Hello, so slightly different Thursdoid this week.

The big question in the community is currently ‘when IWBUMS beta?’ which, while we are close, we don’t like to give a concrete response to as gremlins always have a tendency to leap from the woodwork. No worse release estimate, than a missed release estimate. (That said: weeks, not months for the IWBUMS beta.)

So, instead, we thought the best thing to do would be to let the community see the current internal test build ‘live’ – so you can all see the current version with all its blemishes, and hopefully most of its coolnesses.

As such from an intended start-time of 9pm BST tonight Mark.exe will be streaming the current internal version of PZ Build 41.

Mark.exe’s channel can be found here.

A handy international timezone guide to when 9pm lands in your country can be found here.

We hope that the build is relatively clear in terms of show-stopping bugs BUT there have been a few crashes reported from testers during the day.

PLEASE be patient with us, and with Mark, if there are any technical issues that rear their heads – this is a work-in-progress version and not even officially a beta just yet.

Movement animations, if they look weird at all, are very likely on our ‘to polish’ list. That said, fingers crossed y’all will enjoy it.

MEANWHILE

Far and away the biggest change this week came as a result of some serious discussions about the responsiveness of the main player controls.

For the entirety of anims development the mission had been to balance the increased realism of movement and increased presence with the slight lag of control you have from the character moving realistically: with character footsteps actually accounting for movement, instead of an internal switch that’s flicked the moment you press a key.

Many AAA games have a slight delay in movement, even extremely amazing and popular ones such as Red Dead Redemption 2, so overall we thought this was a noble aim. The end results of which however, amidst a lot of positives, led to grumbling from internal testers. This week then, we experimented – tightening it further. Trying to push it to its very limit of control responsiveness, without the animations looking robotic.

We tightened blend times between standing idle and walking, tightened blends when turning etc, and now we think we’ve found a much tighter balance. Most of the internal testers, re-accustomed to the weightier movement through extended play, were already pretty much satisfied with what we had – but all now agree that the tightening of these screws has made things better.

As such we’re now feeling a lot more confident that, after some adjustment period once both beta and final version are live, most established PZ players will have far less issues over how animations have changed the feeling of mobility within the game. Which has come as a relief.

FINALLY

After we showed off ‘combat while moving’ last week there were community concerns raised that it would be very easy to ‘kite’ the zeds – continually batting them off and keeping yourself safe from the horde.

This… is less of a problem now.

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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

When IWBUMS does go live please note that the hat shown in the linked video is a posh lady’s wedding hat and NOT a sombrero. This is of paramount importance. Thank you.