Hola, zomberinos. Short-ish blog this week, but some fun info-nuggets none-the-less.
FINAL 41 PATCH
We released 41.78 to Unstable last week, and released a fix-up patch yesterday. There’ll probably be another update to it before we consider it safe for a full stable release, but there hasn’t been too much to mop up this time around – so our thanks to Blair who was the chief coder on this release.
One thing it might be nice to get in before we wrap 41 and the long wait till 42 begins, are the products of our investigations into ways to make it clearer to modders and users alike where errors in their mod setup lies – when it comes to different capitalisations in folder paths and different file orders between server and clients.
These often result in error messages that are confusing and/or unclear, making things hard to troubleshoot for modders and our support team. It’d be nice to bring about some clarity before we leave 41 for pastures new – so that’s the main thing we’re waiting on now.
WORK ON 42
Slightly technical details from the land of 42, but something that Blair has also been moving onto is working on the architecture of our recipes system – to make it more foolproof and effective for both us and modders.
We are streamlining our evolved recipes – using ‘templates’ similar to the tags we use for individual items. This will make it more straightforward and simple for both us and the modding community to add in new evolved recipes and food items.
The system ‘as is’ in Build 41 has a sizable amount of ‘clunk debt’ associated with it – that gets compounded by the number of food items we have in the game. The way we are restructuring things strips out some of the complexity, and lets us add new stuff easily – while simultaneously managing our existing recipes and foodstuffs.
Next up, we also have more ideas about further streamlining this using item tags to offload a lot of the recipe ingredient stuff to tags and templates. We’ve also got the roots in place of an Evolved Recipe name system that will notice you putting ham and pineapple on a pizza – and call it a Hawaiian Pizza. Or name a sandwich a BLT if you’ve added bacon, lettuce and tomato.
On top of this there’s a lot of wash and brush up of existing features. There’s a lot of big name gameplay stuff going into B42, but when it eventually rolls around we want to underline that there’ll be a bunch of more iterative improvements on existing PZ too.
For example, right now we’re working on making the randomized profession house stuff more cool and obvious- right now you probably aren’t aware when you’re in a carpenter’s or an electrician’s home as there aren’t enough indicators. We’ve got stuff going in to make it clearer and more thematic. Likewise we’re improving the procedural loot system to make loot and looting more interesting in of itself.
There are also new ‘zed story’ events to come across where costumed zombies will tell a story – gun store sieges, hillbilly hoedowns, kids party raves in the forests, a variety of campsites to come across etc.
Oh, and we’ll be widening the melee weapons pool a bit also. They’re not in-game yet, and no SFX for them yet either, but here’s a quick look at some of what’ll be on offer.
This week’s prison visit from Abby. 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.
