So Rosewood Prison became open for business in the last public IWBUMS beta build 35.20f, alongside the small services town of Rosewood itself and the military residential area of March Point. In amongst it all we’ve got a court house, guard posts, a large police station, a fire station, some Army dormitory apartment buildings that are taller than you’re used to, and various other cool stuff dreamt up by our mapper-artiste Mash. If you want to check it out then details on how to join the beta are here.

The next IWBUMS beta build is being worked on by RJ who’s finishing off his MP factions system, while several other members of the team do what’s necessary to finalise the new map. Mash is clearly listening for feedback on the forum, fixing bugs reported on the tracker and adding in ‘lived in’ detail like garbage and general detritus. There’s also loot tables to define for new building types so (for instance) axes spawn at the fire station and foraging and fishing areas that need to be defined. We’ll also be adding an SP selectable spawn point to Rosewood, primarily because it’s less ‘uniform’ than March Point – which is in itself not too far away for adventurous players.

Testers will also have noticed low zombie numbers in some areas – which is why Binky will also next be creating a zombie population density map. This defines the number of zombies which can be spawned in that area: light areas are high population areas, and dark are sparse. [Rosewood Prison itself already has a high number of undead inmates, meanwhile, as there’s some magic code that spawns lots of zeds when anything has more than 200 rooms.]

We also consider it fairly necessary that we make sure you can slide down the pole in the Fire Station in the same way that you would a sheet rope.

IWBUMS MERGE

A portion of the PZ workforce has been bedridden this week with bodily ailments that would seem alarming even to a seasoned zombie-veteran, which put a blocker on other primary dev areas a bit, but we’re also in a position to merge some other cool stuff into the current public beta.

We held off merging the VOIP build into the IWBUMS branch last week as we wanted to wait for fixes to come in from the guys at General Arcade on dead player bodies still being able to speak, instances of remote hearing and an annoying crash triggered by USB headphones being plugged in during a game. These are all fixed and we just had a successful pre-merge sanity test of it all that went very well indeed, you can check out the shenanigans here if you fancy. As mentioned last week, this will also be alongside the moddable Radio/TV framework and community translations in Russian, Turkish, German, Spanish, French and partially in Chinese.

Keep an eye on the forums for when all this drops in, and we’ll also hopefully have news from the front in other ‘this build’ and ‘next build’ PZ departments next week. Thanks everyone!

This week’s image donators are Eudoxio and Atoxwarrior of the TIS forums. 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 now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can now be found here.