Pre-EGX

It’s a busy, busy week at TIS Towers this week as the vast majority of the dev workforce and a considerable chunk of community will be heading to Birmingham (UK version) later this week (APART FROM NASKO WHO MUST HAVE GONE BEFORE POSTING THIS, THE FILTHY BEAST) to attend the EGX games show and to shove Zomboid into the faces of the assembled masses. If you fancy coming along then there are still tickets available. In the meantime, for this Mondoid, we’ve caught up with two devs – one of whom is hammering away on the ever-more complete-looking edifice of Build 33, and another who we haven’t heard from for a while. There was also quite a big bug/tweak update to Build 32 back on Thursday from the consistently wonderful EasyPickins, the full skinny on which can be found here .

HELLO TURBO

“Hello! So, this morning I’ll be doing a few small tweaks and fixes to my Radio and TV system, and then getting my branch merged with all the other 33 stuff hopefully without getting bitten/scratched in the process. There’s been a lot to tidy up on the radio system – UI stuff, MP functionality, the WordZed utility and a good load of smaller stuff that needed polishing. A major hurdle that’s been overcome is in ensuring player to player radio communication is working coherently. I’ve been doing some testing helped by Twiggy and Tooks, the results of which can be seen here – please read on for the explanation though! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYvy2cLsrxA In this video all the radios are set at the same frequency of 500mhz, and both myself and Tooks are invisible to the zombies – which is why they can be seen getting attracted to the voices coming out of the radio sets rather than our tasty bodies. The biggest complication with P2P radios and walkie talkies is working out exactly what is player conversation in the direct vicinity is picked up, what is transmitted and what is received – and how it’s seen on-screen. As such I’ve developed a set of rules to govern it all cleanly. At first you can see me not wearing a radio device. I’m standing in-between Tooks and the HAM radio, and not in range of any microphone at all. It’s when I move closer to Tooks, who is using a walkie talkie the entire time, that my second line is picked up by his device and transmitted to the HAM radio. After this my character equips a radio as well, and I transmit some lines – first standing away from Tooks and then closer to him. Seeing as we both have walkie talkies equipped and on the same frequency, based on a few rules, the radio system then picks the best suited device to actually transmit it. It’s all about avoiding duplicates on the airwaves. Now this is in the can there’s not that much more to add – next step is internal testing and further fixes/changes from feedback. That said, I also still have to put in recording onto tapes, broadcasting from said tapes and a system that lets modders make use of the radio stuff easily. None of that is vital to the internal test though.”

HELLO RINGO

“Hello! I’m currently taking a small break from working on the North East section of the official map to update Bedford Falls, the first community map that I created that contains hundreds of new buildings, most of them made by members of our