Hey all, brief Thursdoid this week while we polish the vehicles build, prep release videos and such-like. So here’s the news in brief.

• We just released public IWBUMS beta 39.55. This build is aimed at alleviating some common bugs and issues in MP – and in particular stops MP players from driving into areas the server hasn’t loaded yet (shown in grey on your screen). It also fixes aspects of door unlocking, running over corpses, graphical glitches, panic and sleep in vehicles, zeds attacking invisible players and some sounds from player actions that weren’t attracting undead attention. The full changelist can be found here.

If you fancy playing some MP over the coming days then it would really help us if you chose our Spiffospace test server – the more people we get on there, the smoother the full release will go. Many thanks if you choose to jump in.

• Last week we showed you a narrated video of the latest version of AnimZed: the tool that Bitbaboon Mark has been working on as a part of his push to the point at which we switch over to the anims codebase. This week we can reveal that he’s no longer alone in his work, having formed a company called The Eccentric Ape (TEA) alongside some of his former colleagues from his time as Technical Director at an Australian development house.

The initial plan is to have tools-whizz Zac tidying up AnimZed, Grant looking at blending bugs alongside him, Schnitz hooking up states to game variables and Gar sanity checking all the above processes – and leaving Mark free to do the more complex Technical Director-y work in-between. As well as celebrating how remarkably Australian so many of their names are, we’re really excited about how this will make much shorter work of the animation build (from integration, to testing, to release and beyond) and hope that we will be working alongside the TEA boys for many builds to come.

• Map work continues on Louisville, and although she’s famously tight-lipped on content – sometimes Mash lets an image or two through. So speculate away on a minor detail…

• Elsewhere Turbo continues to work on the new weather effects and realistic weather/cloud/precipitation simulation – and tomorrow will be going through the shader effects he’s integrated for different times of day, weather systems and seasons (and all of those mixed in together) with our art team.

GA Stas continues work on improved gamepad support, Bitbaboon Steve is crunching numbers on improved network connectivity and we’d also like to welcome ChrisW back to the fold to renew his work on internal Sims-styles house cutaways and remaining polish to the roof occlusion system.

This week’s zombie communion from Laykan. 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.