Much of life is currently delicately adding polish to the IWBUMS beta vehicle build in preparation for its public release, to the extent that some of the vehicles devs are now working on aspects of it that’ll be going into the first patch – for fear of adding unexpected gremlins with larger scale changes.

With this in mind then – the headlines are:

We’ve just released vehicles IWBUMS beta 39.49. It’s one of the last beta releases we anticipate putting out before the full Build 39 release, if not the last, so it’s fairly fix-centric. One aspect worthy of mention though (as it’s a frequent forum request) is the ability to use a Generator when not in direct proximity of a building. We’ve done this so gas pumps can now be powered, and fuel can now be obtained after the electricity cut-off for all your vehicular needs.

Also in IWBUMS 39.49: we’ve been balancing car damage, increasing bumpiness when you drive over forest and farmland tiles and finessed our map chunk loading system a bit to hopefully improve MP streaming a little – if you have feedback from when you play on a distant server with a high ping we’d love to hear it. Also: many and various fixes covering many different aspects of the game.

Turbo is currently working on a new weather/climate/seasons system for the game, and yesterday delivered his first fully gameplay-integrated build into testing, along with all its climate-changing debug capabilities. While he waits for feedback his intention is to start adding the new/improved sounds for his more varied weather effects and to stress the seasonal change (snow crunch instead of footsteps, different birdsong, more varied wind etc).

Bitbaboon Mark continues his work with the animation system, ready for when we can swap development over into them when the dust has settled after vehicles. He has just “finished splitting the states into data sets”, essentially making all the animation sets compatible with the new data-driven system he described in last week’s blog. In the mean-time, on our side of the world, this week and next we’re doing an art pass over all Martin’s clothing and models so it’s ready for integration in terms of pure visuals – and we don’t have to mess around with colours that are a bit too garish etc once they’re in-game.

Elsewhere: Stas is working on the improved gamepad support for the next version, larger-scale locations in Louisville are being mapped, Bitbaboon Steve is digging into MP connectivity and lag, and plans are being made for how we’re going to ‘refresh’ some of our more longstanding features in future builds – with farming being a prime contender in the next version where we’ll be revamping the weather and it’ll be a natural fit.

We’d like to officially welcome Beard aboard the good ship Zomboid. This lovely chap is a new addition to our Tech Support task force, and will be appearing across our full range of forums for those of you needing advice on servers, running PZ and anywhere else you might run into problems. While undertaking his hazing ritual, we would only ask that you provide him with specs info on your machine and whether or not you’re running any mods.

This week’s kitchen assault from Saffa. 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