Hey all, we’ve had our heads deep in MP stuff this past ten days – so please excuse a blog that’s heavy on busywork and housekeeping.
We released 41.73 to stable last week, which came with an unanticipated issue that saw Linux servers (of which there are many) having frequent crashes – generally when multiple users tried to connect at the same time.
This wasn’t great, to say the least, so a lot of the B41 team’s bandwidth has gone into investigating, testing and finding a solution for this over the last ten days.
We’ve recently released version 41.74 to the Unstable beta, which has fixed the crash issue at our end – and we would ask that anyone who hasn’t been able to play due to linux server crashes to try it out. This includes a full update to Valve’s latest Steam API.
If you continue to experience crashes on the Unstable branch after this patch, please head to our Discord techsupport channel or forums and send us your hs_err_pid**.log file (you’ll find this in the server installation folder) in addition to a download link to a .zip file of your Home/Zomboid folder (remove the “Saves” folder from it to save space).
Doing a wholesale update to the Steam networking interface like this isn’t small beans, and it has thrown up a few issues that we will be remedying in the coming days – but in the interest of getting folks missing out on their PZ ASAP we have released the fix to Unstable to get people back on-board, and report back on any other misbehaviour.
We will also be making some of the new anti-cheat additions far less twitchy, as these too caused issues for some people on 41.73 launch.
NEXT PATCH
Slightly logjammed behind 41.74 is a wide-ranging patch full of many and various things. To minimise future disruption to B41 players we are thinking that it may well be the last major patch before all coders are moved to B42 and more feature-based development.
Clearly there will still be fixes and maintenance where necessary. We’ll be wanting to leave 41 in the best state that we can, and with as many annoyances removed as possible. Plans can change of course, but this currently our direction.
Some of the logjammed items ready-coded and awaiting internal integration and testing are:
[*]New flatpack model for movable icons. Cleared up plastic/metal bucket confusion. New watering cans.
[*]Added compass support for the forthcoming compass item. When an item with the Compass tag is in a player’s inventory, the tooltip on mouseover will include text indicating which direction the character is facing.
[*]Recipe improvements: – more food items capable of being added to tacos and burritos.
[*]Rebalanced weights/encumbrance of: walkie talkies (for French speakers: talkie walkies), fire extinguishers, branches, spears, more.
[*]Adjusted the capacities of pistol and revolver cases from 7 down to 4. Changed the sawed off shotgun recipes to only use the hacksaw, and not the garden saw.
[*]Longstanding bugbear that using lighters with Molotovs completely drains them fixed. Also when a Lighter is equipped it will no longer automatically become lit, instead it will do so only if activated using the flashlight keybind or radial menu, or using the inventory context menu option to activate them.
[*]Several new zed and building stories.
[*]Added a new sandbox setting “EnablePoisoning” which has the settings “True” (default), “False”, and “Bleach is Disabled”. It governs if poison, or only bleach, is disallowed from being added to foods. Although this is primarily intended for MP servers, as an anti-griefing/no-PVP allowance, it has been requested for singleplayer as well, thus why it is a sandbox setting and not a server setting.
[*]Building keys spawn on zombies and corpses when they spawn inside buildings, when appropriate, instead of when they die inside of one. (WIP – may be B42)
[*]Set some traits to be mutually exclusive to remove exploits or illogical combinations: Brave & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic; Adrenaline Junkie & Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic/Cowardly.
[*]Rebalanced the maggots that spawn on corpses so that they spawn less often in spring and fall, and also so that the maggots that spawn on zombie corpses have a poison value of 5 instead of 3.
[*]Improved how current fakedead zombie spawns function.
[*]Improvement to buffs and debuffs in terms of XP and moodles shown.
[*]Fixed issues that involve spawning in barricaded/burnt/randomized locations.
[*]House keys will no longer spawn with a long string of numbers in their display name. (Should’ve improved this previously – apologies)
[*]Added attachments to most food models so they appear in the player’s hand while eating
[*]/gunshot command can now target a specific player
[*]Some work-in-progress changes to zombie behaviour. Random offset to where zombies think a sound came from for unseen squares. Rain increases zombie hearing random offset range and decreases chance for zombies to react to player sounds. Zombies wander more during heavy rain. (Potentially B42 content)
[*]Fixes and improvements to the admin tile picker system in MP.
[*]Some logical improvements to clothing items. Motorcycle helmets protect from head fractures, firefighter gear protects from fire etc.
[*]A fix to how you’re unable to claim a safehouse unless standing on the ground floor, and how game currently doesn’t check upper floors for other players or zombies when claiming.
[*]“Streamer Mode” audio option which changes vehicle siren sounds to avoid bizarre copyright strikes.
[*]Various improvements and fixes to the cutaway system.
[*]Colour-blind friendly accessibility addition – letting you add:another variant to red/green in aiming outline – and also to reduce difficulty when zed is standing on snow.
[*]Added highlight to crates so it’s easier to differentiate which one player is interacting with.
[*]Optional Sandbox Setting To Disable The Tainted Water Tooltip/Warning For Hardcore Play
[*]Improvements to level of damage burnt food does to players with weak stomach trait
[*]Changes to how car alarms function in-game, seeing as currently they are an extremely rare threat.
Although its early days yet, and unconfirmed for B42, we are also currently spending some time doing some backstage experimentation with basements and improvements to our loot/inventory UIs. If these are successful we may well see them surface in future blogs.
Thanks all!
This week’s supermarket camping trip from 지혁. 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.
