So, the big news is that alongside Erosion Mod integration and the new health/medical system we’ve got a third prong to the Build 30 trident – the return of local split-screen co-op and fixed gamepad controls! More on this in but a few paragraphs’ time!

Current Build

After having it on the brew for what feels like an ice-age, we had a few last minute hang-ups with releasing 29.4 into the wild last week – rather predictably just after saying we’d likely release it on Tuesdoid and ‘all systems go yay’. It’s been in our public IWBUMS test group over the weekend, and showed no major signs of misbehaving – so now it’s released! We’re aware you heard the same thing last week, and apologise again for this, but as long as the wider Steam audience doesn’t flag anything then Build 29 can now be considered final and we can finally update Desura.

Build 30

Build 30 [current addition and changelist here] is in quite good nick – not yet in internal testing, but good enough that we allowed lovely Tooks to stream a playthrough over the weekend. You can have a peek at his two dabbles here and here. This, in turn, flagged up a load of now-fixed bugs, so pushing it into a state where a proper internal test build doesn’t feel far away at all.

Given the number of additions and complexity of what’s going into Build 30 we anticipate that its internal testing will be slightly longer than that experienced by its predecessors – but once it hits public IWBUMS testing it should’ve been worth the wait.

To keep your anticipating engines running RJ and EP are going to try to hook up another super-french preview video for you next Mondoid.

Split-Screen Co-Op and Gamepad Control: The Return

The redoubtable EasyPickins has been hard at work polishing and improving on the old model of split-screen that we first bundled into our Rezzed build all that time ago. What can you expect aside from four player split-screen play and improved controller support?

Tap ‘A’ on a controller and you’ll get some options that will let you: take over an existing on-screen player 1, add a new player via the character creation screen and (if previously created) add in an existing co-op character.

All co-op characters are now saved automatically, just as they are in SP. They appear in the game’s save directory in files called map_p1.bin, map_p2.bin etc

It is now possible to play split-screen MP online. The first player logs in to a server, then co-op players hit the A button once in-game just like in SP. Co-op players don’t need to log in, but we do have to juggle issues like MP co-op players having the same username – likewise we’ll have to work out what to do with in-game chat.

Sleeping in local co-op will now work in that players can go to sleep separately, but time will only speed up when you’re both asleep. This currently leads to hilarity [well, slight amusement] as the player snoozing first does so standing up.

That’s about it for this week. Keep your eyes locked onto the TIS twitter for build updates and testing news, and if you can’t then why not subscribe to our newsletter so that anything and everything exciting can be hand-delivered by an electric postman?