Heat of the Night

Hi everyone, it’s been a good month of general work and polish on our closed build. Lots of general required mop and brush up, but as examples of what’s been going on here’s a few items:

• Making fishing clearer and easier to follow for new players – making the messaging clearer to the player when fish are present for example via the disturbances on the water, and making it more obvious when a fish has been caught.

• Fixing issues with body-dragging, for example bugs with phasing through walls on pick-up and drop.

• Improving animal pathfinding to make them act more realistically around walls and map structures, and continued general work on the unseen paths that animals will follow.

• Optimization work on the player’s view cone to help the game in busy areas.

• Map testing and fixing throughout new towns added to the game, and all the existing areas that have been given a glow up – which are primarily in Muldraugh.

• Adding more opportunities for players who generally don’t go to farms and forests to come across animals in-game.

• Adding 42’s new depth textures to scenery and items that testers discover, and that we previously missed out.

There’s clearly a myriad of other fixes and changes going on also. These and all of the above are necessary things, but not particularly sexy in a dev blog – for which we apologise.

We are also navigating the final implementation of better handling of drainables (‘used up’ items in recipes and such) in our revamped crafting system – and providing some neat short-cuts for both our own developers and modders by using input flags for many crafting use cases. Work on the Build Menu, meanwhile, continues apace – though the fundamentals are in the UI isn’t quite there yet, however, so we won’t be showing it off in today’s blog.

Languages

From the very beginning of PZ amazing community translators have brought so many people from around the world to our game, and allowed non-English speakers to better enjoy the Knox Event.

Recently, however, due to the extent and expanse of the full translation sheets over twenty different languages it became clear that it was simply going to be too complicated to keep going in this fashion, especially with the motherlode of B42 content still soon to drop alongside everything that we on the team know still lies ahead.

There’s at least 100,000 words in Build 42, possible more depending on how many new CDs and VHSs we get in, so it’s about a novel’s worth all added up.

Build 42 will see a big shift for us in terms of localization, then, as we are moving to a complete professional translation of the entire game in a full 21 different languages. Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and many others.

We have essentially covered all of our most popular playing languages, and all of our most requested inclusions.

This will cover everything in-game: including both new content, and edits to the old. Existing translations have been checked through to ensure consistency and accuracy, and to fill in some of the gaps a few of the translations had due to the sheer vastness of the PZ broadcast system.

Importantly, access to all existing community translations – and prominence of existing community translator game credits – will clearly remain in the game.

We are so grateful to our amazing community translators, and we have worked out some cool ways that we can thank