Hello everyone.
NEXT
The situation with Linux server instability remains ongoing, with the MP team working on another update to the Unstable beta – and an internal test of their work tonight.
The good news from the Unstable release of 41.76 was that overall network and connection speeds were improved, and will be beneficial to all online players once fully released, but the far more pressing issue was that residual errors in our zombienet library carried over server instability. Getting this, finally, sorted is currently the team’s number one priority.
This issue doesn’t impact all our players, but we recognise how frustrating it must be for those who play regularly on Linux servers – and above all those who operate them. We can only apologise for the continued outage and ongoing work, and recognise that patience has been running understandably thin.
In our travels fixing the issues, the networking has been changed so as to more directly communicate between server and client. The server now has 2 ports to connect to. The game port (16261 by default) is used to handle Steam queries. The additional port (16262 by default) is used to handle the direct connection, and thus circumnavigate the data travelling through the steam network which was impacting latency and throughput significantly. These ports can be configured through the server options.
We’re aware this may cause a bit of disruption when we first release this to stable. However, the positive impact this will have on server performance, reducing lag and improving syncing of the game is too great to ignore, and should be just an additional port for server operators to be aware of and shouldn’t affect the vast majority of players connecting. The non-Steam version, meanwhile, will just work as usual.
THEN
Most of the non-MP team are now fully on B42 development, but we do have a few brave soldiers working on the final 41 patch that’s currently backlogged behind the aforementioned MP fixes.
The intention of this patch is to be as non-disruptive as possible, and to leave 41 in the best possible condition during the next period of extensive Build 42 development.
As such it’s primarily fix-based and polish, but there are also some expanded sandbox options. You can see the topline of new changes in the screenshot below.
You can thankfully also view the full current changelist by following this hotlink.
This build will go into the unstable beta once MP servers are fully patched up and stable.
42
We’ve got a couple of videos from RJ this week to show his current work on domestic animals. They are fairly self-explanatory when you watch them, but PLEASE NOTE everything you see is heavily WIP.
RJ is working in something of a development debug sandbox here, and as such everything will have rough edges – and likewise some player actions will have more appropriate animations, animal sizes will be improved, sound effects, further polished UI etc. etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPLWnNsQ3QY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3mI85QPcGo
Finally, just to give you the shivers, here’s a sample of the Sound Team’s latest work on sprinter screams. Don’t have nightmares.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW2VtgaKpTQ
This week’s book club from Kawri. 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, especially if you’re an Animations Engineer as Christ alive that would be handy? Details here.
