This week has seen the final team members who’ll be working on version 41 moving wholesale into the new tech – so it’s a relatively brief blog as much of the week has involved introducing the new systems, tools and workflow to the wider team.

It’s an exciting time, and so far it’s gone pretty well. Backstage right now animation states are being hooked up to animations – so hopefully incoming weeks you’ll be able to see more and more gameplay in what we show, as opposed to the more testbed stuff that TEA have shown in recent times.

With that in mind, here’s a couple of vids from Zac, first off a walk through downtown West Point to test some of the latest optimization work, and the improved shaders that remove a lot of the bleached-out-ness from proceedings.

(You might be able to spot a few zeds in outfits from future map additions too, and also please forgive some of the float-y zeds – they should get fixed this week).

After that, here’s another zombie spawning vid – in this testbed instance with a zed-count upped to 510 before they start turning into impostor sprites on the periphery of your vision. (Please note that the brief pause before each spawn batch will be optimized by pre-loading the data).

Right now, Zac is looking into some further threading optimization as, bizarrely, better machines were having some stutters – the general plan being that TEA will continue to make engine, tool and optimization improvements while everything is bound together.

Some work that will remain in the non-anims realm andtransferred later on meanwhile (due to the ongoing public beta test) is Stas’s work on improved controllers. He released the latest test version today, and is now well on the way to fixing up all of the inconsistencies reported by our willing bunch of community testers. Check here if you would like to join ‘em.

Finally, last week we showed an example of the Sims-style cutaways that ChrisW is working on – but it was very WIP and we probably didn’t underline quite how much it would improve the visibility inside buildings. With that in mind, then, perhaps this image will be a little bit more explanatory.

This week’s snowmelt from colic2005. 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 MailingList that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct toy our mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.