It’s a slightly strange time currently. We’re updating/polishing the 41 IWBUMS beta, but waiting for work to be completed on big ticket ‘need’ items like the close fire and hi-res updates, and the more distant reintegration of Multiplayer. Things are ticking over well, but this Thursday blog won’t be a blockbuster we’re afraid.

41 IWBUMS PATCHING

The weekly patch cycle still seems to be working out okay. Yesterday’s 41.22 contained stuff like:

More and improved vehicle zed events to come across as you explore – roadblocks, crashed ambulances and such

Moodles now shake and shimmer to signal combat being impaired by panic, injury and the like.

Pressing one of the hotbar keys for half a second now displays a radial menu for choosing an item to equip in that slot.

Healing items can be dragged onto the Health panel to treat injuries.

All containers in the loot window now displayed in the 3×3 area around the player – which among other things makes corpse looting a bunch easier.

Fixed: missing rust on cars, hotbar weapon-switch anims, ultra-fragile headlights, resetting sandbox loot options (yay!), car duplication (again!) and much else besides.

The next patch will contain Turbo’s latest improvements/pondering on the temperature system, and hopefully some renewed fix/polish for the Sims-style cutaway system.

Already in the internal test build, meanwhile, is some balance for clothing weight, trait balance and fixes to weapon-jamming – as well as a some work on zed footsteps and the new challenges. We anticipate that this, and more besides will be released in the first half of next week.

UP NEXT

Apologies for repeating ourselves, but so everyone knows – work is ongoing on the following for the more imminent of our upcoming patches.

Zac is continuing his push on the zoom / hi-res model branch, and when work on this is stable will be moving over onto MP. The lighting algorithm has been rewritten, condensing the old twin-step color+lighting stages into a single pass. This fixes a myriad of flickering ‘light-leakage’ artefacts, as well as halves the fill-rate costs for buildings, floors, and terrain. This should also provide a performance boost, particularly on older GPUs where fill rate is a premium – though it’s not clear just yet how much of one.

Yuri is optimizing his fire system, seen last week, and also making it possible for the PZ modding community to create their own effects. Modders will be able to set textures, shaders, particle numbers and parameters for how it all moves – meaning that ultimately people will be able to implement different fires, smoke, vapours, swarms, magic, geysers, blood eruptions and whatever else floats your boat.

In more boring non-game affairs, meanwhile, that you may well still be interested in – we will also be using the full launch of 41 to coincide with a bunch of other ‘new’ stuff. New trailer, new website, new all-kinds-of-stuff – so there’s also a lot of activity in non-game areas of Zomboid too. More of which we will hopefully see emerge in the weeks ahead.

Thanks all, hopefully a kickass Thursdoid next week when the stuff mentioned above starts to come online.

Many thanks for all the bug-hunting and feedback the community has been doing for us too, by the way. There have been some really nasty gremlins eradicated that could only be exposed by the forensic reporting of our IWBUMS beta testers, and all your efforts have been very much appreciated.

This week’s image from Penelope Graves. 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!