Project Zomboid News

Hello survivors! Today marks the beginning of one of the most significant and important periods in the modern world’s social and religious calendar: the Steam Summer Sale!

 
Because of this, all you existing survivors will no doubt get a little swamped with all the fresh meat turning up for the PZ grinder.

The Zomboid community has always been amazing in terms of supporting new players, and this time won’t be any different, but our tech and support teams will be working flat-out – most likely.

As such we just thought we’d say that (entirely fictitious and non-existent) bonus Spiffo points will be available for those who jump into threads to give advice or survival tips to survivors fresh to the Knox Event.

Likewise if you are one of the aforementioned noobs: hello! This is a dev blog we do every two weeks.


[h3]PATCH 41.72[/h3]
We are still working on the next update to Build 41, which we are hoping to release to an Unstable beta as soon as we possibly can.

The hold-up (we were originally planning to put this out two weeks ago) is due to us wanting to smoothen out MP issues that arise when driving alongside (or in the same car as) players with a far higher or lower ping than yourself. It becomes very stop-start, and quite unplayable.

These are essentially the edge-case ramifications of the necessary decision we made to remove physics-calculations from the server, but there are a lot of people playing PZ these days so edge-cases aren’t an inconsiderable number of players.

The MP team have put a LOT of work into improving this over the past two weeks, and as soon as we’ve had a successful internal test with their latest changes we will feel in a position to punt the build out into unstable.

A top line of major changes in 41.72 includes: fellow players optionally visible on the in-game map, new loot maps, new SFX and a new music track, polished emotes and a new way for players to be able to identify exactly which mods are misbehaving when they throw errors. Also an admin brush tool letting server chiefs paint items and walls etc. onto an ongoing game, and reams of small issue bug fixes.

Additions that have gone in over the last two weeks also include:

 
A huge amount of polish to the game’s food and recipes from BlairAlgol: filling in illogical gaps, expanding recipes, making foodstuffs previously absent from food crafting part of the system and making sure that you can no longer store a football in a toaster. Also a fair amount of food-related balance and common sense additions.
An improvement beneath the hood to foraging – meaning that the game will be able to recognise polygonal foraging zones on the map, rather than the more inaccurate squares and rectangles it currently works from.

The map team are also currently gearing up to do a final export of the current Build 41 map ready for the 41.72 unstable release. This will contain all the polish recently mixed into the main map, after which the team will turn to concentrate purely on mapping new areas beyond the current boundaries.


There’s nothing huge in this map update, we are primarily releasing it so that all the map bugs the community have been reporting are fixed up before the team moves onto Build 42 content, but there are a few treats:

 
Improved farms and farmsteads in readiness for 42’s animals, these include scarecrows that can be dressed up in the same way as shop mannequins.



Improved rich district houses in Louisville
Various new tiles like baby cribs, heavy factory machinery, standing floor lamps, farm related tiles, atm machines, heavy safes, medical related tiles, and new car wash tiles. [And no, baby cribs are not a harbinger of baby zeds]



We are now at a point at which it’s increasingly becoming a pain keeping 41 and 42 content separate on our internal build. We won’t be calling time on 41 patches any time super-soon, we’ll leave it polished and stable, but we’re certainly now well on the way the flipping the switch and working purely on Build 42 content. (Clearly we will still be able to return to implement super-important fixes and changes though)


[h2]42 CONTENT[/h2]
We haven’t spotlit much from Build 42 recently – partly because one of its primary coders had been seriously ill (now recovered), and partly because a lot of what’s been done recently isn’t super visual yet.

However, if you’ll forgive the primarily textual blog, here’s a few updates on what’s been happening. First from our newly-healthy Turbo, who is responsible for our crafting update.


[h3]CRAFTING IMPROVEMENTS[/h3]
“Hello! This is Turbo! As mentioned in earlier blogs, the new craft update introduces a good bunch of new professions, new items, crafting tree and profession work stations etc as well as some other changes to how the game code ‘creates’ and records things.”

“To explain what I’m currently working on and why, I’ll focus on a few aspects of the update:”

A) Crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes that are based on the crafter’s skill.

B) Stats of input items that may also influence the attributes of a final output item.

C) The fact that a newly crafted item will be able to be placed as what we call a worldobject, then picked up again to item form – with all its attributes transferred in the game code between the two.”

“As an example, we are currently working on crafting that will occur deep into the apocalypse: so a blacksmith may be making a hammer which requires a wooden tool handle and a hammerhead as the input. The wooden tool handle may have a ‘quality’ and ‘condition’ attribute with values that are based on the skill of carpenter who made it,  and perhaps for the ‘quality’ of the wood used by them. Likewise, the hammerhead may have similar attributes – based on the skills of the blacksmith who made it, and the attributes of the ore/iron used in the craft.”

“Mixed into this we also have to take into account aspects such as the skill levels of the crafter – and also take in a random factor so that not everything produced is of a uniform quality.”

“The attribute system I’m currently working on should help with these kind of things, and it will not only be used for the new stuff in 42’s crafting update – but we will also be able to refactor things currently in the game’s existing crafting systems to work with it all really easily.”

“Lastly, a simple use case example. (And this is an example – not a promise of item inclusion!)”

 
Consider a shotgun item that can be crafted with attributes like damage, range and condition – based on the skills of the player who has been upgrading, improving and caring for it.
The shotgun is then crafted into a new shotgun trap item, where the attributes of the original shotgun are copied over.
The trap item is placed on the world as what we call an IsoObject – and the attributes are once again carried over to it. The range and damage attributes are now being used for the trap’s code.
The trap gets triggered a few times – lowering the condition attribute.
Another player decides to disassemble the trap to retrieve the shotgun from it, and the newly instanced shotgun item copies the attributes from the trap – and we end up with the correct damage and range values as it was originally crafted with. However, it now also has  a lowered condition due to its activity while it was being used in the trap.”

“With the new system I’m coding, this daisychain of steps can be achieved with very minimal additional coding required.”


[h3]LES ANIMAUX[/h3]
“Hello everyone! RJ here.”

“Okay, so everything that’s outside of your current surroundings in PZ doesn’t really exist. It exists as ‘meta’ – it isn’t streamed in, and the game calculates hordes moving around in distant places.”  

“For animals, however – this needs to change somewhat. You need to be able to travel the distance of the map, but for the game to still remember things about them that don’t matter for shambling zombies. Animals need to age, eat and drink – if you leave them too long they can’t be in perfect condition when you get back. They, most likely, need to be dead.”

“Not only are there lots of things to consider with animal, but there could also be a LOT of them on the map – although we’re current not 100% on our final list we have models for rats, squirrels, larger birds, deer and domesticated animals. So, even though the game knows everything about them and their movement – there’s a risk that when they’re properly streamed it might get too intensive for the CPU.”

“To avoid this I have coded it so that their stats (hunger, thirst, age etc) are updated every in-game hour. Realistically you’ll likely only have one or two cows, but if you want to breed rats for… some inexplicable reason you could end up with a ton of them. We don’t want players with 100+ animals having their stats updated every tick, or things could melt.”

“As such, animals won’t be updated real-time while they are off-screen (except for animals in a migration path, more on that below) but they will update themselves once you (or anyone else) returns to them. So be sure to fill up their feeding trough before you head out on loot run!”


[h3]LA MIGRATION DES ANIMAUX[/h3]
“We don’t want wild animals to always spawn in the same place. So for creatures like deer, we need to have them follow a set path – as they usually do in real life. This is being done through additions that Tim has made to WorldZed – and where we can ‘simply’ draw all the paths that animals could take – with nodes all along it where they can eat, drink, etc.”

“It’ll be up to the player to try to understand and learn these paths, so you’ll know where you could find your animals to hunt. We can also perhaps provide lootable items that can mark up rough hunting trails on your in-game map too.”

“This aspect of animals will be updated in the meta though, as animals need to always be on the move and some animal paths will cross with others – meaning that a group of deer could decide to change its path if it chooses to.”

“A deer group will contain all relevant members of the deer family. If you kill the buck in a deer group, they won’t have fawns for quite some time – until they find another buck to add into their group. As such, it will be important for players to recognise what animals they should kill: which are still too young, which might be pregnant etc.”

“It’s not done for B42 yet, but we are planning tracking to an extent via the deer excrement they leave behind and its freshness – all discovered via the foraging system. This way you’ll start to know on your server/game, what are the path animals are currently on, and could quite easily track back to them to “collect” your meat. Again, this aspect isn’t 100% up for inclusion yet – but hopefully shines a light on our plans.”


[h3]JOB AD MK II[/h3]
Sadly due to unforeseen circumstances we are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard  – most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here!


Today’s Rosewood base from Poffie_was_here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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 you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.

We love a bit of Disco Elysium here at PCG towers, with the game's Final Cut edition currently standing tall at #1 in our list of the best games on PC. Another game we're big fans of is Project Zomboid, which has slowly but steadily amassed a sizeable and creative community over years of excellent developer support. You can probably tell where this is going...
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Hey all, here’s a quick update on what we are all up to.

Our initial plan was to release our next 41.72 patch to the Unstable beta today, but annoyingly last night’s internal playtest had too many niggles with vehicle gameplay for us to comfortably let you loose on it.

This is slightly annoying in terms of today’s blog, but probably not quite as annoying as you happily downloading the new version only for MP passengers to be stuck revving on the tarmac while their drivers whizz off towards Louisville.

Still, once the MP Strike Force have checked everything out and we’ve had another (more successful) test then this is some of the stuff that will be punted out for you to try out:

• As mentioned in the last blog, the opt-in ability to see fellow MP players in your faction or safehouse on your in-game map.
  
• A huge range of new and improved admin powers that should breathe a little more life into online play. First and foremost of these is a brush tool that will allow admins to create tiles, walls, fire, smoke, water etc. in-game.
  
  There’s also the ability to easily trigger thunder, a more synced health panel, improved spawning of vehicles and trailers and the ability to change player weights. Also, also are more zombie-attracting options, improved zed spawns and some powers over whether doors are locked or not.
  
  Here’s a quick video Aiteron has made to show it all off:
  [previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
  
• Another more minor, but quite pleasant all the same, addition from Aiteron is the possibility of adding icons to the context menu. As seen here.
  

• New loot maps. Previously we didn’t have any loot maps for Louisville, but Tim has now integrated a bunch from the hand of Pat_Bren into the loot table. There are nine different maps in all, which means that as well as the usual ‘treasure map’ aspects you will be able to reveal a ninth of the Louisville map upon reading them.
  
  
  
• Also of note in .72 is an improvement to the way in which mod errors are reported. We have added a list of mods to the pause menu, and if one of them is causing errors and ‘the red box of doom’ then the culprit will be highlighted within the list.
  
• Perhaps of greater import to mod authors and our tech support team, however, is the improved lua error log that goes with the above: this will show if any files reported in call stacks are overridden by mods. We hope that this will allow modders, players and our own community liaison peeps to easier find mod conflicts and other issues.
  

[h3]SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF[/h3]
While it’s not exactly excitement dynamite, we know, this week we hit a point at which our internal tasklist board got a bit… silly. When you have been making a game for as long as we have there is a tendency for minor tasks, small bug fixes and ‘easy win’ suggestions to stack up, and up, and up…

The boards were just clogged, and it was hard to see the wood for the trees – and as such we pulled some coders from their features to blitz through and give our testing and production staff some temporary relief. Not sexy: we know, but also necessary for the sanity of some of our team.

This sort of stuff:


Having made a sizable dent in this sort of bug, everyone is now back at their usual post – but ‘Enforced Small Task Clearance Week’ also culminated in an event that will hopefully mean that we don’t have to have one of these mandated periods again in future.

Prolific modder Blair Algol has joined the team, and his role will be clearing out as many of the remaining hundreds (!) of these minor (but sometimes time-consuming) issues as he can.

Blair’s many mods touch so many different areas of the game that it seemed like a very natural fit for such a duty, while he also, of course, comes packaged with many ideas of how to make modding life easier for others in the community too.

Once the boards have been cleared, and Blair has a firmer grip on the codebase, it’s also our hope that he will be able to bring some of his own ideas and ingenuity into the game proper.


[h3]SOUND PHASE III[/h3]
Much like the Marvel movies, our soundscape improvement operations have worked in phases – and we recently had the meeting that kicked off Phase 3. The following are Noiseworks/Formosa’s next primary missions:

• Improvements to how the sound system deals with multiplayer characters and sound priorities. Primary work here is to try and solve the issues where sounds drop out due to clashes in sound priorities and limits when multiple players are around.
• Expand the reactive music beyond action moments. The ultimate goal is to allow the other non-action tracks to evolve and change: triggered by walking into buildings, looting a container, or any other little action that may trigger a change in the track that’s playing. Likewise making sure that they all also blend more organically between each other.
• Gameplay related sound effects, like modelling the realistic effects of using firearms in enclosed spaces without ear protectors. Also: improved noises for large crowds of zeds, sprinters and bullet world impacts if the coding team can provide their support for implementation.

[h3]OTHER STUFF[/h3]
We are currently debating whether to release the map team’s current work (fixes, polish, improved farm buildings and agricultural areas, more defined Louisville upper class suburbs) in a 41 patch, or whether to outright say that the next export will be for 42 later down the line – alongside some sizable planned expansion into other towns and conurbations that would be beyond the edges of our current area. More on that, and where we are taking the Knox Event location-wise, in future blogs.

As we mentioned last time, we’re coming off the back of Turbo’s serious illness currently – so it’s been something of a month of consolidation rather than massive exciting strides ahead.

That said, sometimes strides ahead come in the form of things that will pay off in the far-flung future. Ever since the success of the 41 release we have had a lot more resources at our command, and have been able to invest it in both middleware that could bring PZ to new heights – and the talent to integrate it with our codebase.

As we all know, one of the weakest things about PZ is the UI. We all get on with it fine, but let’s face it: it aint a looker, and it can be a bit clunky, fiddly and slow. We’ve always said we’d give it an overhaul, but it’s always been a daunting prospect.

Since March, alongside our friends at General Arcade, we have been experimenting with some super fancy AAA high-end UI tech middleware that will make this process easier, and will make the end result better.

For the past few months we’ve been making sure that it’s compatible with the game, doesn’t negatively impact performance and will still allow for lua UI for our modders – and it has been this week that we feel comfortable enough to say out loud to each other that it’s going to work, and is safe to proceed.

So next time you see someone moaning that the PZ UI isn’t exactly glamorous – just tell them ‘they know, and it’ll take a while – but they’re working on it’. It’ll be some considerable time till we talk about this again, but we just wanted to let you know that this is another iron that we have in the fire.


Today’s pile-up campfire from Mr.Crab763. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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 you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Want to work with us? Details here.

Hey all, here’s a Thursday round-up. We released version 41.71 last Thursday. We’re big on Thursdays around here.
41.71 contained a huge range of stuff, but topline features included: new and improved dynamic action music, a raft of improvements for Steam Deck players, new items, scarecrows, less wobbly and less performance-costly 3D items on your safehouse floor, loads of MP improvements under the hood, the fabled one-watch VHS video fix, new ambient and shutdown noises, modding improvements and tons more.

Better to read the forum release post than a long paragraph in the blog, I guess, if you are in need of a catch-up.

Since last week we hotfixed some issues with sound cut-outs on busy servers and with rapid-fire weapons, and so now we find ourselves moving onto…


[h3]41.72[/h3]
Seeing as we already have a fair amount of MP changes, fixes and balance in the pot for .72 at the moment it feels like it won’t be too long until we move it into the Unstable beta – unless of course a more disruptive feature comes to the boil over the next week or so and requires added internal testing.

The current changelist for what we have in this patch can be seen here if you are interested.

Primary items of note involve a lot of fixes and polish to radio use in-game, improvements to the representation of weapon-part upgrades in 3D models, and various issues with generators and batteries.

Also in the patch will be the opt-in ability for fellow faction and safehouse members to be visible on your in-game map.



And also some support for our colour-blind survivors, who will now be able to choose their favoured new text colours instead of BAD RED and GOOD GREEN. Thanks to Fox for this one.




[h3]BEYOND[/h3]
There are many advantages of having a tight small team when making a game like PZ. However, one of the biggest disadvantages is that when serious ‘irl’ stuff happens to any of us it makes aspects of development difficult. We’ve never really mentioned it before, and still won’t go into any detail, but this was one of the reasons that Build 41 itself took a long time to come to complete fruition.

The reason we are bringing this up is because one of the primary architects of the revamped B42 crafting system, Turbo, has been very ill (and often hospitalized) for much of the last three-four months.

Turbs said it was okay to let you all know this, as it clearly has meant that while RJ’s work on domestic animals and some roaming beasts has been rocketing on ahead – Turbo’s own work on the post-apoc crafting, tech-trees and recipes has had to be on hold.

We are so, so relieved and happy that Turbo’s treatment led up to an operation and a complete return to health – to the extent that he has been back working with us again this week. It’s been awesome having him about the place again.

We don’t yet know how much this will impact on build content, timings etc, and will be working out what’s what in the week or two ahead – tho B43 stuff is being worked on in parallel, so it hasn’t been detrimental to that.

Sorry if this has been a bit of a ‘too much info’ update, it’s probably not something you’d catch in a Call of Duty blog, but with Turbo’s permission, we thought it would give everyone a more accurate insight into where we’re at with things.

We also hope that everyone will join us in wishing Turbs continued good health – a phrase for which the Dutch probably have their own term for and that we will google later on.

To circle back around to more developmental matters-at-hand, here’s an image from RJ and Tim’s work on ways in which our non-domestic animals will roam the map. These are AnimalZone paths that share points, and allow for both long paths that cross cell boundaries and branching paths too.




[h3]MAPPING[/h3]
We love seeing the maps our community produces – each with their own flavours, design and challenge. To support all our mappers today we are releasing almost 1500 buildings and associated assets of our own in-game housing, garages, sheds and patio sets for use in community maps.

These should help map-builders flesh out their worlds without having to rely purely on their own constructed (and shared community) houses, flats and outbuildings.

If you are a mapper then you can find the released assets here.

We are not releasing ‘special’ and governmental/military buildings – but there are many, many houses, apartments, sheds, shacks, shops and restaurants here for folks to use in their own apocalyptic zombie nightmares.

In terms of our own future map improvement and expansion, meanwhile, check out what Ayrton has been doing to our Louisville rich districts.

“To bring more diversity to some locations of Louisville, I am converting some streets or blocks into Victorian-style districts, it should enable us to add a new layer of complexity to the urban plan with areas that are more/less wealthy, ancient, etc. Those new tiles are also being added across existing relevant buildings.”



Elsewhere Aiteron is playing around with his improved fishing system to mix in some added ‘fun quota’ alongside the improved anims/visuals we showed last time round. Long-term work on server-side items and timed actions for MP continues, and the Noiseworks/Formosa soundscape revolution continues with their next missions due to be discussed in the coming week.

Pat_Bren is also, meanwhile, crafting a bunch more annotated survivor maps to bolster our current stock – and also to cover Louisville and other newer areas of the Knox Event map.


[h3]JOB AD AGAIN[/h3]
Following the success of Build 41, we find ourselves in a position where we can hunt down other experienced Games Programmers to join the Project Zomboid team.

We are looking for coders willing and able to refresh some of our older systems, polish the existing ones and then to delve further into the features that will be part of the Knox Event’s exciting future.

Interested applicants should check our jobs page, but we should underline that we currently don’t have any entry-level positions available. You will need to have a fair amount of experience we are afraid.

This week’s touching crime scene from hp.tf. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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 you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.