The upcoming 41.30 IWBUMS beta patch is a bumper edition, built up over a few weeks now, and has now been locked, tested and is ready to roll. It was due for release today, but due to a dev illness it’ll either be out tomorrow or Monday.

Here’s some new 41.30 stuff that’s gone in recently:

Temperature system improvements. Room temperature now more accommodating until heating/cooling devices are introduced. Reinstated food consumption to combat cold, with reduced overall impact. Toned down other consumption of fatigue/fluids, though fluids remain a strong factor when overheating etc. Lots of other improvements/nerfs/tweaks to how the system was in the builds before the Thermoregulator system was taken back into the garage for extra work and fiddling from Turbo.

Improvements to our backstage player/vehicle save database – meaning that the hitching when entering unexplored parts of the map (when new vehicles are created) should be fixed.

Gun improvements – including some gun racking fixes, and also an increased ability to shoot zeds from close range.

Sprinter improvements. Sprinters should be a lot more playable now, but still a crowd you don’t want to mess with. Running zombies will no longer run through the player, and their attacks will also slow you down for a more real-feeling experience.

Gamepad players will now be able to sprint! Yes, through a toggling of the B button you too will be able to dash away from zeds. Your feedback on how well it works will be warmly received.

A slight reduction in zed player-spotting distances, and a buff of stealth around walls and cars that weren’t giving any protection.

Fixes to burnable in-car survivors, wounds that were healing too quick, corpses that were spread-eagled in too rigid a fashion, automated broadcast generating frequencies that weren’t being able to be tuned into manually and much more besides.

Stuff we mentioned before, but you might not have read up on in 41.30:

A fix that should resolve intel GPU crashes we’ve been seeing since the zoom branch was merged into IWBUMS

Zoom improvements that provide a clearer image on different levels of zoomed-in and zoomed-out, as well as various fixes to seams and lighting

Spiffo’s Secret Special Sauce. Some small but extremely meaningful changes and tweaks to general gameplay that we’re keeping quiet on. Primarily due to our love for the dramatic, and an undercurrent of sadism.

New and polished animations for: washing yourself, examining vehicles,adding/removing gas, installing and uninstalling parts/tires, multi-stage building and more.

A cursor to help in blood clean-up duties.

Cutaway improvements from Team Tanglewood, including a timer to stop cutaways and other visibility/hiding effects flickering.

Fixes for Last Stand, foraging, fishing lines always breaking, vehicle headlights, stuck zombies, swimming pools with shorelines and our famous too-boring sandwiches.

ELSEWHERE

It should be a bumper patch then, and apologies for the extra day-or-so of delay. But what else is happening in IWBUMS beta 41 dev?

Well, let’s visit MP as we know that’s the biggie. The full story on this can be found here, but the update from TEA’s MarkR follows thusly:

“I’m almost done with the new synced MP clock. This will be a big deal for PZ players, as it will give us the ability coordinate ‘characters’ on the server and on the map. It lets us say things like ‘Zombie X will be at position Y at time Z’.”

“The trick then will be that the position and rotation of Zombie X will be forced – so it’ll be ‘physically’ in-sync as well as in-sync via the maths, while the new anim system makes it look pretty and believable.”

“For things like zombies this means we can make an overall reduction of the bandwidth that goes to commands – which is essentially whenever something happens to make the zeds change their minds about the direction they’re going in. It’ll be a lot more of a matter of ‘fire and forget’ for the server, and that should reduce network traffic by an absolute boatload.”

Also this week behind the scenes we’ve been experimenting with some potential extra player character customization options that the sharper visuals granted to us by the zoom build has given us.

Meanwhile, Yuri’s work on fire continues – with any variety of effect we conjure up now playable of the animation bones of each zed/player character. So basically we can have more realistic fire-deaths. Hurrah. Video below.

#UNPAID ADVERTISEMENT

We also just wanted to flag a cool game that people might like – made by a nice man called Dan Marshall. PZ seems to attract a fair few… shall we call us gamers of a certain vintage? Wise elder statesmen (and statesladies) of the gaming community? Yeh, that’ll do it…

So, for your wise and knowing taste, allow us to suggest a look at Lair of the Clockwork God – a game full of great gags and an interesting mash-up of modern platforming and old school point-and-click. Currently riding high on some amazing steam reviews too.

Anyway, shilling over (sorry!) here’s a trailer, and bye bye till the patch release tomorrow or Monday.

This week’s island fortress from Yuri”Dr.K”. 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!