First off another quick note that we’re now curating a Build Status and Version History overview list so people don’t have to dredge through weekly Mondoids to find vids/images of stuff that’s liable to drop into the next build, or to check out what’s in IWBUMS testing. Smaller tweaks in PZ history aren’t mentioned, but the version list does go all the way back to the Steam release so is hopefully informative. We fleshed it out today, so have a peek if you fancy.

ANIMS AND MODELS

Work continues binding in all our various animations to the game and making it all as seamless as possible. Here’s something that just went in. Hope you like. [CONTAINS DISTURBING SCENES]

Secondly, we’ve been hearing a few community thoughts on the appearance of the new model faces, and were thinking similar ourselves – so we’ve fiddled with the mesh and the UVS of what’s being implemented to change the way the faces look, and especially on the female models. We added a few more vertices to the head (not enough to impact the poly count) so have more control over the eyes – and hopefully the results will be an improvement when they’re in-game.

ADMIN THE BADMIN

As discussed last week, RJ’s turned his attention away from the suggestions of the survivor community – and towards the suggestions and quality of life of those who run and maintain PZ servers. We’ve already got his tiered admin system into the IWBUMS public test (and really could do with people setting up servers and bug-testing), so now he’s onto the next stage of his quest before returning to vanilla SP content.

“The new “player stats” admin panel is currently in test and going well” explains our favourite Frenchman, bar none. “I’ve fixed lot of bugs on it for the IWBUMS 35.18 which should be out soon. In 35.18 I’m also looking at dealing with people who copy/paste saves, and think I may have a decent solution but I need to make sure there aren’t any sync problems.”

“I’ve also added user logs to the player stats panel. Every time something weird happens to a player (lua checksum fail, dupe item found etc…) a log will be added and can be inspected by the Admin, who can also administer warning points and keep tabs on griefing and similar.”



VOIP

This past Friday we had another successful test of the new player voice system, that’ll let other players hear your verbal threats, mutterings and zombie-gasps should your character be standing in their proximity.

Comments from testers included “my voice came in loud and clear”, “the distance at which you can still hear people talking is great”, “Voice detection seemed quite good” and “The quality and 3D was awesome!”. This all said there were a few stability issues, so the guys at General Arcade are on a bug hunt that’ll hopefully soon culminate in a version we can tie into the current IWBUMS build.

HOW DO YOU DIE?

Cool cat ShylokVakarianf is running a survey about what exactly gets you killed in your playthroughs. It’s super-interesting and gives us a good idea of what’s causing the most fatalities currently in-game.

This week’s smart, sassy safehouse from Mr.Narsh. 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! The CBOIT now also flags that our Discord is now open for chat and hijinks. Now with modding section!