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News & Dev
July 15, 2021

It's Coming to Roam

And then, suddenly, fourteen days had rolled around once more…

41.51 IWBUMS BETA RELEASE

41.51 is pretty much cooked at this point, and the past few days we have been primarily addressing any potential incompatibilities on different / more elderly operating systems. We intend to release this early next week.

The latest changelist for 41.51 can be found here.

Some items of note:

As previously mentioned, 41.51 contains significant optimizations to our save game system. As such any saved games played in 41.50 will NOT be operational or loadable.

A separate Steam beta containing the previous 41.50 build will be provided so that you can continue and finish your current game.

Similarly, in a changelist as big as this some mods WILL become incompatible – especially those dealing with loot distribution.

We have kept the PZ Discord modding channels informed of the primary forthcoming change, but there will inevitably be a period of waiting before some of your favourite mods (and certainly mod packs) are fully operational again.

Again, if you enjoy playing modded PZ then the 41.50 beta will still be there for you to use in the meantime.

If you’re a modder who would like further information on what’s changing then please click through to this thread on our forum, where mapper extraordinaire TheCommander has also made a very handy forum post and easily understood infographic.

Please be patient with all the community’s modder crew while they find the time to update their/our beloved mods!

MP STRIKE FORCE

As discussed previously we are now updating on all things MP every month – for the reasoning behind that decision please click on through.

And so, here’s a run-down of what Yuri and Andrei have been up to over the past few weeks, followed up by a nice little vid that Yuri made for us.

  • First of all, we added FPS data to our statistics. Servers will now collect FPS data from each client and collect it their statistical data. Seeing as the introduction of local ownership may lead to performance degradation on clients, knowing client FPS will help us to improve performance and as such we can use this tool in load testing.
  • We then spent some time investigating zombie desync. We noticed that our zeds were pausing after they changed ownership between clients. As such we’ve made a fresh implementation of how zombie behaviour syncs. Right now the zombies will continue moving to the target and restore their state on a new client after changing ownership. What’s currently in the build is an initial implementation – we’re going to test how it works before developing it further.
  • We implemented ‘get up’ sync for zombies. This bug could lead to zombies that were laying down on one client, but standing upright on another.
  • We synced zombie falling. Zombies in local ownership now calculate the position and rotation of their fall point, and the client sends this information in the hitCharacter packet. Now all clients will show the same falling anim, and desync where zeds dropped in different places for different places is avoided. This issue also led to players seeming to finish off invisible zombies while you were playing.
  • We had a long think about how we can improve a fight between a zombie and more than one player. A primary issue was how a zombie should react to hits from other players, as often ownership change can lead to desync. We had the idea that zombies should react to hits from their target player, but hits from other players would only lead to splashes of blood and a decrease of their health without a change in ownership. We’ve made an initial implementation of this, but it doesn’t seem to be a full solution yet – as such we will debug it, and potentially think of ways to improve or replace the system.
  • We’ve spent some time updating our tools, specifically the fake clients we use to simulate a full and active server. Now clients can process zombie AI, we needed to simulate the same in our fake clients. This will help no end in our future testing and edge-case scenario simulation.

NOISEWORKS

Tomorrow (barring minor fixes) is the last day we have booked in for work with Noiseworks on their PZ Sound Revolution – although we are also making plans for a ‘Round 2’ to further improve the PZ soundscape, put some more work into the implementation of the procedural music system and respond to the feedback of the PZ community once it’s been released out into the wild.

As such the Noiseworks build shouldn’t be *too* far behind the release of 41.51 into the public IWBUMS beta.

The primary final polish that’s been put into Noiseworks over the past week or so has been on vehicles, music selection and general mix balance and bug fixing. Vehicles, especially, needed a little more love as gear changes / RPM and how the new sounds interacted with the existing PZ framework needed a fair bit of love.

The vehicles are now 10x better than the angry lawnmowers currently in Build 41, though we intend to come back to them in Noiseworks Round 2 when we have more time to make some code-side improvements to help them out.

Here’s a quick video of what they’re sounding like at the moment.

(Please note there will be improvements to zombie collision thuds, car door and trunk noises before we release!)

Something else we intend to release with the Noiseworks build are the 3D items that Rockstar Mark and RJ have been working with, but that’s not 100% at the moment as they’re working out the best ways to scale/rotate items in their export process. This is the way that a box of jars currently appears in-game, which isn’t… ideal?

VCRS

We want to shake up the current ‘spend the first week watching TV’ meta, while also introducing some new and typically 90s loot, and as such Turbo has been working on the PZ entertainment systems.

This will be a simplified media playability version of the Devices branch that Turbo has had as a side project for a long time now, and will include retail CDs and VHS tapes – with common, rare and exceptional spawn changes depending on the recording. Clearly, some of these will also be the shows shown on the television with XP and skill bonuses. There will also be unique home VHS tapes, which will either be shows recorded by the people of the area or camcorder recordings, that have a 1 in 5 chance to attempt to spawn instead of a blank tapes.

Clearly all this will be textual, just as the current TV and radio channels are, but we hope it’ll be a nice way of adding some more flavour to the world. There will be lots of new movies, TV shows and general new writing content.

The ability to record material will not be in the build however, and will have to wait until Turbo’s fully fledged Devices side project (which includes computers and security systems) comes to fruition.

Here’s a quick video of its current implementation, along with the ways that recordings can impact on your player’s skills and moodles if we so choose.

PLEASE NOTE this won’t be how it ends up in the game proper. Being terrified by a horror movie to such an extent that it would leave you vulnerable to the zeds probably wouldn’t be much fun – so please consider WIP!

LOUISVILLE

Work on our version of Louisville continues, which as discussed in previous blogs is now visible in the mid-distance.

This week we won’t be showing any new chunks of the map, as our map team continue to be quite protective of their giant sprawling baby, but maybe we can have a quick look at some of the new brands and locations that the more urban environment will bring.

This week’s featured image from Rexiem. 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!

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News & Dev | 01 July 2021

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News & Dev | 29 July 2021
Stable Build: 41.78.16 | IWBUMS Beta: 41.78.16 | Version history | Wiki
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