It’s that very special time of the year. The Indie Stone is getting ready to leave a small glass of bleach out for Santa, and half a rotten carrot for Rudolf, before wrapping up tight in the safe knowledge that by morning jolly St. Nick will have left a shiny new axe beneath the tree.

As such, it’s a brief Mondoid – which we hope you’ll forgive what with impending yule-tide.

In terms of builds then the IWBUMS public beta is nearing completion, with Romain and EasyP’s bug fixes continuing to roll in. We will be making this fully public and releasing it on the primary Steam roll-out early in the New Year, just to make sure that we can cram in as many fixes as possible and also to ensure that we have all hands on-deck in case of unforeseen hang-ups.

In terms of actual cool dev factoids [in amongst the stealth, NPC, map and general game amelioration work that we’ve got going on] then perhaps TurboTuTone’s latest project is worth touching on.

Turbo is the guy who first brought seasonal change and wilderness growth to Project Zomboid, first through his Erosion mod and then with EasyPickins and Mash through its Build 30 integration. He’s now working with Will in getting the multiple radio and tv channels that have been written into the game, and ready for you to listen to every morning and afternoon as the world around our disaster zone falls to pieces.

In true Turbo fashion, however, he’s bringing a slightly more complex (and brilliant) system into the game – intent on providing the game with the foundations for fiddling with bandwidth to pick up survivor transmissions, discover military radios for access to scrambled transmissions and sending dialogue out into the world (solo and over a server) at set days/times/moments in your game. A primary part of this will also be the integration of his awesome ApCom Walkie Talkie mod that lets MP players talk to each other over the map.

We’ll get into the nitty-gritty of the system once it’s all in and working, not least because there’s currently some debate as to how we’ll deal with radio and tv channels (whether it should be done in quasi-real time, or whether players will be able to access all shows/news at whatever time of AM or PM that they turn on their discovered broadcast system. We really want to get stuff into an internal build and see how it plays.

With which in mind, TurboTuTone presents the new second cousin to PZ creation tools WorldZed and TileZed… WordZed! Click for full size.

WordZed provides a simple system for dialogue (and potential localizations) that are correctly categorized, fed into the system and turned it into data that can be fed into Project Zomboid’s framework. We currently have an early version of the tool up and running, and in the New Year Turbo and Will are going to play around with it – and discuss what can be expanded and tweaked, and of course make sure it can handle the thousands and thousands of words that have already been written for it! Then work will begin on getting this stuff in-game!

And with that, we wish you a Merry Christmas – and if you don’t celebrate Christmas then we wish you an enjoyable slightly improved television schedule! And also many thanks to Connall for making the forums feel all Xmassy with his Community Secret Santa!

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