As Dicas de Zomboid

Hey all, it’s an MP Strike Force update blog this week – so here’s the latest from the test server.

We now have three coders from General Arcade working on Build 41’s multiplayer – alongside two dedicated QA operatives. Work primarily takes place in GA territory with regular code top-ups from the in-dev 41 codebase, though there’s clearly a lot of communication between our relevant QA and organisational peeps.

First off then, here’s a quick update from someone who has been playing it more than most – multiplayer QA chap Oleg. Welcome to the blog, Oleg!

“Multiplayer is quite solid at the moment. There are no critical errors that would lead to a crash, data loss or anything like that. I’ll be honest, right now it’s far more interesting for me to play in MP than on my own!”

“At this exact moment we’ve got some smaller problems with zombie corpses, synchronization of various animations and many and varied other issues popping up from areas throughout the MP game – so there is certainly still something to work on.”

“The difference between the game that myself and Mikhail started playing two months ago when we started QA and now is pretty big. In terms of the smoothness and synchronization of the movement of the characters, most of the animations, how pvp feels – all this stuff has changed for the better.”

“Big thanks to Yuri, Andrei and Aleksandr – and of course to TIS’s Sasha who has been a great go-between answering questions and raising issues between the teams!”

So that’s the baseline stuff but, as Jennifer Aniston once said in a commercial that half of the people reading this blog are too young to remember, “here comes the science”. Over to Yuri.

“Our focus this month has been in improving the synchronization of zombies between different players, and also in PvP.”

“Our QA team has been spotlighting bugs, and right now the majority of them aren’t zombie or player character related – but are in other areas of the game that need polish like throwable weapons/items, vehicles etc.”

“As such the focus of our next month of work will likely be in turning to these issues and fixing them up to raise the overall playability.”

So, right now, everything seems to be ticking over and on-track. We should have a clearer overall picture when we put out the next MP blog.

Some of the individual items fixed recently:

Zombies didn’t have the ‘alerted’ animation in MP when they heard a sound, leading to various issues and it not looking as good.

Character sync accuracy was increased. The remote character makes less extra movements when turn around.

Standing characters are now on the same square on all clients due to setJustMoved and isJustMoved functions being added.

Further improvements to positioning through prediction points when players turn around, a new PZMath.roundFromEdges function and the threshold for starting and ending remote character movement being reduced. The algorithm for calculating the forecast of