Good evening all, and happy Tuesdoid to those in hemispheres different to our own. Here’s the latest!

ANIMS:

Work on anims is pretty intense at the moment, not least because once they’re out there in future builds we can finally start dropping all the background dev work we’ve been accumulating into the game. We’re still tying the anims into gameplay proper, and making some optimizations while we do so, with the current focus being on the zombies themselves. Here’s a WIP look at some anims that we don’t think you’ve seen before. There’s a few bits of weirdness (zombie skin colour, clipping and whatnot) but please forgive that if poss!

Animator Martin has also made a close-up vid of the animations for your delectation, although clearly the skin and look aren’t how they now are in-game. Oh, and we didn’t show you this video of ladies at work the other week either.

MAPPAGE:

Mash is now wrapping up on the new residential area that’ll be found to the South of Muldraugh, and is now turning her attention to dropping in some interesting new locations to explore and hold out in over the map-at-large. We’d like most of this content to come as nice mini-surprises when it’s all dropped into the 35 IWBUMS, but managed to wrestle an image of Mash’s new townhouses from her grasp.

VOIP-AGE

Our favourite Russian-types General Arcade, who beaver away at the larger-scale MP improvements while we concentrate on the main game, report that they’ve made a lot of good progress on getting VOIP into Zomboid, and that all our planned features have been implemented – with adjustments, finetuning and general compatibility stuff now to follow.

“Basic VOIP is definitely working well, and voice quality and bandwidth consumption are quite nice” explains lovely Sergei Shubin. “3D sound positioning is also working well! The most complex feature is AEC – Acoustic Echo Cancellation – and one of our next jobs is to test it out thoroughly. Currently everything works well on Windows in non-Steam mode. Other platform and Steam support is what we’re working on at the moment.”

35 IWBUMS

RJ’s work in the IWBUMS public beta channel continues. His current focus is on ‘small but impactful’ stuff that’s been on the ‘to do’ list for ages, and of course that’s being suggested by the community, so that it’s all been tidied up before the animations drop in. As covered last week there’s now improved fall damage, randomised starting conditions, towels that dry (!) and much more besides.

The latest, 35.12, doubles down on the inventory improvements – bringing in ‘favorited’ items alongside 35.11’s ‘Transfer All’ button and a more Windows-esque approach to Ctrl and Shift selecting items in your bags and inventories. There are also updated tool-tips so it’s clearer what your looted equipment is capable of, and an adjustment to how/where fire spreads in-game.

It sounds like Turbo is also ready to start dropping his community translations, entertainment work and other stuff into testing too – so hopefully that’ll start appearing soon.

COMMUNITY BITS/BOBS

A few notes of goings on! First off, if your toast is buttered that way, then there’s a brand new PZ Community Discord channel that’s recently opened for business. Find it here: Secondly, our thanks to Connall for his recent improvements to the Bug Tracker which, as ever, intrepid error-chasers can find here.

Finally, there’s a survey being run about exactly what brings about your demise in PZ – so we can get an idea of what causes the most fatalities currently in-game. It lives behind the link that’s behind the word ‘survey’ in the previous sentence. Thanks you!

This week’s featured image, again, by the inappropriately named Dildo_Baggins. 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! Oh, and it should probably flag the Discord from now on too.