DayZ Status Report - 23 June 2015

Posted on June 23rd, 2015 03:05 PM EST

Greetings Survivors,

As the team continues pushing development of DayZ, we have Brian, Chris, and Viktor providing us with a peek at what is on the plate for the team. For this week, Lead Producer Brian Hicks will discuss development going forwards in regards to the DayZ audio module, while Lead Artist Chris Torchia will discuss the decision making behind the firearms design, and Lead Animator Viktor Kostik will discuss the development of transitioning the player character across to the new animation system.

Like always, we have a couple of links to our DayZ Trello board, and towards the end of this weeks' Status Report we showcase a video showing an interesting game session springing forth from a Vybor spawn.

Contents This Week

Development Board Spotlight

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Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

Its been a hectic few weeks, with 0.57 release and E3 - but I'd like to take some time out this week to discuss pending changes to the Audio side of the Enfusion engine, as well as some critical audio bugs plaguing DayZ Early Access players.

We've talked about replacing the existing Audio system in DayZ with a new Audio module better suited to DayZ's needs, but we haven't really outlined what some of that means. As many players may know, the inherited audio technology from the Real Virtuality (TKOH / Arma 2) side of the family has its strengths, but it also has quite a few weaknesses. As we began looking at the time and resources required to update this portion of our base engine, we looked at several key areas we wanted to improve:

- 3D Positional Ambient Sound: Supporting true 3D Positional Ambient sounds is integral to proper immersion within Chernarus. As well, once we support this - the roar of the coast, and the confusing positional ambient noises should be a thing of the past. 

- More complex configuration options for vehicles, weapons, etc: Current technology supports a very basic methodology for potential sounds and triggering events for weapons, vehicles and the likes. Moving to the new Audio module will begin to allow the design and audio teams to implement more complex audio configurations for items and vehicles in game.

As development on this portion of the engine continues, we'll be looking at other features existing internal projects offer (such as Arma 3's tech) to ensure that the support the Enfusion engine offers is as comprehensive as we can allow.

In addition to this, work has continued internally on slaying the ever illusive audio bug beast known as "Ghost sounds" - Potential headway was revealed during a conference between key members of the Arma, and DayZ teams. Potential related causes of the issue, as well as fixes implemented on the Arma side of the company are hopefully going to be implemented. We'll be testing this out on experimental hopefully with 0.59 - I'll be speaking with people about this on the official DayZ forums when we begin testing, and anyone encountering the issue at that point is strongly encouraged to utilize the Feedback Tracker.

See you all in Chernarus!
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

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E3 - DayZ PC Gaming Show 2015

Also, we have a little bit of info in regards to modding and the singleplayer part of DayZ in the following video featuring Brian Hicks at this year's E3 convention. Thanks and props go out to the fine people of DayZ Underground for providing the video!

 

 

 

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Dev Update/Chris

From the beginning of the project, Dean and I worked closely on the initial design of firearms in DayZ, including which kinds of attachments they should be able to use as well as which specific firearms would best fit the environment.

The requirements from Dean for creating the final list of firearms included:

- 50/50 mixture of 'Western' and 'Eastern' firearms.
- Bias towards civilian models.
- Expansion of the weapon set should occur with minimum expansion of calibers and attachments
- Emphasis on short and intermediate range firearms

Peter also required that each firearm should be as visually distinct as possible from one another and that we should add some of our more unique items.

To figure out which sort of guns we should add, I took several trips to zbraně a střelivo obchod (gun and ammo stores) in Prague as well as investigated the websites of local gun ranges for firearms for sale and rent and was shocked at the massive spectrum available to civilians.

Here are some items I found in Prague. See if any of them are familiar:

-Mosin Nagant
-Modded AR15s
-AR10s
-VZ58 (by the way, I'd love to buy one and export back home to the US :) )
-SVT40
-Tiger rifles (civilian SVD)
-Various bolt action rifles of every make and kind -Ruger 10/22
-Derringer pistol
-Single action revolvers
-Kimber 1911
-P38 Pistol
-Civilianized AK clones of multiple origins
-Various pump action 12 gauge shotguns

The list goes on...

In addition, we wanted to remain faithful to the lore of DayZ's roots in Arma2 so involvement of NATO and Russian forces and their equipment. This meant our options were wide open to consider some more exotic items like the AK74M, VSS, UMP45, etc...

We hope this approach would provide a large variety of experiences for our players as your strategy must sometimes change, depending on what kind of firearms you end up with in your journey.

- Chris Torchia / Lead Artist

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Dev Update/Viktor

In the last weeks all animators were focused mainly on the new animation system since all animations need to be reexported and adjusted for the new skeleton.
Our initial goal is to reproduce the character as we know and then focus on the improvements which new system will allow us to do.

Player already has all movement animations, can reload all guns, climb ladders, enter and drive vehicle and do other things as old character.

The big chunk of work is done although some major things still need to be implemented like most of the user actions.

Some animations were improved on the go. So now we have new climbing ladders anims, falling and landing, picking up and carrying heavy items, some additional gestures and other polishings. The reload animations at the moment work the same way but we just started on advanced behaviour where chambering and loading rounds will get it's own animations for each gun.

In the Phase 2 of transition player character to the new animation system we will do some major improvements regarding animations.
There will by synchronized walks and runs which will enable us later to do some fancy stuff with upcoming wounded character and stamina.
On to do list is also improvement of animations for first person view, improved IK for feets and hands, detailed animations of guns, and more.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

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Community Video: "Long Story Short - I Got a Vybor Spawn"

For this week, we have a small gem created by "Dog the Bandit Hunter". This video popped up in the sea of DayZ content while looking for a bit of entertainment one weekend. From the tumbnail it looked like it was a video dedicated to depicting the Vybor spawn bug itself, so I thought I'd have a look see. Very quickly did I find out though that it was a bit more than that. Instead, the video turned out to be a somewhat hectic documentation of Dog's experiences, as a result of the Vybor spawn, during a gaming session.

In short, many lols were had that afternoon while watching (and re-watching) Dog's video.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, it seems like "Dog the Bandit Hunter" have hung up his spurs in regards to editing and uploading gaming videos on YT, but luckily there's still quite an archive of entertainment goodness on his channel. If interested in more, please feel free to have a look:

Dog the Bandit Hunter

As always, if you have a nice video containing DayZ footage you'd like to share, or if you have come across some DayZ footage from other content creators, just post it in the Gallery section of the DayZ forums and we'll happily have a look.

May is long gone, and again we are extremely grateful to see how many bugs we received from players. A quick look at the Feedback Tracker tells us that  Darcion did very well in terms of finding new bugs, so for the month of may, Darcion is the top bug hunter! As mentioned before, we'll keep track of this in the background, and those of you guys that make the extra effort to help out the team in terms of filing them bugs will be mentioned in the Special Thanks section on the rolling credits for DayZ.

Header image credit: T1M #pepe

- Michael aka SMoss / Community Manager

Source : http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-23-jun-2015

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