, from a forthcoming mod by AuthenticPeach. Yes Spirit1678, you were correct. 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!