And so begins a bold new era of… Thursday.

Build 38

We realise the 38 release has been built-up a fair amount, it’s been on the brink for so long while we mop up this bug and that – but on the approach to release on Monday we realised that some aspects of the build’s optimizations hadn’t been properly integrated in recent 38 builds, and as such as a whole the ‘release candidate’ hadn’t received sufficient public testing. There’s a lot of changes under the hood in Build 38, and the last thing we want is for an unironed version to go out and disrupt people’s ongoing games.

It’s all in place now, however. As such, if you’re an IWBUMS tester or fancy being one for the day, please jump into the latest beta – let us know how it runs for you, and we’ll press ‘go’ when we see enough green lights.

Build 39 (aka Vehicle Test Build 21)

As mentioned in a previous Mondoid, we now have various people working on Build 39 (the vehicles build) so have a ‘gameplay’ coder and Bitbaboon Steve doing general optimizations – all alongside Yuri’s existing ‘nuts and bolts’ engine and physics work.

As such, Vehicles Build 21 has been released with a bunch of stuff intended to gel our vehicles ever tighter to PZ gameplay. This includes:

Simulated gear shifts are now based on your engine rpm, the number of gears your car has and the max speed. Previously it would just work on the speeds you hit.

You’re now slowed and have less traction if you’re driving off-road. [In future builds constant off-road driving will also reduce a vehicle’s condition.]

Car keys are now a more important aspect of the game. They are mandatory when it comes to starting an engine or turning on headlights, and have a (small) chance of spawning already in the ignition or in the glove box. A ‘car locked’ sound is also heard, rather than the characters say ‘locked’ out loud like a weirdo would.

If you have Level 2 Electrical Skill then you can Hotwire a vehicle if you can get inside. Better and more modern cars are trickier to hotwire, and a failed attempt will result in damaging the ignition.

In larger vehicles like vans and emergency vehicles you can fit more characters inside in MP – and rear seats can also be used as containers now.

Vehicles are no longer empty of ‘life detritus’. They now have loot tables that reflect their past owners. Every day vehicles might have bags of rotting groceries inside, uneaten candies and old magazines. Meanwhile there’s a small chance that a pick-up might have a fisherman’s equipment, while a pick-up could have been a carpenter’s work vehicle – and as such have a trunk full of items that reflect his work.

General changes: gas consumption now dependent on what gear you’re in, and more forgiving. Reduced chances of stalling. Balanced vehicle storage capacities. Vehicles audible from a greater range. Can no longer drive through double doors. (Sorry 🙁 )

Moar vehicles

A few threads have popped up on the forum saying that we could do with a bit more variety in vehicle models to make things look a little bit more realistic – and as such Martin has been modelling up some different variants on existing car models, as well as creating a few new ones, for Mash to paint up some textures for.

These won’t appear in Build 39, most likely, but will pop up in the relevant areas in the versions that follow

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.