Hello! Another Monday, another Mondoid. Quite a lot of cool stuff bubbling under today…

BUILD 38 IWBUMS

First off we’ve got a new IWBUMS public beta release for Build 38 out today. This contains a first version of our new ‘corpse management’, aimed at encouraging players not to leave piles of rotting zombie corpses outside their safehouse.

To this end you can dig graves, craft memorials for RP and also proximity to rotten corpses will make you feel ill/sad (although it seems that this aspect is bugged and breathing in zed fumes is loads too dangerous at the moment, 38.2 will remedy this when it arrives tomorrow).

Also included in this first version of 38 are some changes to the clothing system, and a bunch of new Sandbox options to help you personalise your game – touching on darkness, randomised zombie speeds, day/night active zombies, chances of annotated map and randomized house discoveries and fuel consumption. Oh, and TV and Radio programmes now have an impact on the character’s moodles, and if watching an instructional show then an XP multiplier is received.

38.2 will be arriving tomorrow, and it’ll have some extra sandbox options as well as the fixes – and higher capacity graves.

BUILDING FUN

As mentioned last week NewChris (ChrisW) is making change to the PZ building floor render code, and already has a build of his changes working backstage. His first task is to stop the game from hiding rooftops and upper floors as soon as you go up to them. This should give a much better sense of immersion, and better show off the buildings that Mash (and the community) has created. The following vid is WIP, but gives a fair indication of how things will look.

This week’s challenge has been in ensuring that zombies are still visible, and not covered up, if the player is in a tight spot where walls/roof tops would previously have been collapsed. As such in the following video Chris has made sure that if your character has seen the nearest zombie, then the engine won’t hide it behind a wall.

Depending on how ChrisW gets on with the system over the next week, this might become a part of Build 38 too – before he moves on to our much-desired Sims-style cutaway.

VEHICLE BRANCH

Alongside the new IWBUMS beta we still have our public vehicles Tech Test running, details of which you can find here. In the past week Yuri has fixed the ‘cars floating away on the Z axis’ bugs, some memory leaks and the ability to sleep when driving – and has also updated the physics of each individual car.

For the past few days he’s been investigating other potential memory leaks and general FPS issues, and his next task will be to work on the annoying invisible shared inventory bugs that are getting in the way of our MP testers.

In the mean-time we’ll also set up some threads on the forum to help us get particular feedback on the current physical set-ups of each vehicle. Our thanks to the community for the invaluable bug reports and insight they’ve been providing. When it comes to the animations (which new boy Mark has been doing some great work with over the past week) we’ll probably use the same approach.

OTHER STUFF

RingoD has published some cool new guides on the TIS forum. First off, How to Combine Map Mods and then How to Create Lootable Maps for community created towns and settlements. If there are any other map-making and modding tutorials that you think are required then please just let us know.

Deputy on the TIS forums paid the locals of the real Muldraugh and West Point a visit! Check out his pics, as he terrified the locals with printed out Spiffo images, through here.

This week’s burning issue from Steffen over Discord. 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 now open for chat and hijinks too. A general overview of the content of PZ builds past, in testing and upcoming can be found here.