Greetings all. We released public beta Vehicle Build 35 last Friday, the top-line of which was the introduction of two new cars – the jeep-esque Dash Ranger and the more luxurious Mercia Lang 400. Build 35 also introduced better vehicle variety/colour spawns, better interaction with the new car overlays on the Mechanic skill UI, better gamepad control and lots of balance/polish. If you want to help out with MP testing then the Spiffospace server is a good place to hang out. Vehicle build 35.3 also introduced Bitbaboon Steve’s new engine/exhaust sound system, which means that driving around is now far less of an irritant on the ears. Please note, however, that currently the truck engine noises are placed on all vehicles. Now we have the engine noise system in-game it’s easy to get new variants in-game, but sourcing the relevant sounds to feed into it is a little trickier – not least due to our isometric perspective (away from the internal noises of the engine itself) and the fact that we feature ‘normal’ cars rather than the performance vehicles that are in so many other games. We have a few irons in the fire with this, however, and should have more fitting sounds for standard cars in the next few builds. Here’s a quick video of what’s ‘latest’ in the build right now – alongside the tire pump that’ll be going into Build 36. [The new car’s hood/bonnet might still be a little pinched, we will likely improve on this.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvD3H-9gQ4 Something else that came up after the release of Build 35 was the decision to hold back a lot of our work on the item sync optimization until a later version – as it was clear that the gremlins it was going to keep on throwing up were now in danger of delaying a public Vehicles release. As such this has been reverted to the system we have in the current public build, which came at the cost of the reintroduction of several MP sync bugs – half of which have now been hotfixed, with more to follow when we release Vehicles beta 36 in the coming days. Vehicles beta 36 will largely comprise of polish and bug fixes destined to make our community testers life a little better – with issues addressing safehouses, damaged vehicle textures, Muffler degradation, aforementioned residual sync oddities, odd night-time lighting on vehicles and various other stuff. Under the hood, meanwhile, it also comes with a networking optimization that should help on chunk-loading when you’re driving at speed – that of compressing info on identical items are now compressed to a single item. So, especially on a modded server, your connection will take less of a beating when it’s being informed of the thousands of lovingly stored nails in containers up ahead. It should hopefully speed things up, and also make for less sync bugs appearing in general. Connall, meanwhile, will hopefully have finished zoning the new parts of Mash’s map for the build next week. In team news, meanwhile, the PZ workforce (when taking into account our friends at General Arcade currently working on vehicles and new chat functions, and the guys at BitBaboon working on optimization and the new animation system) has doubled in the past year – and it was clear that we needed a few more production people backstage to suit this. As such we’d like to welcome Sasha to the team – who’ll be working with Jake as a fresh layer of production and QA before our beta builds go live, and helping to filter out show-stoppers before they’re dropped onto our community testers. We’d also like to give a hearty ‘hello’ to General Arcade’s Konstantin to the ‘open task’ sheet – who will be working with Stas and Yuri in terms of QA on their various aspects of Zomboid work. This week’s house of praise from ssjr66888. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. 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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!

Current Features

• Hardcore Sandbox Zombie Survival Game with a focus on realistic survival.
  
• Online multiplayer survival with persistent player run servers.
  
• Local 4 player split-screen co-op
  
• Hundreds of zombies with swarm mechanics and in-depth visual and hearing systems.
  
• Full line of sight system and real-time lighting, sound and visibility mechanics. Hide in the shadows, keep quiet and keep the lights off at night, or at least hang sheets over the windows.
  
• Vast and growing map (loosely based on a real world location) for you to explore, loot and set up your fortress. Check out Blindcoder’s map project: http://pzmap.crash-override.net/
  
• Use tools and items to craft weapons, barricade and cook. You can even build zombie proof forts by chopping trees, sawing wood and scavenging supplies.
  
• Deal with depression, boredom, hunger, thirst and illness while trying to survive.
  
• Day turns to night. The electricity falters. Hordes migrate. Winter draws in. Nature gradually starts to take over.
  
• Farming, trapping, fishing, carpentry, cooking, trapping, character customization, skills and perks that develop based on what you do in-game.
  
• Proper zombies that don’t run. (Unless you tell them to in the sandbox menu).
  
• A ton of amazing atmospheric music tracks by the prodigy that is Zach Beever.
  
• Imaginative Challenge scenarios and instant action ‘Last Stand’ mode, on top of regular Sandbox and Survival 
  
• Full, open and powerful Lua modding support.
  
• Xbox Controller Gamepad support on Windows. [Others pads can be set up manually. Gamepad support not currently available on Mac]
  
  We’re a small team at the moment, but we’re also committed to providing the following:

  Planned Features:

  
  
• The return of our PZ Stories mode that also serves as first ever tutorial actively trying to kill you at every turn. Kate and Baldspot return!
  
• In-depth and varied NPC encounters driven in a persistent world, powered by a metagame system that turns each play-through into your very own zombie survival movie with emergent narrative gameplay.
  
• Constant expansion of the countryside and cities around Muldraugh and West Point
  
• Full wilderness survival systems, animals and hunting for food.
  
• More items, crafting recipes, weapons and gameplay systems.
  
• Steam Workshop and Achievements support

• Processor: Intel 2.77GHz Quad-core Ubuntu LTS 16.04/Steam Machine. Requires Libgcc 6 or higherMemory: 8Gb RamHard Disk Space: 5gigVideo Card: Dedicated graphics card with 2 GB of RAM minimum. OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.2 support (generally 2012 or newer) Sound: FMOD compatible sound card
• Memory: 8Gb RamHard Disk Space: 5gigVideo Card: Dedicated graphics card with 2 GB of RAM minimum. OpenGL 2.1 and GLSL 1.2 support (generally 2012 or newer) Sound: FMOD compatible sound card