Storms and Studies

Hello all, welcome to this week’s Thursdoid. A slightly short one, as usual Thursdoider Batsphinx is currently waving the Zomboid flag high at the GDC in that there America, for the betterment of all Zomboids – devs and players alike. Normal Thursdoid blogging will resume next week! A few things to cover non-the-less.

VEHICLE BUILD 41

We were about to release the build today, as a potential IWBUMs version, and in testing last minute have noticed a serious crash issue in MP that needs resolving first, so we’ll look to fix that then release — if not tomorrow, then early next week. A few highlights for what will be coming:

• Since we had a few complaints about the slower UI update speed, we’ve added a menu option to allow people to choose their own level of sacrifice of game FPS for UI framerate, and in addition have raised the default UI framerate a bit. (We’ll see what option most people like to try and determine a good default value in the future. Of course ultimately we’d like to get the UI further optimized, but sadly since it’s written in lua for modding purposes its inherently a bit slower to process than most game uis so we’ll do what we can.)

• Zombie horde optimizations – there is still more to do, but in particular we’ve made significant optimizations to zombies responding to sound, and the way sounds are transmitted across the map, to make handling huge hordes better. Additionally there has been done work on the pathfinding that should make things run better when you’re amongst hordes of the dead. You’ll likely still see FPS drops until we manage to further optimize but you should notice a noticeable improvement, especially when you’re in a vehicle.

There are numerous other fixes and additions, the full changelist of which will be posted when we go live, we just want to get the build fixed up as we’re at the point now where every build should be moving us closer to a polished vehicle build so we can move on to other features we have in the pipe.

WEATHER UPDATE

Since this has been a rather teeny Thursdoid, we thought we’d share a few nice videos showing some of the new weather systems Turbo has been working on, with new shader effects (along with legacy versions for those without shader support) Hope you enjoy! Stormy car ride https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelQMB62qUI New shader driven fog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJqxS7FK17c Super rare night vision goggle prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgdPDbbUZs New shader ambiences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6futPu-g13I

THE LOOT DETECTIVES

Erstwhile investigators ShylokVakarian and his proclaimed ‘Queen of Loot’ ChatNoir have been running a rather impressive study on loot that appears in player’s starting houses, with some interesting revelations on which spawning towns have the best loot, down to the likelihood of running into good bag or a fabled Spiffo doll in your spawn house. It’s very interesting and useful statistics you should totally check out to help you plan your survival. Thanks to ShylokVakarian for his study, it’s really great that people are willing to dig this deep into the game we’ve created, and we massively look forward to his other studies in future! That’s all for this week, apologies its a bit short and version-less, we’ll look to get something out to you ASAP. This week’s image is from BecquerL. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here