Hey all, it’s that day of the week once more…

BUILD 35

RJ seems to have ironed out the majority of headline bugs in the current open IWBUMS beta of the first Build 35 features. Gameplay feedback would still be much appreciated though. You can find details on how to join here. In the past week we’ve had 35.7 and 35.8 that (among a bunch of other things) makes wall frames easier to click on, allows construction materials to be removed from your backpack during barricading and ties room size into the panic felt by claustrophobic traits. There’s also a new MP server option ‘FastForwardMultiplier’ that defines how much time accelerates when all players are sleeping.

We’ll see how work in the anims branch goes in the next week or so in terms of whether we release 35’s sleeping/nutrition/building/metal content to the wider PZ audience before an immediate new animations IWBUMS test, or integrate it with the snazzy new combat/clothing and whatnot.

In the mean-time however, as mentioned last week, RJ is coding in some tutorial-style information windows and also working with Writer Will to make sure new players get all the info they need to know about PZ’s ever-expanding roster of backpack contents. He’s also going to be doing some exploratory work into how to finesse our current house alarm system.

ANIMS

Unfortunately we’re still having problems getting the female models to behave. It’s a really odd problem and we’ve tried numerous things to get them to work properly in-game. We’re not sure if it may be something strange going on with the .X file exporter we’re using, but we have lit the beacons and are getting everyone together in the same office this week so we can have a better coordinated look under the hood to try and figure it out.

Work on the rest of the animation build is going well, though obviously the female bug hunting has taken up a lot of time we’ve still made progress in getting the rest of the build sorted. This is why we don’t do ETAs, as stuff like this always seems to glee in popping out of the woodwork as you approach the day you expect to release stuff.

Here’s a few images of ladies getting up to mischief without last week’s nightmare fuel. [The lady’s face will benefit from the different lighting in-game and isometric-ness btw, and we can probably play around with her textures too.]

MAPPAGE

Mash’s work continues on the new residential area south of Muldraugh continues. Also back for a quick spell on mapping is EasyPickins, who has created a ‘tree noise generator’ to make the wilderness more random/realistic and less clumpy. Here’s a ‘before’ shot, and here’s one from ‘after’ – although these are only pines, and don’t show the new big trees either.

This will impact on 90% of our current map cells on the overall PZ map – everything that hasn’t been manually updated basically. It will make all future groundwork for new areas a lot less troublesome for Binky.

INSOMNIA

Just a quick note to say that we’ll be showing Project Zomboid at Insomnia in Birmingham between the 26th and 29th of August on a stand with a few of our indie chums. We’re not sure how many of the team will be along what with all the work we have on, but if you’re around then there’ll be someone there to pop over and say hello to.

This week’s featured image by Slothy J of the vast Steam conglomerate. 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! Byeees.