Plenty on at the moment, and a new Community Megatest with free PZ codes up for grabs coming up on Wednesdoid…

NEW BUILDS

We released a new build of the Vehicles test branch today, in preparation for it becoming Build 39 once Build 38 gets a full release. Vehicle Build 15 fixes bugs with car wrecks spawning in the air and gently floating down, and also goes through and corrects the vehicle shadows and collision boxes of all our car models – meaning that flipped cars can no longer be walked through.

Yuri also finished off his gamepad integration work, adding gamepad control to our lootable map interface, which he will be transferring to Build 38 alongside the rest of his controller work.

The original plan was to release our new map expansion featuring the town of Riverside and the Knox Heights Country Club into the vehicles build, but as the week has gone by it’s seemed increasingly daft to sit on something that’s finished for longer than is necessary. As such we’re currently working on the zombie spawn maps and player spawn points necessary for it to be released earlier with Build 38.

Our intention is to get this out, alongside rooftop rendering and general RJ fixes, in time for a Community MP Megatest we’ll be holding on Wednesday evening. This is as a result of the…

WAR ON ZOMBIE LAG

We currently have two technical director chaps working on Zomboid. There’s Mark who’s setting up animations and currently getting a character skinned renderer active on a toggle (so we can turn on the new anims on the dev-side one-by-one as we go), and Steve who we’ve initially tasked with optimizing MP connectivity.

Steve’s primary aim is to remove zombie lag (teleporting zeds, unfair bites and general server strain) and this past Friday he might have made a bit of a breakthrough – which has now been coded and is due to be released into our IWBUMS public beta for testing tomorrow. Essentially Steve discovered a way to optimize zombie transmission – limiting the amount of zombie placement and zombie movement data that’s shared between players, while still keeping the online gameplay rolling.

This, combined with Stas from General Arcade’s ‘server save pause’ that’s already part of Build 38, could hopefully provide a massive improvement for all our MP players and server owners when released.

Through the power of maths we can tell it’s likely to be a nifty optimization, but we can’t tell how nifty it will be without putting it to the test… and so…

SERVER COMMUNITY MEGATEST II

This Wednesday 23rd August at 8pm BST (GMT+1) we will be opening up a server that’s running the current IWBUMS build, and we’d politely ask those interested in helping out to attend. Full details in this thread.

As with our previous Build 38 Megatest, participants will all receive a free Project Zomboid code to give to a friend/enemy/close family relation. All we need is for you to be running around on the server for an hour or so, and it’ll probably be quite a fun escapade.

The only difference between this time and the last Megatest is that, to properly emulate a normal live PZ server, we will be capping the number of participants at 50. When the test is over, however, we will open the server a little wider. This does mean, however, that there will only be 50 Steam codes up for grabs.

AND FINALLY

Massive props to SoulFilcher for recreating this little scene in LEGO. Terrifying indeed.

Today’s featured image from SAS 6007. 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 Mondoids 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.