Less weighty blog than last week, but hopefully some good stuff still lies within. Read on!

BUILD 40 PATCHING

We’ll be releasing a new IWBUMS version for the next (final) Build 40.37 patch either tomorrow or early next week. This will contain a few quality of life improvements and the required chatbox whispering fixes, but the main feature will be the improved darkness and more colourful internal lights that we showed last week.

CONTROLLERS TEST

We are extremely grateful to everyone helping out with the current Controller improvement beta, and Stas has been using everyone’s feedback to fix bugs and streamline the system. It turns out that there are a lot of people very passionate about us getting this right, and it’s making the test process feel worthwhile and fun.

Stas has just released Controller Build 6, and at this point most show-stoppers and major irritations have been removed. So if you’ve been holding off on helping out, it’s a good time to join.

Details on what we need to know about the Controller build, and download instructions, can be found here. Everyone who gives active feedback will be receiving a free PZ Steam code as a thank you, so jump in if you fancy it.

BUILD 41

This week TEA and Martin have been doing a lot of work on clothing layering – unlocking the ability to wear items of clothing beneath, or on top of, other accessories and outfits. This has also meant that ‘one piece’ clothing like dresses, overalls and similar have become an option.

“In the below video you can see me mixing and matching outfits, and layering them as I please,” explains Zac.

“Every Outfit now supports a list of base textures for Top and Pants, and every ClothingItem also has its own base texture that it applies to the character mesh. So you could, for example, wear a t-shirt with an apron over it – and then a jacket on top. With this same combo you could also wear jeans and calf-high boots.”

“This allows for: gowns, dresses, miniskirts. Boots, sneakers, slippers. A vital choice between boxers or briefs etc.”

“Using the cloth layering system, you can even choose whether to wear your boots over- or under your jeans – or your underpants on top Superman style. Though, this said, the actual in-game UI implementation of this will still need to be done – currently it’s done through AnimZed.”

Finally, here are a few other outfits that Martin has come up with using the outfit editor and some of the new features highlighted in Zac’s video.

In other 41 duties, meanwhile, Yuri this week continued his work on the new water visuals, and has rewritten the code for calculating the direction of water movement so it reads where water should be still and where it should flow. He’s also excluded swimming pools and other such bodies of the water from the system, so they’re not automatically given a shore.