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Hello Survivor! A Mondoid of dev-nuggets this week, but hopefully you’ll find them to be nuggets of gold rather than… other substances that are occasionally found in nugget-form.
There’s quite an important note for Linux PZ server hosts at the foot of this Mondoid too, by the way, so please scroll down immediately if you’ve just realised that we’re talking directly to you!
For everyone still on this paragraph though, let’s Mondoid!
BLINDCODER’S MARVELLOUS MAPPAGE
First off a super-quick mention, amidst sighs of adoration and love, for Blindcoder’s amazingPZ map. It’s pushed a remarkable 9.65 TB of data SO FAR this month, and he’s currently hard at work generating build 29′s map. It’s on track to be released later this week. Thanks Blindcoder, TIS and the community all thank you for your travails!
LOVELY MARTIN
As you might recall, a while back a chance meeting in the new office building reunited Lemmy and Binky with a long-lost colleague from their distant AAA past. Martin the lovely Animation Man is currently on-board with the PZ team, and has now gone over all the current anims in the game on a polish/tweak run.
His task right now is on the stealth anims. These include movements like sneaking along walls, crouch sneak movement (instead of just aiming weapon/walking), peeking around corners and others of a crafty ilk.
This is all a part of our overall plan to make the looting game a lot more built around stealthing around the town and trying to avoid attention. We’ll show a few examples of his work and its integration, as well as badgering him for a bit of a Q and A in future Mondoids.
NPC MANEUVER TOOL
Binky’s been busy finishing off a lovely tool to help toward NPC movement, to further make characters move in a believable way. Its functionality that was once upon a time coded directly into the NPC build of the game, but this proved way too cumbersome to use and maintain. Now it will be a nice external tool that will allow us to create a library of maneuvers that a character can do to move from one location to another. These can then be pieced together, and chosen based on personality or possible military training of the NPC in question.
We did actually do a video long long ago of the results of the early in-game tool, which you can witness once again here. YES, we’re finally doing re-runs! Fear not though. we have a new video for you too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVMR4pcvtAA
FMOD SOUND SYSTEM
For the longest time our sounds have been put through OpenAL, which unfortunately led to a fair few incompatibilities on a lot of people’s systems in which they couldn’t get directional sound working properly. This has been a long-term irk that has rankled, and as such we’re looking to move to the much more AAA FMOD sound system. This is totally funky, and offers us a lot of extra things into the bargain that should make the sound in Project Zomboid a ton better. Here’s a little video of our experimentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwEcwOIAE4U
It’s not ready to go yet, and we have to license the library before we’d be able to distribute it, but this will provide a much more immersive soundscape in Project Zomboid. It’ll make distant sounds much more realistic and atmospheric, provide reverb and other effects such as having the world geometry affect the attributes of the sound, as well as to provide much better supported 3D sound and more consistent volumes, and hordes will really sound like hordes with many many groaning voices creating a sea of unsettling sound as you approach a densely populated area. Helicopters will also be less likely to burst eardrums.
IMPORTANT THING TO READ FOR PZ SERVER HOSTS
There’s been a really nasty security bug announced in Java over the weekend, of note to server hosts.
Windows Server Hosts:
We’ve sent an update out via steam, please make sure you update and then restart the gameserver.
Linux Server Hosts:
An update has not yet been released by Debian or Ubuntu for all of the bugs.
Debian server hosts can check here to see when an update is released: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2014-6519
Ubuntu server hosts can check here: http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2014/CVE-2014-6519.html
Server hosts can update OS via the command “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y”
Server hosts like Nitrado should already be aware of this, and will apply upgrades without prompting, only those hosting ProjectZomboid servers on VPSs or dedicate servers should upgrade.
This security vulnerability allows the remote modification of java code, those hosting Project Zomboid gameservers on Linux should watch the link for the OS they’re running, and apply the patches immediately. You should restart the gameserver after you’ve applied the patches in order to bring the patch into effect.
Everyone else:
Due to the nature of the way these bugs work, issues only mainly affect server hosts. We do recommend that you keep your computers patched anyway, but you don’t need to worry about Project Zomboid, this is preventative maintenance to make multi-player servers safer for everyone.
Today’s image courtesy of Coolflat.
Be sure to check the upcoming version post and subscribe to our newsletter to be sure you won’t miss anything! That’s it for now. Thanks so much for living and dying in our game! Love y’all.