How do everyone. Hope this finds you well and non-fevered.

VEHICLES BETA

We just released Vehicle Build 34 in our opt-in vehicles beta – a build primarily comprised of a multitude of fixes and general tidy-up work around the issues bug-harvested from the public Spiffospace test server. The test server itself has been updated, so if you fancy helping us chase down some bugs then please do join in.

There will still be some irregularities on there so be prepared (though testers seem to be having a lot of fun) but overall we’ve pruned back a lot of annoyances in this new build that should bring remaining big issues into a sharper focus.

Also a part of 34 is the updated Mechanics UI visualisation provided by Mash – which should bring a bit more clarity to what’s wrong with your car, or if you don’t have a high enough Mechanics skill then at least show you which area the problem can be found in. There’s one for each primary vehicle class – and seen below are the van and station wagon.

On top of the Vehicles 34 big heap of fixes, we also released 33.4 last Friday. This gave server admins more powers when it comes to organising regular loot respawns, improved the range of car conditions you’ll find on the streets of our towns and also boosted spawn rates for certain hard-to-find loot reported by the community.

Another longstanding issue with vehicles are that the motor sounds have needed a great deal of improvement – we blogged about our first foray into this a while back, but after that it became clear that Bitbaboon Steve’s longstanding experience in this field could create a far better template and system code-side for when additional vehicles are brought on-board and require sound balance.

This system is now in place, and this video shows an initial mix of an idle car, a slow-moving car and a fast-moving car. This isn’t final, however, as we feel it needs more deep exhaust noises instead of the primary engine sound to make it feel more realistic and less abrasive to listen to for long periods.

This will also suit the isometric viewpoint of the game and fit the game’s setting a little better – and likewise we know the car crash noise needs some love. It’s good enough to show y’all though, as it shows the rudiments of the underlying system are working pretty well.

Meanwhile this build’s map expansion (filling in the gaps inside the primary ‘road loop’ around our major settlements for cars to venture into and search for rural safehouses) is now complete in the editor – and now handed over to Connall for the zoning of town areas, foraging areas etc. It will be added into the vehicle build once Connall has finished this dark zone magic.

FUTURE BUILDS

Bitbaboon Mark continues to work through the sorts of bugs shown in the video from last week – primarily the one from the end of the vid in which states now initialise much more reliably but then get stuck and don’t progress – unless hit with a baseball bat of course.

Other main ‘future build’ work in the pipeline is General Arcade’s Stas who has spent the past month or so bringing our MP chat functions into order, and is now working on an all-singing and all-dancing new communications window. You can see Stas’ latest video of this here – with the word of warning that clearly the visuals are due some polish as we go along.

The levels of chat this allows will be customisable depending on the way you like to play (local rather than direct messaging on RP servers etc) but the (highly work in progress!) video should give an idea of where we’re going in terms of window scaling, local chat, whispers, global chat and the like – with Stas’ future work covering PZ-specific gameplay aspects like safehouse, radio and faction chat.

This week’s road horde from 84th Locklear. 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. Fanks!