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DayZ is entering BETA on PC

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 19:06 CET

Dear Survivors!

Today is a very exciting day for all of us here at the DayZ team. Coming closer to five years of Early Access Alpha development, we are now moving the PC version of DayZ into BETA. What does that mean for the future of DayZ and how long do we intend to run the BETA? Watch our new Dev Log video to find out more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_ZfK6a8T00&feature=youtu.be
To recap, The DayZ BETA shifts our focus from introducing new features and content to bug fixing, stabilization and balancing. The goal is to create a stable and -most importantly- fun experience for our 1.0 release, scheduled for the end of 2018.
Worry not, this is not the end of DayZ development: we have more features and content planned after we stabilize the game, and they will come to you as part of free platform updates in the future.

The former 0.62 version running on our old technology has been moved to a legacy branch on Steam, and the default (Stable) branch on Steam now runs the new, 0.63 BETA update.

So what are some of the BETA highlights?

Major engine changes
Improvements to game and network performance
Introduction of base building
Massively improved implementation of vehicles
More elaborate AI for infected and animals
Major map rework to make Chernarus more beautiful and detailed
Ability to run your own servers
Modding Support

While mentioned as the last bullet point, the modding toolset is equally important to our effort of polishing the game, as it opens a whole new world of opportunities to experience DayZ in different ways. Read more about our modding toolset on our official forums[forums.dayz.com].

Pricing plans, and post 1.0 plans

Despite our original announcements suggesting otherwise, the pricing will not change for DayZ with the BETA release, and we'd like to reach the final price for DayZ when we release of the game out of Early Access. That means for now, DayZ is still available for 27,99 EUR / 34,99 USD.

For the rest of the year, we will be working on our post 1.0 development plans and evaluating where we take DayZ next in terms of additional features and content. As soon as we have a solid roadmap in place, we'll let you know through all the official channels. Until then - see you all in Chernarus, and please do report every issue and bug you find to our Feedback Tracker[feedback.dayz.com]!

Status Report - 23 October 2018

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:24 CEST

Today is going to be quite an important Status Report as we are going to talk about the BETA update and our road towards the end of this year. Peter is explaining the current state of base building and Adam discusses the new in-game map which will support you on your travels. Let's get into it!

Dev Update/Martin
Dev Update/Peter
Dev Update/Adam
Dev Update/Filip

Dev Update/Martin

Dear Survivors. As promised, it's time to address the upcoming BETA update. This will be a longer text, so take a deep breath, we're going to get back all the way to the last year.

In the 2017 - Year In Review video published last December, we shared our goals to deliver the BETA and 1.0 updates of DayZ in 2018. Over the course of this year, we've made significant progress towards completing those goals (2 major experimental releases, and 50+ Stress Tests), and while there's less time left in 2018 than we'd all like to have (some 60 days left before the holiday season starts), we're still well on our way to releasing these important updates.

In this blog post, we'd like to better define the PC BETA update - what our goals with it are and what your expectations towards it should be.

What does reaching BETA mean for DayZ?

Before we dive into the specifics of the DayZ BETA update, let's set the terms straight first. In software or game development, BETA is widely regarded as a product that's feature complete. For the DayZ PC BETA, this is true in a sense that the BETA will have all the features required for its core gameplay loop to work, but within the overall scope of the DayZ project, it's certainly not what we would consider a totally feature complete game.

Then, the BETA stage of development is a point from which the focus of development shifts to bugfixing and polishing, instead of implementing new features and technology. This will be especially important for DayZ, as one of the the main goals of the BETA update is to start making the game into a stable platform that's ready for further development.

The other main goal of the update is to make the vanilla game an enjoyable experience - after years spent on core technology development, we finally have a game in our hands - not a game concept. The game has a given set of features and content, and that will allow us to make the necessary balancing and polishing together with our community.

Most of this will be happening throughout the rest of 2018, culminating in a 1.0 release where we leave Early Access - but even after this milestone is achieved (meaning we finally close the core development of the game), we're going to keep improving the platform before new things start making their way into the game again.

So to summarize, the PC BETA update is going to be a version of the game that has all the basic fun elements of DayZ available, and it's also the start of the journey towards a balanced, stable platform that's ready to support further development and modding.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the particular features and content that will be available in the BETA update.

BETA Features and Content

In August, we've gone through a feature freeze - an important internal milestone where we've evaluated the overall state of the game and marked any item from our Feature & Content Goals[www.dayz.com] that did not reach a certain level of implementation as post 1.0 development.

While we are ultimately the masters of our own development time, there is one universal truth in game development: you can always try to squeeze more stuff into a release, so eventually, a line needs to be drawn and goals need to be established in order to achieve results.

The goal we've set was clear: making sure that we proceed towards stabilizing the DayZ gameplay and platform in 2018, as this stabilization will be necessary for further development of the game, and will benefit DayZ in the long run. Additionally, after working on a project for 5 years, it also became apparent that the team needs to have a sense of an end goal in mind.

Making decisions like this is painful for every developer - nobody likes to see "their" feature being cut, or postponed to some future update - but having a balanced and polished core of basic gameplay is more important than having dozens of flavor, supporting and exotic features.

Everyone who was ever involved in the full development cycle of any game knows that at the finish line, there''s always less stuff than was originally planned. Since DayZ's development has been very open from day one, you get to experience this side of game development with us, first hand.

So, at the end, this is where we've arrived at for the DayZ BETA features and content - ultimately meaning that this will also be our 1.0 release after the polishing phase:

Please note: the overview is not extensive and does not cover every single small feature or item in the game - DayZ is a pretty complex game after all. This mostly describes things that the BETA has in addition to the 0.63 Experimental release[dayz.com]. If you have a question about a specific feature, feel free to ask us about it in this forums thread[forums.dayz.com]!

Critical new BETA features (not available in legacy versions of DayZ)

Base building
- related crafting, items, and their economy setup
- precise placement of objects
- electricity system
- locking other players from accessing your base
New implementation of vehicles
- improved controls, physics, and network synchronization
- improved damage system
- improvements in vehicle interactions, management, and maintenance
Modding support
- implementation of the Steam Workshop
- game launcher
- specific modding tools[dayz.com]
- server files for hosting community servers
New player character features
- visualization of bleeding source
- character lifespan (growing beards, learning soft skills)
- character restrain
- hit reactions

Smaller new BETA features and improvements (not available in 0.62)

major improvements of the sound design
hidden loot stashes
not losing your weapon double carry (when switching from hand slot to shoulders)
improved in-game map implementation
dynamic spawning of loot (fruits, stones, mushrooms and other items)
specific animations for carrying/using most items
melee attacks with guns
server browser improvements
central Economy improvements
and more :)

Features and improvements planned for BETA/1.0, or originally in 0.62, but moved post 1.0

Helicopters
- we've arrived at the decision that base building implementation will provide enough of an end goal for players, so helicopters can be added later on
Climbing over obstacles
- this feature required additional programming and animation support that we've decided to invest more effectively into other parts of the game
Throwing items
- throwing requires a lot of additional specialist work on physics and network synchronization, and we'd rather invest that into vehicles and other features
- this includes throwable weapons like grenades or smoke grenades
Bows
- the implementation of bows means an introduction of a completely new weapon type on 0.63 and was always a risky goal, in the end unfortunately not achievable in 2018; we've invested the programming time into gun play, melee combat, vehicles and other core features that were more important
Character and infected ragdoll
- unfortunately, there are many network synchronization cases that we need to resolve and implementing ragdolls in combination with death animations will require more time and resources
Two-way doors
- while a huge quality of life improvement, changing the doors to two way opening will require additional rework of some of the assets, and is not achievable in 2018
Fishing and fish traps, decaying bodies, carrying characters, contaminated areas, item coloring etc.
- these are considered flavor features and for now, work on core gameplay features was prioritized instead

In recap, there are no major feature cuts or postponements - anything that makes DayZ the game unique and original among the other survival games is still there. Some of the biggest trade-offs are probably bows, throwing, ragdolls, and some of the flavor features that you were already used to seeing in legacy versions of DayZ. These trade-offs are usually allowing us to spend more time on the core features, and that, again, is certainly more beneficial for the future of DayZ.

In addition to those features, we've had to done some trimmings to the content. Specifically, we're only going to have two types of vehicles available in BETA - the V3S truck and the Lada 4x4. As for weapons, compared to our original goals for BETA, we're not going to be able to implement the following content in time:

Magnum
Red 9
IZH 43 shotgun
SKS
CR 527
Winchester 70
Any other firearm currently available in 0.62, but not on the 0.63 Stress Test branch

In general, we''ve done our best to have each firearm type from 0.62 represented in the game, and additional variety in firearms will be provided with content updates after 1.0, where we should have more animation resources available at hand.

Road to the 1.0 release

In general, polishing the package of content and features as described above will be our goal for 1.0, and for the weeks immediately after 1.0. This will include:

general balancing of every part of the game (central economy, weapon damage...)
a massive amount of bug fixing
polishing and improving the general feeling you as players have when playing DayZ

Just to assure everyone again, both the BETA and 1.0 releases will happen this year. All of that will be done together with our community, and we will be expecting to hear a lot of feedback on various things. When the BETA update gets released, we'll be providing more details on how we will be collecting and evaluating feedback.

As the cherry on top, there's of course the planned modding toolset release - and we'll also get back to that later on, when the BETA update is in your hands. It deserves its own blog post, and after all, this has already been a very long wall of text anyway! :)

- Martin Čulák / Brand Manager

Dev Update/Peter

Even after some of you had the chance to try out the construction feature to some degree with the recent release of the Stress Test, base building is still considered to be a kind of a mysterious part of DayZ. To recap, the construction feature allows you to build two main elements (portable mesh barriers aside): fence and a watchtower.

The process of building these objects is identical and starts with a construction kit, which is placed to outline the position and layout of objects. From there, you are able to add building materials such as logs, planks, nails or metal sheets, and by using the proper tool and a user action, you turn them into actual parts of the fences or watchtowers. Similarly to the watchtower with its multiple floors, the fence includes an optional platform. Upgrades for both are available in terms of camouflage and passive defense.

Moreover, a fence can be turned into a gate as there has to be some way how to get in or out, The opening is wide enough for a truck as well. The gate can be kept closed from unwanted visitors by utilizing a multi-dial combination lock with easily shareable custom codes. Of course the code can be cracked by brute force and -as everything in DayZ- it can be broken with a proper tool, although you should consider the time needed for such actions. That goes for dismantling actions as well.

Currently we are in the process of solving unpleasant issues with the lifetime of constructed objects and intentional server hopping into the base. Especially the second one is tricky as I don’t want to introduce some unnecessary artificial counter measures or out of place actions which could potentially harm the unique DayZ experience.

Base building as a whole is a broad set of activities. Throw horticulture, food preparation, obtaining water, stationary crafting, storage, building a shelter, engineering an electricity grid and others into a mix and you get your very own base. All of that was designed to blend in well with the environment, and I have to say that I’m excited to see the wide variations of bases you will come up with, and how they will add to the persistent world of DayZ.

It’s hammer time... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Adam

If you have played DayZ since the version 0.60, it is certainly possible that you never had an opportunity to see how the in-game item of Chernarus'' map looks and works. The revival of this feature was definitely one of the more important points for the upcoming BETA release and I am glad to announce that this was a success, and in addition to its re-introduction, we have been able to bring a number of improvements to it.

So, how does it work? You find the Chernarus map and take it into your hands. After that, you can open it with a user action. Your character will unpack the map and you will have an access to the map interface, where you can use pan and zoom in or out. A nice extra about this is, that anyone else in the world will actually see you having the map open too.

So what you can find on the map of Chernarus? While we would like to bring a number of different types of maps, we have decided that it would be best to start with a tourist map. This map features the whole in-game world in great detail (excluding the military areas of course). It shows all the pubs, stores, local offices (PAS panel), medical centres, police and fire departments. I should also not forget about the newly added tourist trails - you can see all the color tracks on the map too. Adding features like the trails is one of the improvements compared to the previous version of the map (versions 0.59 and older). It also allowed us to add all important lakes, streams, rivers and swamps. The location names on the map also received a necessary pass and we have got more types of them now. All the names are up-to-date with the map changes that happened for the past few years, and their names are in Cyrillic, so you can easily connect them with the names you see on tourist trails, settlement or traffic signs. The engine team has also looked at the performance of the map and has brought a number of improvements to it.

[forums.dayz.com]

[forums.dayz.com]

[forums.dayz.com]

[forums.dayz.com]

The map feature, at its core, works the same way as it did in Arma, which means any community map (that is packed using the upcoming DayZ tools) is also supported and only minor additions in the config and script have to be done. And to those wondering - yes, you will be able to add notes (markers) to individual map items. Peter will explain this in more detail in a future Status Report.

- Adam Franců / Map Designer

Dev Update/Filip

If you have played on the Stress Test branch over the last weekend, you might have heard a number of new and updated sounds. Our work in this area continues with:

sounds for evade prone animations
updated animals footsteps sound
dynamic attenuation of ambient and engine sounds, when character is inside vehicle. The sound changes according how many doors are open.
sounds for rifle swap animation

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Community Spotlight

Hello guys,
The Community Spotlight is separated to its own page because I have more space for your creations. You can check it out HERE[dayz.com] - there are some nice videos of basebuilding in action!

- Baty Alquawen/Community Manager

Header image by H aroldPalmer.

Community Spotlight - 22 October 2018

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 17:19 CEST

Hello everyone!
It is the day before our Status Report, and that means it's time for the Community Spotlight!

We released a Stress Test last week and you clearly had some fun with it over the weekend. We didn't announce officially that you can find the first iteration of base building on the servers, because we didn't think it is ready (and no, it isn'''t). But some of you discovered it really quickly and tried their first creations.

A small base concept in the offline editor by Lijazos:

Another one by CryDoXz, including a time-lapse video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVWUYH-Dm_M

And the last one made by JeckRush:

It is really nice to see you had a fun on the Stress Test, even though it is very much WIP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gGkyDaZ3zo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25uAsvQTnW0

TheRealCDiggity has shared a deep truth with the community. He added a comment to this nice picture:

Had a great time with these guys before we were brutally attacked by a barbaric madman, they taught me a valuable lesson, that making friends is a lot more fun than attacking randoms with knives and eating them.

Don't forget, an empty stomach is not a good political adviser.

What is better than calm evening on your farm? mov3ax is really enjoying the rest.

And I don't want to force my opinion on you, but even in DayZ is the Earth round. mov3ax has a proof!

We have another amazing screenshot-guy here. His nickname is DanceOfYesus and his pictures are breathtaking. Just sit down and enjoy the view. The whole gallery is here[imgur.com]:

winterfellwilliam and his friend Sparky organised a fight club in Kamyshovo. I have no idea who won, but all participants are on this photo.

This video is really weird. It scares me a little bit. Who the hell is the Mr. White?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuVRIjPHGY4

We've met members of the famous DayZ Underground community on Gamescom this year and they made a nice video from our meeting. Here is it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=126_cUst7kk

TheRunningManZ met a very talkative player and it drove him crazy. Really funny story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0CdGE-KN_c

I love this video. Cool song, dope video, good work HandZ!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4pwrZGOV1o

A new episode of the DayZ community podcast named Compass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUbkG5cjCKc

Let's talk about your modding and game modifications.

Server HeadhunterZ built a road to the Prison island, no more wet clothes and hypotermia.

Dr. Zed is working on infested zones, looks cool, man!

Vojtěch Matouš[www.facebook.com] is working on a new weapons. Check out his work down below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqEWxZ0rbhY

I was already talking about our music composer L_K_P1 and I want to talk about him more. He send us a message that DayZ is for him not just a game, but also inspiration, it helps to trick his brain to forgetting his pain, because he had a spinal chord problem and he needs to stay in bed for 22 hours per day.

His latest song has a cool video clip, you should check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nQBfNRsHBA

Turambar44 is enjoying his peaches when exploring the real life Chernarus.

DayZ in DayZ - is this a DayZception? Another interesting content made by NeuroticEUROtic on Reddit.

Lets check out your answers to the last location riddle. Correct answers:

S-BOY
Tweedy
Foxypote

[i.imgur.com]

And the next one is really hard:

Send your answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag and you can find your name here next time!

Thank you for your attention and see you in two weeks!

- Baty Alquawen/Community Manager

Header image by imdenkos.

Status Report - 9 October 2018

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 19:24 CEST

Survivors, has it been two weeks already? We had the first internal multiplayer play-test of vehicles, Eugen is going to tell you more about it. He also talks about the hit registration issue, which is one of our priorities right now. Adam wants to introduce some changes related to gamma abuse, and Boris shows you how to prolong the burning time of torches.

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Adam
Dev Update/Boris

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear survivors. Let’s start with something that definitely needs addressing. While I’m happy we've released the PC server files, in regards to the both the PC and Xbox versions, there are some serious flaws that we need to look into.

Priority Issues

For one, hit registration has been quite a problem recently, and I want to talk about what we know so far. While for most you, it seems like your bullets are not registering when hitting players around you, there might be (and probably are) multiple causes to this behavior. From magazines spawning and having ghost bullets (server and client think there is a different amount), through network messages not being sent, to maybe the armor system working incorrectly on specific items and configurations.

We’re looking into different angles. So far, with the use of bots, we are able to reproduce the issue when there are multiple corpses around. It seems like a network issue, so we’re starting with this to eliminate the possible low level cause first. It is also the first course of action because if we can confirm some network messages are not being sent in certain cases, it probably causes much more than incorrect hit registration.

We’re still in the process of debugging when exactly it happens and how. But having a sure way to see it in game helps us a lot. So if by any chance you know how you get your character/weapon/magazine/bullets in desynchronized state, please do report that through the Feedback Tracker[feedback.bistudio.com].

The second thing I want to mention today is the inventory implementation on Xbox. We know it needs to get our love and attention. We will soon be reaching out to you and we'll be interested in your feedback.

Other than that, we are preparing a patch for the PC Experimental branch, ideally containing the fixes to the hit registration issue, as well as other smaller changes based on your feedback. From log upgrades to the ability to set a Steam query port for ease of DDOS setup when hosting a server, and some more.

Progress towards Experimental BETA

We've recently had our first multiplayer playtest of vehicles on the new implementation and the first results are promising. Once we have more to share about the patch, we will do so, both here and other channels. But the current state leaves us with two major, risky features in terms of overall update stability: vehicles and base building. The rest are going through rounds of intense QA testing to make sure we’re not missing something game-breaking.

So let’s get back to work and see you in game once we''re ready for further Stress Test.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Adam

Nighttime in DayZ should be dark and terrifying. It should force you into using any light source you have available. Having an ability to light up your surroundings should be just as vital as having enough water and food. Shutting off your light should only be required in case of an emergency. Also, when night vision goggles make their way into the game (which is something we still want to do in the future, but not in BETA), they should be a rare, powerful thing that can turn their owners into potential predators, not a laughing stock for people avoiding night-time by turning the night into a day by cranking up a gamma slider (be it through drivers or display settings).

The removal of the in-game gamma slider was but a first step towards making the very frequent gamma abuse more complicated to do. In today's status report, I'm going to present another step towards making the night-time a en equal playing field for everyone (at least as much as we're actually able to do that).

A survivor scouting Myshkino military camp using flashlight mounted on his AKM, unaware of a danger hidden in a shadow.

Please keep in mind that this is still very much experimental feature and we will be tweaking it based on your feedback (once it hits public branches). We have also taken a look on the global light config again (adjusting some dusk and dawn values), boosted up brightness of all available light sources and we will be taking a closer look at the CE setup to make sure there is always enough light sources within the game world.

- Adam Franců / Map Designer

Dev Update/Boris

Greetings survivors! Lately, there has been some effort invested into improving night gameplay across multiple departments (Adam will share more on that as well). So I'd like to report on one of the contributions I did in this regards, which is a refactor of the craftable torch.

Firstly, the torch now contains an attachment slot for rags, which allows players to prolong its burning time by adding more than one rag on it. You can also refill its stock while it's burning, which means you don't have to craft a new torch after running out of fuel for the current one. The latest Experimental branch on Steam already contains this change so you can try this out for yourself.

Additionally, in BETA, refueling will be possible to do through a crafting user action without the need to open inventory. As usual, this will be done through a quick bar or an interaction with a relevant item on the ground.

Refueling of [media.giphy.com]a torc[media.giphy.com]h 1[media.giphy.com]

Secondly, you'll be able to even further prolong the burning time by coating the torch with animal lard. Such upgrade is mainly useful for base builders, as it allows them to craft a long-lasting source of light that can be placed anywhere without the need of frequent refueling.
Using gasoline as fuel is being considered, but currently, it's not implemented yet.

Refueling of [media.giphy.com]a torc[media.giphy.com]h 2[media.giphy.com]

Lastly, the amount of fuel on the torch will be represented by its quantity bar, so you will always know how much time you have left before it goes cold.

With these changes, this basic item is more interesting to use while giving it some connections to other activities like hunting, base building and collecting clothes or rags.

- Boris Vacula / Scripter

Header image by Sp1kerZ.

Community Spotlight - 8 October 2018

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 18:22 CEST

Hello everyone,

I am really happy that we've made the decision to separate the Community Spotlight into its own day - now we have more space for you creativity, and also more information from me!

We were shooting a Dev Log video last Thursday in our motion capture studio in Mníšek pod Brdy. It was a really long day but we are satisfied with the result. I can't promise you when this video will be out, but I have some behind the scenes pictures and a bunch of short Instagram stories on our Instagram account. I've added the stories to our archive, so you can watch them without any limits[www.instagram.com]

I hope all of you know our best screenshot-er DrDeSync. This screenshot looks really creepy, and I am afraid to ask if these guys are friendly. Because I don't think they are.

Another nice screenshot is made by pizzausfree. Thank you for sharing!

rumski called this screenshot "Dropping Gear and Stuffing Faces Because...Running…". It is not needed to collect everything you find, man!

Meet Michael and the trailer he's living in. It looks like a cozy place! Intruzo posted his experience from a role-play server on Reddit. He said Michael was really friendly and he invited him to his trailer for dinner. I like players like Michael, they make the DayZ experience more interesting for other players.

This screenshot comes from the Xbox community. Wilson80121 and his squad are ready to go to Tisy.

This is a nice edit from kakshiOG called "Fallout Storm". Good job!

ZomboCZ really cares about DayZ. He likes to share every detail he can find in the game. Last week, he posted a bunch of new assets from the Experimental branch on Reddit, which he thinks could be interesting for the community. I am going to share it here with you.

A train station is now enter-able, you can see all details of the building HERE.
[imgur.com]

He also focused on the new R-105 Soviet military radio. If you don't know how it works - you can use it the same way as a regular walkie-talkie, but the voice transmission, so it's very useful for role-players and friendly survivors.
[imgur.com]

You maybe don't know it, but we have new fruits on the Experimental branch. You can find plums and pears now. Here are detailed shots from ZomboCZ.
[imgur.com]

If you still have a problem to find a new fruit, I think this can help you a little. You can find pears under these trees:

And plums here:

The first video is by Rene aka BarelyInfected and he gave us a story about hunger. When you are dying of hunger in DayZ, are you going to kill and eat your buddy? It is all about choices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es73b-jvdPY

This is not a friendly encounter. It is pure PVP action, fast and deadly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=270&v=j4SpBri4XMQ

When you join some server with increased infected spawn, you should expect some trouble. But never give up, man!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJvec8NVshk

Check out this great DayZ cinematic by mov3ax!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jecodf-BDoE

This video is probably some part of role-play, I really did not get what happened there, but The Syndicate group isn't friendly at all. A lot of players died in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASjC_dGoUHo

Uncuepa is a great buddy from the community and if you know him, you can ask him some questions, because Boydy will record an interview with him. Ask your questions HERE.

https://youtu.be/Lh9ZRGcS0Lc

People are fighting over water, food, ammo. But sometimes, the reason to kill is simply just a jacket. Damn, it had to be a really nice jacket though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF8JqVXO6fc

This is also a funny video. Xbox player O_Ambulo_O got trolled by his friend. It is hilarious! Click on the picture for watching:

Let's talk about modding or game changes you made!

Xxkabalxx is probably working on winter in Chernarus, because he shared a first sound test and I can feel the cold from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Htwzzjqb400

ThePyrotechnic developed a BEC plugin to display the number of players on your server. You could be interested.
More info HERE.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/316793437?t=01s

Someone could want more spawn points on his/her server. If you don't know how to do it, here are instructions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zB3NGjgkA0

I know, I know. Everyone already heard about the DayZ Battle Royale mode. We are working on our own Battle Royale mode called the Survivor GameZ, but untill that's ready, you can try this community mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrOYBS9aBxE

And mov3ax is already working on airdrops. What do you think, guys?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJgNfK9d2KY

ZiltoidTheHorror doesn't care if we have an auto-run button in-game. Real PC players use coins, matches or papers. Console players are using hair rubber bands.

Yolikus is living in the real Chernarus aka Ústí nad Labem. And this is the view from his flat compared to the game. Awesome, thank you for sharing!

And the last part of the Community Spotlight is the location riddle.
The small building is located near Gorka:

And the winners are:

Good work guys, thank you!

And the next location is:

Send your answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag.

That is all from me, thank you for your amazing content and see you in two weeks!

Header image by Memorix Gamer.

- Baty Alquawen/Community Manager

Status Report - 25 September 2018

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 18:14 CEST

It's a crazy time for us here at the office, with the release of the Xbox version and the PC server files behind us we're now moving for the PC BETA! Of course, this is not going to happen over night, Eugen will give you an introduction on this. We also have our Leads from the Gameplay Programming, Animation and Sound departments with us to bring you some more detailed information on what's going on behind the scenes of our road to BETA.

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Mirek
Dev Update/Viktor
Dev Update/Filip
Dev Update/Baty

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors, the server files release is now behind us, and I would like to thank all the community members who have patiently waited all the way to this point. We are very happy to see old players coming back to try the new servers popping up. We are aware of the issues currently plaguing the administrators running community servers and your feedback is very much welcomed. We have already deployed a patch with fixes, and there's more coming.

We are looking specifically into issues with zombie spawns, logs, configuration and security. Once ready, you will see updates coming directly to the Experimental branch of the game.

Now that our Experimental content patch is out in the open, I wanted to talk about the next thing.

Some of it has been said previously mentioned in interviews from Gamescom, and I wholeheartedly recommend watching these, as the questions asked by both M1ndr and BarelyInfected have been straight to the point.

While there have been some serious delays with the delivery of the first content patch, the work on the internal version of the game has not stopped. This basically means one thing: the next patch arriving to the Stress Test branch will be considered an Experimental BETA and will contain new content and features, including vehicles and base building. We will offer a detailed list of the BETA package later on. The list for both features and content is not exactly short, so we'll need to make make sure everything works.

The process for the publishing of this patch will start with Stress Tests focusing on the new content. Currently, we are quite happy about the stability of the internal client and server, and most of the team is focusing on bugfixing. More information on the release will be shared through our official channels, I cant wait for you guys to drive around Chernarus with your friends.

Once this patch hits the Experimental branch of the game, it will again be made available with both server and client, and pushed to Xbox as fast as possible.

That brings me to our players on Xbox. While we may not seem that active now, we are listening to your feedback and concerns, and we're working on necessary changes and bugfixes plaguing the game. There was a smaller game update pushed earlier today, and whenever possible, we'd love to keep updating at least once a week. The current patch focuses on UI fixes (no major inventory changes yet), server messages and VOIP. This also includes any fixes done to the game on PC. More changes are coming alongside the mentioned BETA patch and features.

See you in Chernarus!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Mirek

I have a very brief overview of the features and bugs we are currently working on. Let's take a look:

LODs for the animation system

Currently, when playing any animations, the whole skeleton is evaluated (every single bone), no matter how far away from the camera the other entities are. Our new system will improve the client & server performance significantly - especially server-side. Instead of evaluating almost 200 bones, we now need only about 20 or even less to be evaluated on server-side. The evaluation of the entire skeleton currently takes about 75 percent the of AI's simulation time, so we believe this optimization will help to increase AI numbers significantly.

Vehicles - physics

The gearbox (clutch) simulation and tire friction still need some tweaking, because vehicles still have some issues with riding to hills.

Vehicles - animations / camera

We improved the 3rd person camera and added more character animations. This includes handling the clutch, brake & thrust pedals.

Vehicles - networking

We have reworked the networking logic for 4 wheeled vehicle synchronization (and the same logic will work for future vehicles), the next step is network traffic optimizations.

Input system

We had to rework the input system a bit, due to requirements to simply add new actions (something the modders among you will appreciate!). Currently, the new system is in testing, adding the key binding options will be the next step.

AI spawns on servers with offline DB

This is probably one of the last bugs we want to solve on the current Experimental branch. The rest will be fixed within the Experimental BETA update.

A lot of other bug fixes (bugs which we have already fixed on the internal branch) will also be included in the Experimental BETA. This includes fixes for the iron-sights/optics inaccuracy, damage system issues, attachments rendering in inventory and many, many more.

- Miroslav Maněna/ Lead Programmer

Dev Update/Viktor

Last week, we've had a small motion capture session. This was mainly dedicated to a capture of various missing animations for player character or minor fixes to existing animations. Meanwhile, we were also focusing on bugfixing and polishing of the player actions, vehicle related animations, and item poses. The vehicles now have many advanced animations like switching the lights off and on, using pedals, shifting gears and of course steering.

There are many new things and improvements done on the player animation graph side. One example to speak for all, just recently we have reworked aiming with the flashlight, torch and other items. This was always not very convenient to use because the light was not going in the right direction. From now on though, it works just great! The light beam now aims where you are looking, no matter if the character is standing or moving, so flashlight should be your best friend from now on in dark areas. We have also added a small detail in the form of an animation for switching the flashlight off/on.

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

Dev Update/Filip

Hello everyone. The entire audio team is continuing the work on the overall audio appeal of DayZ, and we've created a range of new and updated game sounds. Let's have a look:

new rain sounds for tarmac, tile and wooden roof surfaces
updated the rain sounds for trees and bushes
updated the leave rustling sounds for bushes
new sounds for the "empty vessel" and "pour liquid" action (pouring water onto the ground or into another vessel)
sounds for jump and landing animations
new sounds for various items for pick into hands action
new sounds for carrying weapons on your shoulder
infected play different footsteps (bare feet, sneakers, boots) according to what they are wearing
new sounds for eating fruit, cereals and taking pills

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Dev Update/Baty

Hey guys,

we separated the Community Spotlight and released it yesterday and I hope you liked it. If you have anything you want to share with the community, tweet it to me and I am going to check it! You can find the latest Community Spotlight here:

[dayz.com]

- Baty Alquawen / Community Manager

Header image by A1ANNUAKII.

Community Spotlight 24 September 2018

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 19:47 CEST

Hello Survivors!

Each Status Report, I've been collecting some of the community created content that you sent me or that I came across on the internet. From now on, with BETA/1.0 releases and modding support coming up later this year, we'd like to get back to the idea of having Community Spotlight articles published separately (believe it or not, that's how it's been way back!), trying to really put your content into the spotlight and not have it buried at the end of a Status Report (don't worry, we'll still link this article in the Status Report!).

For the first edition of this renewed Community Spotlight, I'll most likely stick to the classic format, but try to evolve it over time, making it more interesting to follow!
Let's start and see the awesome things you've made over the past couple of weeks!

I hope you have noticed we have released the DayZ server files. What does it mean? You can now run your own server on your own hardware and you can configure it how you like it the most. And, of course, you can try some modding! As we said in the forum post, we are not officially supporting modding yet because we don't have all the tools ready, but it doesn't mean you are not allowed to start modding. Actually, exactly the opposite is true! We are looking forward to seeing your work!

In fact, there are already some very nice modding projects!

Let's open up with trains. Players are crazy about them for years and Arkensor is working on a modification which should bring them to life. He recently shared his first teaser with the community. And it will be HUGE! All aboard the HYPE TRAIN! CHOO CHOO!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aw4-lmONqM

Another creation from the community on the way is a new map called Barrandien. It is a map based on the real location in Czech Republic and it is 420 km2 large. Barradien is made by small group of loyal members of the DayZ community from the Czech Republic with a little help from our map designer Sumrak. We are proud of you guys!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiyVMYD9o1c

If you are going to check the server list, you can already find some changes. One of the new things are the 100+ slot servers. And some of them are full almost every day and run pretty nice as far as I know. Another change are spawns with gear on specific locations. These servers are for PvP players mostly, because it is something like King of the Hill and it is not easy to survive on these servers. It is really nice to see how the community is playing DayZ in the way every individual player likes it the most.

What are you doing on Saturday, 29th of September, at 9PM AST (1AM UTC)? If you are free, Boydy prepared an event with the http://pipsi.net/ server called Manhunt with nice prizes. You can find more information in the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnbgE8e3hSw

I want to show you some nice edits by Reddit user EskimoArctic. What do you think guys, aren't they nice?

Another talented editor is called Greenfist. Look at these awesome screenshots he made. Really cool.

And one more screenshot! Nilwick shared his screenshot that looks like a renaissance painting. And yes, it looks really like one. You should share it to r/accidentalrenaissance reddit!

Someone is really hyped for New York Comic Con! WhiteDeathDayZ‏ sent me a picture of the cosplay he wants to wear to the event and I like it! I am glad we are going to have a true Survivor there! Don't forget to share more pictures from the convention with us!

Did you know there is a community DayZ podcast? It is called Compass and it is made by Uncuepa and his guests. If you are a podcast fan this is something you would like to hear!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE7w5p0C6Do

SepticFalcon, our loyal supporter made a video how the Public Address System works. If you didn't know about it just check out his video. It is really fun with a PA system, you should try it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFgxamf5Ytk

And the last thing before the riddle. Bthntn composed a song for DayZ. It is dark and atmospheric, you can listen to it here:

[soundcloud.com]

Let's end with our riddle. Only one person guessed the latest location correctly. It was a player named Bakro. Applause! The place is near Kozlovka at the road to Novoselky. Not Msta, guys.

Let''s try again with another riddle prepared by Sumrak. Where is this place located? Send your answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag.

Have a nice two weeks and see you in Chernarus!

Header picture by Jonny Rotten.

- Baty Alquawen/Community Manager

DayZ Server Files launch

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 17:14 CEST

Dear Survivors,

today we are releasing the DayZ Server Files. Anyone with sufficient hardware will be able to host their own DayZ server. You are now going to have more customization options and will be able to configure your servers directly.

This, of course, goes hand in hand with new opportunities for modding as having access to the server files gives you much more freedom than ever before.

It is important to mention, that even though we are thrilled to see what our community can make we are not officially supporting modding yet. Why? Mainly because some parts of the game can change a lot and we are still finishing the modding tools we want to provide to you in the future.

That being said we definitely won't stand in the way of your creativity.

You can read the documentation and the minimum recommended system requirements here[forums.dayz.com].
We believe that these files will help you create the unique server environment you always wanted.

See you in Chernarus!

Header picture by DrDeSync.

Status Report - 11 September 2018

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 19:39 CEST

Today's Status Report will start off with a small surprise for most of you guys, so definitely check out Eugen's opening announcements. Our Lead Gameplay Programmer Mirek is answering community questions on the recent server issues and our animator Adam demonstrates the return of the surrender and restraint systems. Let's dive into it!

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Mirek
Dev Update/Oresten
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors, we have some good news to share. The Content Update has hit the Experimental Branch today, and that means we're also making it available to community server owners currently hosting with one of our Game Server Providers (GSPs). Please expect slight delays as GSPs will cope with the number of switch requests, but I'm happy to see things finally move along to the Experimental phase after most of the critical issues were fixed in our Stress Tests. We have implemented a large number of optimizations in our network code while trying to identify an issue that in the end was caused by specific server hardware problems.

Now I have something that many of you probably don’t expect yet, but we want to see things move along at a faster pace there so we can get feedback: We've decided to release the DayZ 0.63 Server Files before BETA, and currently, we'd like to make them available to all DayZ players within the next week. Everyone will be able to download the Server Files for free on Steam under the tools section, and from that moment, everyone will be able to host a DayZ server on their own. I think that with the release of Server Files, we will see a much broader variety of server setups and community made game modes and while the full modding tool-set[dayz.com] won’t be available before BETA, I think you guys have already figured a lot of the stuff out.

Last but not least, our goal with the next Content Update (that we might already call an Experimental BETA patch since we will be stabilizing the internal version of the game on the Stress Test machines) is to have a release in as soon as the next couple of weeks. This update will, again,introduce a variety of new things, with vehicles getting in a bit later after the initial release of this next Content Update. We will announce the new features and content as soon as we release the first Stress Test build. Just to pick one example, the new restraining system that Adam talks about is definitely one of my favourite ones.

The Xbox version of the game will see major game updates getting in soon after they hit the PC Experimental branch. While we won't be Stress Testing as of now on the Xbox platform, we will keep churning out updates with bug fixes and stability fixes to this version as they manifest themselves. Even today, we have pushed a game update with lots of fixes for bugs that we have seen in the PC version, and most importantly, we're fixing some of the specific inventory issues and controller related bugs that will make DayZ a better, more enjoyable experience on Xbox.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Mirek

Hello survivors. For the last couple of weeks we were releasing new Stress Test builds almost every day with the goal to improve server performance and to finally solve the BattlEye mass kicking. And we solved it! I'd like to describe here what we were doing and why Stress Tests are so important for us.

Probably the best way how to explain what we were doing in our last Stress Tests is to answer some questions directly from the community. Let's go through the questions that TheMagicTorch asked on Reddit, as they will nicely demonstrate our thought process.

Q: Are you working with BattlEye developers to try and resolve the issues?
A: We do have a direct communication open with BattlEye developers, and the first thing we've made was that we asked them for some input on what could be wrong. In any case, the kicking issue was there even when we disabled BattlEye, so logically, we started looking for an issue on our end.

Q: What do you think is causing the kicking? In technical terms.
So we knew that the issue is on our side, we were sure it must be somewhere in the low level part of our networking - we were thinking that the issue must have something to do with packet ordering or re-sending of lost packets, or even with serial numbers of packets. Now we know it was caused by packet fragmentation - in some rare cases, some packets were dropped and it broke down the entire server.

Q: Why are you finding it particularly difficult to resolve kicks and lag? Are the kicks and lag a result of lots of bugs that you're slowly working through, or are you still trying to identify where problems are?
The source of the kicks was just one mistake in the code, but it was hard to find it, since we weren't able to reproduce it internally. The 0.63 branch was created almost 2 years ago and a lot of changes have been made during this time period. Two weeks ago, we started to revert these changes, because it was probably the fastest way (but not the easiest one) how to find the source of the issue. We have reverted one or two improvements every day, made a build and released it on the Stress Test servers, so basically we went back in time every day (the curiosity here is that this bug has been in the build since May 2016). When we've identified the source of the issue, we started putting the reverted and working stuff back into the branch, and released it in Stress Test #46.

Lags are closely connected to the server performance, so different parts of the code may cause them. We were profiling the servers every day to find out the source of performance drops, or what exactly takes most of the CPU time. Every day, we've made some improvements, which were merged into the Stress Test branch for play-testing. It's important to test these optimizations because optimizations can often break things that were previously working fine. One optimization helped us to find out that there is an issue with the firearm damage sanity check, which caused bad hit registration. This bug was there the whole time, but after the optimization, it happened more often.

Q: Why does performance seem to vary between region?
The deployment team along with Eugen has tracked this issue down to be a problem with a hardware configuration of the servers, and we're now seeing consistently decent server performance across regions.

- Miroslav Maněna/ Lead Programmer

Dev Update/Oresten

Hey everyone, it's been a while since I wrote something, but boy, have I got goodies today or what?

For the last two weeks, I have been working on looking through optics, surrender and restrained states.

Optics

The current implementation of looking through a detached optic in the latest public build had a lot of problems with it... The accuracy of mouse-to-screen is sub-par at best, and you can't accurately follow a target without moving your mouse a couple of meters. We discussed various ways to implement a solution, but I was mainly worried about the character not accurately displaying where someone is looking. If we were to ignore the player animation accuracy and just set the camera to be 1:1 with the mouse, other players could think that they haven't been discovered all while the player who's looking through his binoculars could be tracking them.

I solved this by not allowing you to move while looking through binoculars or scopes, and by doing this, I eliminated any external factors that could mess with the accuracy of the animation; because really, what kind of crazy person would be moving while looking through a pair of binoculars? One wrong step and you could lose your target entirely! Here's the animation I cooked up:

As you can see, it's quite damn responsive. Here's how it looks while looking through it:

It's in a really good state so far and accurately displays in and out of the optics exactly where that person would be looking.

Surrender and restrained

Surrender is a highly sought after feature that we have been working on to deliver in the highest possible quality. At first glance, it would look like it's just another gesture; but under the hood it holds a bunch of complexities. You can't access your inventory when you're in surrendering - not something common for gestures. You also have new stance rules where you can only walk while standing and only turn in standing and crouched - also not something gestures can control. Lastly, but not least, it also has a bunch of surrender-specific stance changing animations - also something that gestures cannot control. With these things in mind, we had to approach the surrender mechanic with a bit more caution, as a half-assed approach would probably come back to bite us later down the line.

We have solved it by essentially handling it like a gesture state on the script side, but on the animation side, it would be considered an "item" of sorts. The reason behind this solution is that when a player puts an item in his hands, his character will switch to the corresponding animation set (picking up a rifle will start playing the rifle animations, pistols for pistols, and so on) with all of their specific animations for turning, changing stances, etc. By putting this "ghost item" into the character's hands, the surrender animation set is enabled, and the specific movement rules that that animation set has attached to it. In addition, we have opened up avenues for ourselves where we can have a bunch of surrender-specific animations; such as deaths, gestures, actions, etc, etc. Gestures-in-gestures? Oh boy.

https://i.imgur.com/oHeJShT.gifv

All of those same rules also apply to the restrained state, but this also means we can accurately show what item is currently restraining you; such as in this case with some locked handcuffs:

https://i.imgur.com/HpAcMOM.gifv

Maybe down the line, you'd be able to drink face-first from ponds even while restrained to keep yourself hydrated while running from your captors. Who knows!

Until next time.

- Adam Oresten / Technical Animator

Community Spotlight

Hello guys,

has it really been two weeks already? It passed quickly with all the community feedback from all of you Xbox and Stress Test players! I want to thank you again for the feedback, it is really important, and it helps the dev team quite a bit.

Let's start with a new merchandise on the Bohemia Store. A lot of you already have our t-shirt but you asked for hoodies too. And here we are:

[store.bistudio.com]

With this hoodie, you are never going to be hypothermic again!

A question time! You can ask our technical animator Adam Oresten any relevant question and he is going to answer them on the Bohemia Developer's blog[www.bohemia.net]. Just tweet your question with #MeetTheBohemians and #AskAdam.

Do you have a problem with orientation in Chernarus? We don't have any in-game map now, but if you need to find where you are or where to go, iZurvive is a solution. It features a 0.63 map and there's also hiking trails, wells, animal locations, and more.

You can use the web map at https://izurvive.com/, or the mobile version for iOS[itunes.apple.com] and Android.

I want to introduce you to some nice streamers.

The first one is Claire aka ArrianaGaming. She is streaming almost every day and she is a passionate DayZ Survivor. Check out her Twitch channel[www.twitch.tv], Instagram[www.instagram.com] and Twitter and give her a follow
The second one is RageBruhTV[www.twitch.tv]. He is also a very passionate DayZ player and an entertaining streamer.
Last but not least is BenFruit[www.twitch.tv], a partnered streamer with a cool voice. He is a friendly player who loves interactions. Check him out!

I choose four videos from the community today.

This interview is from Gamescom made by M1NDR. He is talking with our Lead Designer Peter Nespešný about the future of DayZ.

https://youtu.be/j1-7ejPZ7bI

Another interview from Gamescom by Luzi, this time with our Lead Producer Eugen Harton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1koM-YJB0

This video could be handy for Xbox players. Virtual Flood is introducing a looting guide for beginners. Finding loot is so easy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9IhI-d2N-U

Are you stressed? Do you need to relax? I have a nice, calm video for you. Just sit down, put your headphones on and enjoy the sound of DayZ's nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuQATkjM1tM

The answer to the latest riddle is a house near Gvozdno. And who guessed the right answer this time?

KainMisterr
‏ Leo_A_Santos
_Canis_Dirus_
DayzedEmu
FiveSevenClown
TheChewyMint
LottaLottieT

And where can you find this location? Send an answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag.

Thank you for your nice content and see you in two weeks!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by D rDeSync.

Status Report - 28 August 2018

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 19:29 CEST

In today's Status Report our leads reflect on our appearance at Gamescom last week, where we had the chance to meet so many of you guys. Of course, the big spotlight is on tomorrow's release on the Xbox Game Preview program. For our PC players our Senior Producer Julien gave a first look at DayZ modding this week. Let's get started!

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Peter
Dev Update/Martin
Dev Update/Julien
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Gamescom is behind us and while it has been pretty physically exhausting, it is great to see all the positive feedback from players who visited us. DayZ was playable on all three platforms, PC, Xbox and PS4, and we've had these stations full almost nonstop. All stations were running the same build of DayZ on Enfusion. It's amazing to see how far we have come in this regard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3mliPS0mrk

We've had a bunch of interesting interviews (check out Baty's part for a sample of those!), answering some tough questions a lot of you guys have had for a while, so I recommend watching these as it is hard to capture the detail in text. And I think we have done a good job communicating our vision, or the given situation in these cases. I hope you find the interviews enjoyable.

The Xbox release is happening tomorrow, and Martin will provide some additional details on that. I'll just mention that the Xbox One release shows Enfusion Engine as the future of Bohemia, as a base for what DayZ is right now and the possibility to bring our unique titles to all platforms. It''s a big milestone for us and for Bohemia as a whole. There were always concerns about performance, controls and UI, but I think there is a way to do it right and we will learn what is best together with the Xbox community itself in the Game Preview program.

On the topic of the PC Experimental release, we have made some huge progress over the last week with the issues plaguing the Stress Test servers and are planning to increase the numbers available. We are also discussing the switch over to Experimental after last of the issues is fixed.

The Internal build and its development have seen a steady amount of features and content come in. And as of now, we are mostly focusing on base building and vehicles. The rest of the features are being reviewed and setting the priority on bugfixes for BETA is in progress. We are well underway to stabilize DayZ as a whole and I'm excited to see it get in good shape in the coming months.

It has been a long time coming, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Both in terms of features, getting 0.63 to you guys, the release of server files, and modding. All things are in motion and we are very happy to invite new players into the game as well as welcome the old ones back. The growth of our community both on PC and Xbox feels almost imminent and I can't be more excited about things to come!
- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Peter

Gamescom 2018, same as in the previous year, was an amazing experience. It's been great to meet fans and community members there in person. For me, it’s really refreshing to talk with you about the past, present and future of DayZ. I’m very happy to see that you are so eager and love DayZ so much. It’s motivational, which leads to a great psychic upbeat and spikes of positive energy.

Last but not least, I want to welcome all the Xbox One survivors into the world of DayZ. I’m excited that the next huge group of players will be able to enjoy such a unique experience which hardly can be witnessed anywhere else.

Be careful out there, it can be harsh... see you in Chernarus folks!
- Peter Nespešný / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Martin

Hello Survivors! The past two weeks have been among the busiest this year, and that's because we've all been handling three major things at once: the PC content update, Gamescom, and the Xbox Game Preview announcement! As Eugen covered the PC part, I'll go ahead and give you a little bit of a behind the scenes from our Gamescom preparations, and update you on the state of the Xbox version of DayZ!

DayZ at Gamescom

Besides our own Gamescom booth, we've expanded our presence at Gamescom a little bit more this year. Thanks to our friends at Xbox, we've been invited to the Inside Xbox show to announce the release date of DayZ on Xbox one - and we've made a nice little teaser trailer to go along with that! A first one since the initial Early Access release!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er4nVkCYBq0

We've only had a very short time for the production of the teaser (about 2 weeks of time, which is absolutely bonkers), and I'd like to recognize the work of Bohemia Interactive's Multimedia department that managed to set us up with a nice video in what was a truly killer deadline! It was very much a team effort, but my hat is off to Vladimir Jaske for the great editing work, Ivo Struzinsky for game capture and the work on our camera tools, and Jan Dusek for quickly editing together a really nice sounding DayZ track (the one at the very end) with our external composer Nick Fox. I can only say the teaser got people properly excited, and I can't wait to start the production on a new video for the 1.0 release!

As we've set the tradition with Gamescom last year, along with our developers, we always bring a very decent amount of free merch to our booth. It's something that we do very differently compared to most of the gaming booths, as we make sure that visiting us is actually a rewarding experience that allows you to meet with the developers you know from online channels, and sets you up with cool swag on top of that. Gamescom is a very exhausting undertaking for the team, but this personal aspect makes it worth the hassle!

DayZ on Xbox: known issues and release details

With the release date for the Xbox Game Preview announced, the teams back home started preparing themselves for August 29! The first step was letting all of the 5000 people with keys into the Closed Preview of DayZ. I'll admit, we've originally planned to do that sooner, and everyone freaked out quite a bit when our servers behaved in all the wrong ways at the beginning of the last week, but thanks to the massive effort done by our dev team, we've managed to get the situation resolved and get people to play. Looking at the feedback we're getting, there is a set of most common issues we have with DayZ on Xbox right now:

Crashes of the game upon loading
The inventory behaving in all sorts of weird ways (items not getting picked up, players being unable to fill in all inventory slots etc.)
General issues when interacting with items in your hands slot (especially fireplaces, guns/magazines)
Status icons invisible on some screens due to wrong UI scaling / cropping near the borders of the screen
Hits sometimes not being registered when firing a weapon

I want to thank everyone for reporting the issues - be it over the Feedback Tracker, social media, or private conversations. We are aware of most of the annoying issues, and while our priority is now set on applying last minute fixes for server stability and client crashes, we'll look into the remaining critical issues right after the Game Preview release on August 29!

As our Inside Xbox announcement was really only focused on the release date, many questions were raised on our social media. Here's the answers to some of the most common ones:

How much will DayZ cost on Xbox One?

DayZ will be using a standard premium game model (so no free to play, or any in-game monetisation) during the Xbox Game preview, and it will be available for 39,99 USD. You can check your local price when the product page becomes available on the Microsoft Store. The price of DayZ will increase with the release out of Game Preview - the final version of DayZ will be available for 49,99 USD across all platforms.

At what time exactly will you release DayZ on 29th?

DayZ will unlock at 7PM CEST on August 29. You can use this tool[www.timeanddate.com] to check your local time for the release.

Is there going to be a trial version available?

Yes! You will be able to enjoy one hour of free playtime that you can use if you're not sure about the purchase yet. The trial version will run on its own servers, and will not have character persistence (meaning that your character progress will not save during your first hour, and will not transfer into the full Game Preview!

How many servers will be available for the launch?

As many as needed! We have a good, scale-able setup that will always run enough servers for everyone to join, there will not be a fixed number of servers available. We'll also have teams monitoring the server status 24/7 in the first days after the release to make sure everything goes smoothly!

Do you expect people to provide feedback?

Yes! We want to get all the feedback - you can use our Feedback Tracker[feedback.bistudio.com], the official forums[forums.dayz.com], or even our social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, or Discord[discord.gg]!

Can players start their own private servers on Xbox?

Not right now, but we definitely want to have that option in DayZ later on.

Are there cars and helicopters on Xbox?

No, not right now, but before leaving Game Preview, we'd like to have both on Xbox One. Especially cars play an important role in the DayZ gameplay!

That's all for now - starting with the Game Preview release, I'd like to kick off Status Reports that focus on DayZ on Xbox, so look forward to those! It's crazy that the Xbox release is in less than 24 hours from now - so many new Survivors coming to DayZ!

We'll see you all in Chernarus!
- Martin Čulák / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Julien

For those of you who missed our first look at DayZ modding[www.dayz.com], let me briefly introduce myself: I'm Julien, Senior Producer at Bohemia Interactive, taking care of the modding component of DayZ.

Summary of announced DayZ modding plans so far

As said in the blog post linked above, with the DayZ BETA closing in, we’re starting to share some information around modding.

At the moment, it is projected to be a PC exclusive feature, integrated via the Steam Workshop. It will work in a pretty similar way to how it does with Arma 3.

In last week’s announcement we already mentioned, that DayZ is a hybrid between the RV and the Enfusion engines. While the packing and the asset creation are mostly unchanged and will go through the same process as for Arma 3, the rest (script, particles, animations, UI etc.) will be handled via the Workbench, which is a powerful all-in-one tool developed to handle everything Enfusion related.

We invite the most curious among you to read the full announcement[www.dayz.com] or join the discussion[forums.dayz.com] - we have already received some interesting questions, which I answered.[forums.dayz.com]

How to talk about your existing DayZ modding experiments

We know that some of you have already started digging through the data available in 0.63, and the first DayZ mods are already being made. We'd like to make all modders aware that if you want to start experimenting and share your progress on your creations, you should feel free to do so - and the modding section of our official forums[forums.dayz.com] is a great place to do that! We are eager to discover what you’ve been up to these past weeks!

However, please, do keep in mind that DayZ is still in active development, which means anything can change any time; e.g. scripted classes, some 3D models or textures (and anything else) might be heavily altered or simply disappear in between updates, impacting your mods. Also, we would like to ask you to not release any of your modifications publicly before the official start of modding.

General timeline for DayZ modding

As for when modding will be available: we aim for a partial release together with BETA. However, this is not set in stone.

While the initial release of the tools is still unclear, server owners will be happy to know that the server files package should be made available to everyone during BETA on PC at the latest.

That's all for now - I'll keep you up to date on our forums[forums.dayz.com]!
- Julien Vida / Senior Producer

Community Spotlight

Hello guys,
we are back from Gamescom and it really was crazy. Our booth was massive this year, we had there 10 computers, 10 Xboxes and 5 PlayStations with DayZ, and our booth was full most of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_uMDtX2k0Y

You were such nice guys and you liked the game. It means the world to us.

We organized a community meet up on Friday and I am so sorry I couldn't be there. There we so many of you, it is really nice how many of you wanted to meet us. Thank you for stopping by!

Our photo wall was a huge success. Just try to search #Gamescom2018 and #DayZ on Twitter or Instagram, you can find there so many survivors who took a photo with some gear:

And I have three videos for you today:

Our favourite content creator Rene aka BarelyInfectedvisited us at our booth to ask Peter Nespešný and Eugen Harton some questions about DayZ development and the future. And here are their answers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h7runsT14w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-gvu3Yw3fI

And something different right now. This is a story of a group called River Boys, full of adventure, friendship and fun until the server restart separated them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__xEFndQXCY

That is all from me, thank you again for stopping by at our booth and see you in two weeks!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by ExacoMvm.

Status Report - 14 August 2018

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 19:36 CEST

Gamescom is upon us, but before we head out we have another Status Report prepared for you guys. To start things off, our Lead Producer Eugen provides an update on the current state of the first content update, as well as our plans moving forward. Our leads from gameplay programming, animation and sound give a quick recap of their past two weeks of work. We close the Status Report with our Community Spotlight. Let's get into it!

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Peter
Dev Update/Mirek
Dev Update/Viktor
Dev Update/Filip
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,

although the struggle with the server performance is ongoing, we're seeing some good results overall in our goals. We have implemented multiple optimizations during our Stress Test period and there are more coming. Right now, we are seeing some unintended behavior in the multi-core server environment, and that's our current focus. Running servers on a single core, we're experiencing a large upswing in the server FPS that should, in theory, be even more noticeable in a multi-core configuration, but unfortunately, that is not the case now. Some of these issues are quite complex, so we will be tweaking the server code base even more.

The first content patch is in an okay state, but we're still not happy with the overall performance. As far as content goes, that seems to be received well, and I'm happy to see people enjoying the returning features and flavor that was added to them. Once we're happy with the performance itself, we will move the build over to the Experimental branch of the game and make the build available to the servers owners in our community. We know it has been a long time and the community has suffered because of it, but if we work together, we can make this dream game of ours a reality.

Besides the development of the first content patch, there is a lot of ongoing work put into other BETA features. On Friday last week, we have concluded the primary feature development and the Internal build seems to be in a good place feature-wise. The focus has shifted to bug fixing. There are more than 2000 fixes to get through and we want to make sure we get them done! We will share more details about the next patch after Gamescom.

I know some of you are worried about missing features or content. Over the last few years, there have been many features designed, and an insane amount of content created both externally and internally. Some of these things make DayZ better as a game and simulation. Some of them can be considered more or less an added flavor, or even clutter in the overall vision of what the game should be.

DayZ needs to be fun first and foremost. It needs to meet your expectations in behavior, stability, and balance. It also needs features that support the player interaction and empower players who want to invest time into learning the details and intricacies of the simulation itself. We read everything you guys say. This is a game made by gamers and for gamers. We want to enjoy the game with you and even though the struggle is sometimes real, all of us want the game to succeed the same way you do.

When we have any details to share beyond what has already been stated in the goals for the Beta release[dayz.com], we will do so on all of our channels.

Some of you might have noticed an increased commotion around the Xbox version of the game. What we are testing now is the same version that you're seeing on PC Stress Tests. We're making sure it runs well and provides a gameplay experience that feels good on a controller, and shows good performance. The benefits of the performance work we have done are already enjoyed by a smaller group of players that already have access to the Closed Preview, but there are so many players out there that have been with DayZ for a long time and even more who haven't had a chance to try this unique experience. One of the benefits of utilizing modules of the Enfusion engine is being able to have a game like DayZ running on a console. We always want to grow the DayZ community, and it's important not to forget about other platforms.

I'll be at Gamescom this year talking about what we will be seeing in the near future and what our goals are before we reach 1.0. I can't wait to share more with you as there are exciting times ahead of us.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Peter

What would DayZ be without the possibility to restrain others and put them into captivity! Now you can also restrain yourself if you would like to plot some twist - of course you will be able to struggle free if something goes wrong. While the character has his hands restrained, his inventory is blocked as well as his quick-slots. However, his inventory is accessible by other players through the vicinity part of inventory screen.

https://media.giphy.com/media/OO2J5QpwGnTTYsNmmV/giphy.gif

We are also working on the implementation of continuous interactions with objects in the environment. It will allow us to broaden possible interactions, like taking items directly into hands (or swapping them), slowly opening doors, seamless drinking from wells or switching channels on the radio transmitter laying on the ground.

Speaking of items on the ground, there is a comeback of dropping items from hands to the ground directly in the world (of course the 'take' animation displayed instead of the 'drop' animation in the GIF is a placeholder). The next step will be a shortcut for putting an item from your hands to the inventory cargo even without it being assigned to a quick-slot, as we would like to minimize any unnecessary access of the inventory.

https://media.giphy.com/media/NQ23rqTPGLtwsJWvzg/giphy.gif

The work on firearms is still ongoing as well. The support for the new weapon (and items) swapping animation is being implemented, after which there will be a possibility to add independent shoulders. Recently, the long awaited leaning has been reintroduced in it’s basic form (as it was in 0.62 version). However, we would like to make it more prominent and useful for gameplay later. Weapon inertia was missing as well until now and its new implementation is portrayed as sight misalignment. Its degree depends on rotation speed, a nice side effect to it is a parallax shift in the new 3D scopes. You can see them presented in Mirek’s portion of Status Report below.

As the latest addition to the pack, welcome the first implementation of lifting weapons in front of obstacles. This mechanic will prevent firearms from clipping through objects geometry, may it be walls, infected or other characters. Don't worry about self defense, as in these cases you will be still able to use a melee attack with your firearm. The lifting at obstacles takes various firearms lengths and their muzzle attachments too into account .

https://media.giphy.com/media/vy0fWoWIDb7VBKxPhk/giphy.gif

Also, progress on firearms malfunction was recently resumed and unjamming support is being added to all the firearms which will be available in 0.63 version of DayZ. Type of malfunction used is 'failure to eject' which causing mechanism to jam where next round fails to feed.

https://media.giphy.com/media/iDJmLvnnOua9OEi4SP/giphy.gif

Chance of malfunction is directly proportional to condition of the firearm. In case the firearm is fed from detachable magazines, chance of its malfunction is combined with condition of used magazine. Firearms and magazines condition can be repaired, making weapon cleaning kit a valuable and important item. With firearm malfunction in, I’m looking forward to see all that interesting situation which will emerge during the heat of firefights.

Better stock up on weapon cleaning kits... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Mirek

For the last couple of weeks and for the next weeks, the major tasks for our gameplay programmers are server-side optimizations, bugfixing for features and content and the implementation of core systems to support new gameplay features, which can then be tweaked by designers.

Optimisations

We have found a bug, which has been in the game for more than two years but was finally visible after the introduction of ambient loot. This bug was tied to the game entity deletion and caused massive performance drops. We are also preparing optimisations for the Central Economy process, which should be done in a few days time.

Gameplay features

Vehicles - probably the biggest and most complex feature we're now working on is vehicles. Almost everything had to be rewritten (including character parts), in order to be able to add additional vehicle-related features more easily in the future. Viktor already showcases some progress two weeks ago and I'm sure we will show you more in a couple weeks.

Leaning - We've reintroduced a very basic implementation of leaning. The first iteration is in the game and now we have to polish things like animations, camera, and probably more. Check out this first teaser here:

Weapon changing - We have implemented a basic system for the changing of weapons. For now, we are supporting only firearms, but the rest is on the way.

Sights misalignment - Which means weapon inertia in iron sights and scope. Now, only a few parameters have to be tweaked in order to achieve the best gameplay experience with this feature.

- Miroslav Maněna/ Lead Programmer

Dev Update/Viktor

Over the last weeks, we've been creating and implementing new attack animations for the infected. That's light, heavy and running attacks with individual arms to get some variation into the PvE encounters. For the player character, we've started the implementation of basic facial expressions during combat-actions. We've also implemented multiple improvements for the idle character animations, like blinking, exhaustion and new idle movements in general.

Apart from that, the team has been working on placing and deployment animations that will be used while handling cars, during base building, or when placing traps. All of this comes with numerous fixes to our player animations and the animation graph.

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

Dev Update/Filip Čenžák

Our audio team went on a trip across our offices and beyond to record some footage for the reintroduction of vehicles. The results are new engine sounds, as well as tire sounds for different surfaces.

When it comes to shooting, we will bring back an Arma feature of the shooting controller, which silences insects and birds for a while after a gun is fired. To add to the infected, we've implemented and improved several of their animation sounds with steps and rustling clothing during three different states: idle, running and climbing.

Here you are some pictures from our tires and engine recording:

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Community Spotlight

Hello guys,

It's here, finally! Gamescom time! Bohemia Interactive is going to have a large booth with at Gamescom - with DayZ on PC and on consoles too (both Xbox and PlayStation!), so you can play on whatever platform you prefer, meet the devs and get some merch of course. We prepared a photobooth where you can take some cool DayZ-styled photos. You can try and wear a Gorka uniform, Ushanka, Zmijovka, guns, baseball bat, the Taloon backpack, High capacity vest, Ghillie and more gear from DayZ.

So if you're at Gamescom next week, don't forget to stop by in our booth D042 in the Hall 10.1, we are going to be there from Tuesday to Saturday - you have a lot of time to visit us!

That is all from me and now is your time!

Someone is really excited about the upcoming DayZ Preview release on Xbox! AlexRUiLs[forums.dayz.com] made this 3D print of a DayZ logo. Looks so good!

But he isn't the only one who has a 3D printer at home. Kerbo has it too and he printed DayZ logo as a gift for our amazing streamer TheLoyalPatriot. The logo was made b a fan of DayZ called Meyk[t.co].

What about some videos?

This is an emotional story about what happened to Chernarus when the infection started by DudeiRage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD7xeASxnAI

Syl is an awesome guy. He opened a shop in Electro to interact with people. And he had a few nice customers! Check out his shop here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ECqzh6U1q0&t=

NeuroticEUROtic shared a cool picture with us. He called it "Friendly Planet Cherno", but here is a question: Are video game planets flat? Who knows!

Let's check out our riddle. Where was this mystery location from the latest Status Report?

Who guessed the riddle correct this time?

MisterrKain
Tempest Sojourner
‏Emu Threat
bullet head
Manatee
HumbleAtomicBohemian
Jonny K
‏Herbert J. Leder
DrDeSync

Good job guys! And the next riddle is:

I am looking forward to seeing you at Gamescom, and for people who can't be there, I am going to share everything with you on our social networks.

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by Uncuepa.

Status Report - 31 July 2018

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 22:02 CEST

Today we have a quite exciting Status Report for you guys as we have several topics to cover. To start things off, Eugen is talking about the long-awaited content update for 0.63. Next, our Brand Manager Martin Culak will finally reveal some information on how we intend to deliver on our promise to bring DayZ to our fans on Xbox this year. Peter is talking about the introduction of scopes, the continuing debate of "Aimgate" and shotguns. Plus, there's a first glance at the return of vehicles. So, buckle up, and let's dive into it.

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Martin
Dev Update/Peter
Dev Update/Viktor
Dev Update/Filip
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,

let's talk about the hot topics first. The content patch -while delayed- is shaping up nicely. During the extra weeks spent on the stabilization of its features, we have solved quite a large number of issues, while the main three that were blocking the release are confirmed to be fixed as well.

Three main reasons that the patch has not been released sooner are :

1. Client Freezes (Happening in random intervals causing 10+ seconds of no response whatsoever)

The issue manifested itself in specific situations and actions of multiple players in a single bubble. We have found the cause and were able to confirm last week that it's no longer happening.

2. Stability issues (Crashes, VME and asserts on the branch)

While important, these are definitely considered less damaging on the whole gameplay experience. However, we should be good to go!

3. Scopes

During the implementation we have come across a large number of issues from animations, clipping, shaking and more that needed to be solved.

Now that we have talked about these, I wanted to confirm that the content patch is getting released on the Stress Test branch tomorrow and that it will be focused on Player vs Player interaction. During this period we might try to raise the player numbers per shard and see where the additional optimizations can take us. After the Stress Test period is over, we will port the patch over to Experimental and enable the switch to do the same for server owners. I'm looking forward to the vanilla experience as there is so much more to explore with these new features.

While all this was happening the team was working on the BETA features. We're running several work groups focused on important parts of DayZ, specifically weapons, infected, vehicles and actions. As of now, the general production is running two weeks behind and we are ready to get back on track.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Martin

Survivors! I've got a couple of great news to share with you all! There's something with DayZ on Xbox that caused some surprises and confusions, so let me start with that!

DayZ on Xbox - The road to Xbox Game Preview begins!

The rumors are right! Our guys in Bratislava and Prague have managed to get the first series of builds through the Xbox certification process, and have already made them available for preliminary testing to a closed group of players enlisted in the Xbox Insider Program[support.xbox.com] (basically a community of super hardcore Xbox One players and fans, as well as Xbox employees). While this is truly a smaller-scale test with only a handful of servers running, it's hard to hide our own excitement, as this is the first time we've let anyone outside of the office play the "full" DayZ experience on a console!

For obvious reasons, this also translated into a lot of excitement (and outrage) in the DayZ community, so it's time to share some update on where we are with DayZ on Xbox.

Current State of DayZ on Xbox

The first important thing to say is that the build that some of the Xbox Insiders are playing is pretty much on par with our current 0.63 build for PC, and shares the same features and content. The way our development pipelines are set allows for most of the progress with PC development to beimmediately used in the Xbox build, and since we've recently done quite a lot on that front, the Xbox version is already well playable. This will only get better as soon as the 0.63 content patch goes out on the Stress Test Branch. Of course, if it was all sunshine and roses, we'd probably just release the thing already, so unsurprisingly, there's a catch. A few of them, actually:

we're still applying some minor changes to the controls scheme
we're getting our server infrastructure ready
we're awaiting fixes for some Xbox specific issues (UI, some user actions missing etc.)

Despite these issues, the progress with PC builds, and some platform specific optimisations already bring a good enough gameplay to Xbox, along with a generally very good client and server performance, so as soon as we get ahead of the listed issues (and as long as there aren't new ones appearing), we will proceed to the next step!

Closed Preview

If you've been following our friends from the Vigor[vigorgame.com] team (they have released Vigor into Game Preview just yesterday, go check that out[vigorgame.com]!), you'll get a decent idea about what that next step is going to be for DayZ - a Closed Preview. Ultimately, that's where we'll get together a bunch of the most excited Xbox Survivors among you, and give you a chance to secure access to pre-release builds of DayZ.

In return, we'll ask you to provide us with feedback on your experience, and we'll also use the traffic created on our servers to further evaluate the performance there.

Even in the Closed Preview phase, we're probably not going to be ready for any large scale testing, so we'll pick our first bunch of Survivors very carefully, and try to involve some content creators at Mixer and Twitch to spread the excitement for others waiting to get their hands on DayZ.

We should get to that part rather quickly though, so be prepared! For Xbox fans around you, also one more clarification: we're currently not planning on expanding the Xbox Insider build to further rings, so the Closed Preview will be your only chance to get some early hands-on time with DayZ!

Game Preview

We're probably a bit further away from the last step - releasing DayZ for everyone in the "Xbox Early Access program", the Xbox Game Preview[www.xbox.com]. As we've been saying at press events over the past months, we'd like to bring DayZ to Xbox Game Preview at the end of this summer, and currently, it looks like we should be able to deliver. For the final confirmation though, we still need things to settle down a bit more, so your best bet is to wait for Gamescom (starting August 21, more on that below!) - by then, things should be more clear, and it's also a good opportunity for any release date announcements, so please cross your fingers that everything works out just fine!

As with any Game Preview title on Xbox, there will be a trial version available that'll help you decide whether DayZ is already a fun game to you in its current state. We're considering the trial to be limited to one hour of gameplay.

I'd like to clarify one important thing - the general timing of the Xbox One release. Up until now, we've been counting on releasing the Xbox Game Preview shortly after DayZ hits BETA on PC. Since we're able to come up with Xbox version of our PC content rather quickly, and we're also enjoying tremendous support from Microsoft, we'll probably take a turn on that position. If things keep going well, we may see an Xbox Game Preview release happening before the PC BETA.

And as a last bit: I know some of you are worried about this entire console thing slowing down the PC development. We've already said that on a couple of occasions, but let me repeat this again - our primary development, where most of the work is happening on daily basis, is the PC version, and that's where any progress with Xbox builds always comes from. While we have certainly grown beyond just having 2 programmers working on things related to Xbox releases, our primary focus is, and will remain on developing the PC builds. I may let Peter expand on that, but also the overall game design vision of DayZ has never been changed or strongly influenced by the fact that DayZ will eventually be released on consoles.

Even in Game Preview, and later on on PS4, DayZ will remain a hardcore, authentic survival game.

We're going to Gamescom (and maybe, just maybe to PAX West and Australia)

Brief update on upcoming events: we'll be at Gamescom again, yay! Gamescom is taking place between August 21 - 25, and we're bringing a much bigger team this year, with all the usual suspects (Baty, Eugen, Peter, Dan), and a very welcome addition of our Senior Map Designer Adam! Altogether, there will be 11 DayZ developers at the event (including our new Community Managers - Tim and Bestius), ready to meet you all and show you the game on all three platforms - PC, Xbox One AND PlayStation 4 (yes, that would be a premiere!).
We're also doing our best to answer the many invitations (yes, that's you too, Boydy!) and arrange at least a brief visit of PAX West in Seattle, and PAX Australia in Melbourne. We'll keep you updated!

That's all for today - see you at Gamescom, Survivors!

- Martin Čulák / Brand Manager

Dev Update/Peter

As mentioned in our last Status Report, when it comes to firearms we are focused mainly on the scopes right now. In the following GIF you can see the new PSO 1 scope in action together with the new post processes. Aiming down the sights uses depth of field to blur the firearm while keeping the front sight focused. The scoped-in view is using a circular mask to blur the surroundings and creates spherical distortion to make the magnification effect more prominent.

The next GIF shows how the combination of ADS and scope is operated in a case where such possibility of firearm and scope allows it. The last mode used for precise aiming (sights or scope) is remembered and the next time the aiming action is called it switches right into it.

Regarding point shooting (not precise aiming, in other words hipfire from raise), there was sway applied from the very first implementation. However, it used the same strength as in ADS which isn’t enough for such a situation. It lead to the belief that the projectiles are always landing in the exact center of the screen. Now, we have a multiplier for sway implemented, to make it harder to hit targets further away. On the screenshot below, the left target was fired at with point shooting, the right target was fired at with ADS, both using a pistol at 25 meters. You see the results displayed by the trajectory lines and their bullet impacts.

By the way, due to the controversy revolving around "Aimgate", it’s also a common belief now, that the projectile direction when fired while point shooting is drastically bend, which isn’t the case. The angle is getting smaller with larger distances. You can see two lines on the following screenshot, the white line is the direction from the camera, the orange line shows the actual direction at which the projectile was fired. Using the 3PP camera, which has the largest offset from the axis of the weapon barrel and with the target in a distance of 10 meters, the angle between the direction of the gun barrel and the fired projectile is around 2 degrees. And to display even this minimal change in projectile direction to the players, we plan to have the weapon visually realigned towards the center of the screen.

Last but not least, alongside with the implementation of the pump-action shotgun in the new weapon system, we found what was wrong with buckshots all the time. After a rewrite, buckshots are now spawning the set amount of independent projectiles which are getting dispersed with distance and can penetrate materials.

I’m excited this change will make shotguns finally valuable and deadly - exactly how you would expect.

Come get some... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Viktor

In the past two weeks our animators have been working on:

vehicles: steering wheel poses so the character can steer the wheel nicely. This includes animations like starting the vehicle, adjustments of enter/exit animations and idles.

Please be aware that everything you see here is still WIP and subject to change:

Getting into V3S[media.giphy.com]
Starting V3S[media.giphy.com]
Turning[media.giphy.com]
Jumping out of the vehicle / Getting back in[media.giphy.com]

surrender/restrained: implementation and missing animations
hit reactions for crouch and prone for when player character gets hit
bugfixing related to firearms

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

Dev Update/Filip Čenžák

Just a very brief update from the audio team:

new reload sounds for the MP133
new sounds for falling trees and bushes (after hack tree and bush action)
shooting controller for ambient sounds. Birds and insects go quiet for a while after shooting
Coast ambience is positional now. You hear the ambience from the direction where the coast is.
Sound Occlusion for gun shots. Gun shots are attenuated if there is any obstacle (like wall or structure) between the shooter and listener

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Community Spotlight

Hi guys,

I would like to dedicate my first post to server admins. As development towards BETA is progressing, and more players are interested in permanently playing on 0.63 Experimental, we want to extend our communication when it comes to server owners and communities. We know how much time, passion and resources go into the proper management of a DayZ server, and with the upcoming changes we want to keep you in a better loop on what's coming next. This information starts with the upcoming optional switch for community servers from 0.62 Stable to 0.63 Experimental and will continue covering further changes that will affect server management.

Please be aware that we are not talking about access to "exclusive information" or a "direct line" to the development team. This newsletter will be designed to keep interested server owners informed about all changes and events coming to the very backbone of our community.

If you are a server owner, you can register HERE for the newsletter.

Sometimes I am very surprised how the community can help each other. For example XAMpew, who wants to help all poor lost survivors with an interactive online map of 0.63 that is currently on the Experimental branch. It is still not ready, but he has done a good job so far. Thank you XAMpew! You can find the map HERE.

We have already received several packages from you. Blue and Quennie[www.twitch.tv] sent us a teddy bear, Boydy a big bunch of Australian goodies, but one day there were seven boxes full of scotch beer in our office and we were pretty surprised! We would like to thank you Spaggie again because you made us come together in the evening and just talk about other things than just work after a long time. After all, we are not only colleagues but also friends.

I would like to introduce you to these two players who love to make wallpapers and screenshots. One of them is Harold Palmer, who has been supplying us with his great screenshots for years and he has his own web page. Check out his work HERE[www.haroldpalmer.co.uk].

The second player is called Squad Crow and Chernarus is so beautiful through his eyes. You can find his work HERE[www.behance.net].

Let me introduce you MrOG, the streamer who is known (besides for his fear of wolves) as an excellent sniper. And if I didn't add his clips to this Status Report he is going to snipe me too.

https://clips.twitch.tv/AnnoyingWanderingClintPermaSmug

https://clips.twitch.tv/SuperIronicFriseeHassaanChop

IS DAYZ TRASH? This question has been asked by Polish streamer TopeREC in this video. Okey, it is just a click bait header but the video is hilarious. Check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvMmTbCeJWk

SepticFalcon started a new series called "How To Survive DayZ 0.63 & Beyond!" and it is really handy for new players of 0.63. So if you are a 0.63 newbie, check it out, it is worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVGIDMJy7-Q

I want to show you a picture of a bug we found during our internal testing. I am not an expert but I am sure this is not the way how to aim correctly with a weapon.

And it is time for another riddle! I found only three correct answers this time:

Matt
MisterrKain
Andi Carpenter

Here is the location:

And here is a new one. Where is it located? Send an answer to our Twitter account with the #DayZriddleTime hashtag.

And this is all from me, see you in two weeks, Survivors! I am looking forward to see your content!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by apd23.

Status Report - 17 July 2018

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 20:15 CEST

This week, we are moving to push our first content update to the public Stress Test branch. To start today's report off, Eugen is going to talk us through the remaining issue of the week as well as last weeks challenges for the team. Our leads from animation, sound and map design share a few insights on their past work. We close everything with our beloved Community Spotlight.

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Viktor
Dev Update/Adam
Dev Update/Filip
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,

it's been quite busy around the office in the last two weeks, and there is a lot to talk about in general. I wanted to cover a couple of topics: the first content update for 0.63, and issues you have been experiencing in the past few days.

Database issues with 0.62

The problem with the legacy 0.62 Stable branch had manifested in two different ways:

a) an infinite spawn timer
b) by loading a wrong character

During the last maintenance, we switched to a temporary database to figure out a solution, making sure the issue does not repeat in the future. Since then we have identified the culprit, fixed it and will be moving back to the Stable hive during our next regular maintenance tomorrow morning. Most of you will be getting your old characters back as the data itself has not been tampered with.

Blue Screen of Death crash issues

This issue was quite rampant - luckily, we managed to get it identified and fixed in a patch released last week. The problem was caused by an interaction of multiple external factors that we have since looked into and found a workaround that will keep us stable going forward.

New content and features for 0.63

I'm happy to say that we no longer track any major gameplay issues with the upcoming 0.63 update there were assigned a priority of blocker/critical. There is a number of issues being tracked, and on schedule to get fixed, but most (if not almost all) of them can be described as visual glitches.

As of now, the patch is scheduled for a large internal playtest tomorrow and if we don't run into any more issues, we will release the update on the Stress Test branch. One thing we're quite excited about is not only the features that we're bringing back but also the huge number of bugs that have been fixed. All this together should bring a more stable and interesting DayZ experience.

As we're seeing the comeback of the unconscious state, as well as everyone's favourites - the M4A1 and Mosin, alongside numerous scopes - we will consider using a specialized mission for testing these, probably switching back and forth from the regular survival gameplay to a more action packed combat scenario.

I'm extremely excited to see those unconscious clutch situations getting back to DayZ, as saving people and playing a hero has always been my thing a lot more than being a bandit :)

I don't want to spoil everything, but I do believe it's going to be tons of fun!

See you in Chernarus! ;)

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Peter

The implementation of the firearms scopes back into 0.63 version is ongoing for some time now. Long range combat has always been a staple of DayZ and you can count on the fact, that it will be in the future as well. The focus is to bring back scopes for firearms currently in the game and those which are coming.

Switching between iron sights/scopes
The new implementation introduced the ability to use iron sights along with scope view. Of course, that’s possible only when a given firearm and scope combination allows it. If you are curious, we are not planning to do slanted sights for now.

Zeroing and accuracy
With upcoming scopes, allowing encounters over long distances, it’s time to utilize zeroing to compensate projectile ballistic trajectory. Similarly, you should be aware of the accuracy of different firearms to choose the best tool for the job. As a side note, barrel dispersion is already back in Experimental 0.63 version for quite some time, however it seems it’s not that noticeable without magnified view of scopes.

While aiming down the scope, projectiles should be fired directly from a barrel of a gun, same as it’s while in iron sights. This will prevent the possibility of some additional angle to be added to the trajectory.

Unfortunately, we found out that there is a divergence between actual projectile trajectory and directional vector of the barrel, which is definitely an issue on longer ranges. We are currently going through all aspects of range combat as we are trying to isolate and fix the underlying problem.

Revision of scopes
Reimplementation of scopes is also a good opportunity for us to revisit individual scope models, as well as their configuration. Especially their camera positions, reticles, magnification levels and zeroing ranges.

For some of them, it’s needed anyways, for example the PSO 1 can be used along iron sights, and it’s being turned into a 3D scope now, instead of just a 2D texture. This change alone requires a removal of the eyepiece to avoid the first person camera clipping, and will allow for a in-scope view as large as possible.

We don’t have a picture in picture rendering, so we're looking into adding some post-processes such as depth of field, sphere distortion and colour tints to make scopes more visually pleasing. I believe that scopes will now be be easier and more fun to use.

Zoom in... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Viktor

The animation team has been quite busy over the past two weeks, creating some completely new animation and improving existing ones. Let me go over a few of those.

New usage animations for items like a shovel, pickaxe, or hoe

These should provide more variety in animations and a better representation of each item in general.

Improved holding of items emitting light

We have added a new animation instance and a new set of animations (walking, running, holding) for flashlight, torch, and a flare. Players are now able to have the light in better positions.

Animations related to vehicles

We are testing and finding the best way of adding animations for changing gears, starting the engine, and other related actions.

Improvements to existing animations and systems

We created new animations for when the player gets hit and added more unconscious variations for different items and stances. Additionally, we polished attacking animations and fixed bugs related to firearms animations. We've also made a bunch of new holding poses for various items, so your character can now hold items in a visually more pleasing way.

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

Dev Update/Adam Franců

This time around I won't be sharing anything brand new, as I have spent most of past few weeks squashing bugs all over the Chernarus terrain. While the 0.62 update has definitely brought Chernarus up to whole a new level, the vegetation swap also introduced a lot of issues with the object placement.

This trend continued with the update 0.63, which introduced a revamp for rocks, stones and bushes as well as a number of model updates to the environment assets (be it a complete replacement or just smaller changes to the doors and ladders). It has been a long time since a proper bug fixing passed and as the updating of 0.63 is progressing, Chernarus should definitely receive some bug fixing love from us.

Over the past weeks, I have squashed literally thousands of issues (major issues like getting stuck somewhere, problems with swimming, ladders, but also minor ones such as frequent object clipping). I am certainly not done yet and plan to continue this bug bash in the upcoming weeks before returning to the general map updates (for example we have got buildings like the city police station to add to the major towns).

There is one more thing that I would like to mention, as it is kind of tied with the topic bug fixing. Everyone knows (and loves :)) the all-Cyrillic directional and settlements signs (did anyone say KAMYWOBO?). For a very long time, a number of settlements, railway stations and road intersections in the new (non-Arma 2) parts of Chernarus were completely missing these features. As a part of this bug fixing pass, we have re-added them along with fixing many issues with the existing signs. These changes along with the already mentioned bug fixing pass (or at least a part of it) will be available in the Content Patch #1.

I hope that you all have a great time exploring Chernarus, see you there!

- Adam Franců / Map Designer

Dev Update/Filip Čenžák

The last couple of weeks brought a number of updates from the audio department - we don't have any samples for you, but most of the things should make their way into the game soon enough. Let's go over a couple of examples:

female character voice support has been added
some new character sounds have been added
- hacking down trees
- cutting bark off of a tree
- digging
- mining for stones
- cooking (boiling, baking, drying)
thunderstorm sounds were improved to capture the atmosphere of DayZ just right

For the upcoming new features and content for the Experimental branch, we've mostly contributed in terms of weapon sounds:

a sonic crack of bullets has been improved
impact sounds of bullets have been improved
Mosin and M4 sounds have seen some updates
- we have a brand new set of reloading sounds for each weapon
we've managed to fix a bug with weapon reload sounds while on the move

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Community Spotlight

Hello guys,

At first, I have a news for you. Our name on social channels has been changed. We were known as DayZDevTeam on our Twitter and Facebook for a long time, but now we are just DayZ. So no more weird tweets like "I am playing @DayZDevTeam right now, come and join me!", I am so proud of Martin, who managed to change it, it is not that easy. Don't forget to tag @dayz next time!

Let's check the community content.

Do you have a Samsung Gear S3 watch? https://twitter.com/FlipGamingde has an inspiration for you. He made the most perfect Watch face ever and of course it is in DayZ style.

Some of you went to real Chernarus and sent us nice pictures from your trip. Like NiloxCSHO from Reddit, who didn't need a map to travel around this area. He knows Chernarus very well. Check out the gallery here.

I want to show you a talented player, who can make really nice screenshots. His nickname is Sp1kerZ and you can follow his work on Twitter. Keep it up, man.

Streamer Reece McDowall shared a screenshot with us. It is about resolving struggle between players. The king is dead, long live the king!

Love is everywhere, even in Chernarus. WineDaddy captured a picture of two lovers who don't care about the apocalypse. I have no idea how you made it, WineDaddy, but you did it right.

And the last thing from your content is a story made by M1NDR. He infiltrated a group of cannibals and tried to destroy them from the inside…

And we want to congratulate M1NDR because he hit 100 000 subscribers on his YouTube channel today! You are amazing, man and we <3 you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9aWK_9PNtA

You've sent me so many answers to the last riddle, I was really surprised! But only a few were correct. Here is a wall of fame!

Puddin_TheKrow
D. E. Parry
Rustycaddy
CanisDirus
Go Up
Setup
Jacob_Mango

And here is a next one. Can you guess where is this location? It is not so hard this time! Tweet your answer to our official Twitter channel with a #DayZriddleTime hashtag. Don't forget, our Twitter is changed to @DayZ now.

Thank you for reading today's Status Report till here and see you in two weeks.

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by CMDR_sunny.

Status Report 3 July 2018

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 14:07 CEST

Hello Survivors,

as this week we have some national holidays coming up in the Czech Republic and a big part of the team took this chance to take a few days of vacation, this Status Report will be shorter than usual. However, we are diving into exciting content regardless, as we will be talking about the upcoming first big update for 0.63. And we are happy to showcase another huge collection of your awesome community content - Let's get to it!

Dev Update/Eugen
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,
it's about time to talk about the content update that's coming to Stress Test branch very soon and will get rolled over to the Experimental servers after making sure everything works as intended. We will try and batch the content updates in this way so we can stabilize and make sure the content works properly.

AI Sensors/Audibility/Visibility

With this change you will see your stealth options getting expanded by quite a bit: Besides stances, the colours and weight of items will affect your ability to avoid zombies and confuse their perception.

Hidden Stash

With this feature, you'll be able to hide your loot underground and put containers to use. The shovel will be spawning alongside the new containers ready to use. Same goes for corpses.

Character - Unconsciousness

Shock stat and weapon hits that increase it can cause the character to fall unconscious to be possibly saved by friends in your group. With the unconsciousness state, you'll be seeing more options to disable players and interact with them in combat.

CPR

The ability to CPR people with high shock values.

Gestures

The new radial menu alongside the newly added gestures will now be available for even more interactions and videos you may create.

Repairing

Items like the Sewing kit, Weapon Cleaning kit, Duct tape and more are seeing a comeback as durability matters again. Weapons don't jam yet but that's something you'll definitely see in a future content update.

New weapons

Yes, there are new weapons coming to the game and it's two classics that everybody loves. M4A1 and Mosin. Yay!

Scopes

There is no definite list of scopes coming yet in the first content update, but, based on the weapons currently in the game, we will deliver a meaningful selection.

Soft skills

The Soft skills are getting in, so you'll see the basic specializations working and your crafts bringing better results faster.

Environmental Exposure

The temperature system will start working without any repercussions first to gather more information on how harsh we want to get.

Jumping

We have started working on a huge animation set for jumps and climbing this year. So with the upcoming update, the first part of this package is gonna get in and give you the ability to cross some basic obstacles improving your manoeuvrability throughout Chernarus.

Diseases

Diseases and associated effects (coughing, sneezing and more) are returning as well as items that resolve possible negatives, such as purification tablets. This includes the possibility of diseases transfer from player to player and items.

Compass

The first part of the navigation system in DayZ besides the new map is the compass. Hopefully, it will help you to learn more about Chernarus and its intricacies.

Ambient Loot

One of the core features that we want to use to solve a possible lack of loot is a set of items that spawn not centrally but based on the player position and interactions. This might need a lot more tweaks, so expect its values to change even during testing.

Voice Communication

The whole Voice Communication system along with radios, public radios, megaphone etc. is coming to the game to give you objectives on the map as well as new options to communicate and meet with other survivors in the game.

So, how soon this is going to happen? The features listed here are undergoing testing as of now and the content has been branched away from the internal development version with many more fixes and improvements to stability, security and server performance.

On a side note, since in the internal version of this patch, we resolved the GDPR issues blocking the ability to switch to the experimental version, with its introduction we will enable this option for server owners. I'm personally looking forward to all this content coming back alongside things that changed and have been improved upon heavily. See you in Chernarus!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Community Spotlight

Hello Survivors,

This weekend, Nine Inch Nails (a band that many of us in the dev team like) had a gig at the Aerodrome festival near Prague, and guess what - Alessandro Cortini, who's been a member of NIN for quite some time now, is a fellow DayZ survivor! We could not pass on the opportunity to meet with Alessandro, and so we did bother him for a bit before he went up on stage! It's been so awesome to chat and listen to some of his stories! Just a brief look at his DayZ t-shirt reassured us that he's serious about being a fan - the condition of the t-shirt has been way, way past pristine, and so we set him up with a new one :) Check out Alessandro on iTunes[itunes.apple.com] or SoundCloud[soundcloud.com], and look for him on Chernarus. Remember - talk to people! You never know who's on the other side, it could be someone from your favorite band!

Let's check out some new video content:

An emotional story of the life of Ricky Jameson by CamCANTRUN recorded in DayZ and the Arma 3 Eden Editor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAO1SrvzRnk

Ant made a DayZ fan trailer and it is really nice!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh_Xf1alkHY

Rustycaddy made a video in honor of our beautiful Chernarus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDQaQtKDJ1w

This is a story about the great opening of Uncuepa's bar. It starts really nice, there were a plenty delicious food, drinks and music, but what happened in the end wasn't nice…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWDGNnFsyhQ

And what about some of your pictures and drawings? Check it out:

The first one is a nice edit of a screenshot by the famous DrDesync.

Another edit is made by Reddit user TheWhishImBallHorson named "They Found Me". Good job!

Zarrov sent us a sketch of his idea of barricading. It looks impressive!

It is an end of a school year and Barrett5Bumpas is getting bored at his classes. So he made this DayZ inspired picture. It is really nice, but don't forget - education is more important than video games!

Do you know you can change the skin of your Steam? I didn't know until today. Mdswish shared his DayZ themed customized skin with the community, you can download it here[editor.steamcustomizer.com].

Do you remember the photo series Humans of Chernarus[www.dayzunderground.com]? It continues and it is still really cool. If you don't know it, it is a portrait of some DayZ characters living on the DayZ Underground server, the project is inspired by Humans of New York.

And the last community content for today are Joito's Twitch alerts made by the talented Cobalt_Smobalt. They are so awesome!

Let's check the riddle.

Who guessed the riddle from the last Status Report?

Emu Threat
basedBara_RL
CanisDirus

The correct answer was a Little Hill near Mogilevka.

And the riddle for this Status Report is:

If you know where is it, tweet it to our official Twitter account with #DayZriddleTime and you can be on the Wall of Fame next time.

Thank you for every content you've sent me and see you next time!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by A1ANNUAKII.

Status Report - 19 June 2018

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 13:07 CEST

Following the 0.63 Experimental release last week we are back with our Status Report. Today, Eugen gives us an update on the state of development, while Viktor and Adam from the animation team show us what they've been up to for the past couple of weeks. Our Map Designer Adam demonstrates changes to the weather system and we get some insights into the audio progress by our Sound Designer Filip. And of course we close with our community highlights, let's dive into it!

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Viktor
Dev Update/Adam Oresten
Dev Update/Adam Franců
Dev Update/Filip
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,

the Experimental release is behind us, but the work does not stop here. So I would like to look at the issues present, troubling the community playing this version and also talk about the internal development that has happened and features you'll be seeing very soon on the Stress Test and Experimental branch. We kept both of the branches active to make sure we don't break Experimental too often and have features coming into it with more polish. While 0.63 is heavy on new technology, we know it's quite light on content. But you will be able to enjoy a lot of the new stuff in the upcoming weeks.

The issues that take longest to iron out are related to the stability of client and server, and problems that would end up interrupting your play sessions for various reasons. From locked characters, to server kicks or just unexpected crashes to desktop. Things are getting better, but there is more to be done in this regard and we continue to monitor the situation and apply fixes to make sure we eliminate this as soon as possible. We know its not there yet and its our top priority.

We should also talk about our plan to make the Experimental servers available to server owners currently running their communities. Sadly this had to be slightly postponed due to changes necessary for GDPR and memory leaks wreaking havoc on stability and performance. These seem to be fixed as of today, so very soon you will be able to switch over and enjoy the updated version with your fellow community members on your own terms.

In terms of development, we are currently moving along quite nicely with only small delays in features planned out internally. The benefits of the new technology are already showing themselves in the pace of implementation. We are also looking into possible solutions to issues that currently cause these delays and make sure we deliver. Let's go over the current state of development and features themselves.

We can consider finished for Experimental phase:

Hidden stash
CPR
Gestures
Repairing
UI Main Menu
Soft Skills
Environmental Exposure
Goat - Animal

Last week we have moved/continue to the review/bug fixing of:

Character Unconsciousness
Chambering Loop
Fireplace
Jump
UI Server Browser
Cooking
Weapon/Item Swap Action/Animation
Compass
Gathering Ambient Loot
Gathering Actions
Vehicles - Open/Close doors
Vehicles - Attach/Detach vehicle parts
Injured Animations

This week is dedicated to the internal implementation of:

Climbing
Weapon dispersion
Weapon zeroing
Weapons - Double Barrel
Diseases
Scopes
Enfusion Hierarchy
New Input System
Action Animations
Collisions during melee

So you might be asking yourself when these things hit Stress Test and Experimental branches. We plan to switch over a bunch of these very soon, and you can expect to have these available in batches over the coming weeks. However, we want to aim for at least unconscious state to be finished in different edge cases. As of now, there are still small issues with ladder/water unconscious state interactions that are not ready for the Stress Test, but this week we should see them fixed and as such moved to the Stress Test branch alongside many other new features and content.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Viktor

Hello everyone, today I would like to share with you in this short update what the animation team has been working on for the past weeks and what is going on at the moment. Obviously, the player character is important to us, so we continue improving its behaviour and what it can do.

At the moment, we are revisiting some of the animations and improving them, or replacing them with better ones. This includes melee combat and its attacks. There have been some animation changes to better represent which item is the player attacking with, like a new sprint-attack with the baseball bat. Also, a lot of work has been put into finger poses so that the character is holding various items the best way it can. Some of the recent animation additions include the new IZH43 animation set, and some gestures like nodding head, shrug, and "OK".

One of the more significant improvements to player locomotion is the ability to jump over obstacles. The feature is still work-in-progress, as well as the animations, but the character is now able to overcome small objects that are in his way by jumping over them. We are now in the process of adding all the animation variations for different directions and items in hands. At the same time, our programmer is working on the climbing for players and soon, we will start implementing animations for it.

As we also started tidying up some animations and features, there is an ongoing work on player actions. This includes polishing of existing animations, some graph tweaks, but also some new animations to better visualize what the character is doing. Our Technical Animator Adam will share more details on what was happening over the past weeks regarding various animation improvements related to these actions.

Make sure to check out the gifs for the baseball bat attack, cutting down bushes and, jumping.

Cheers!

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

Dev Update/Adam Oresten

For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work revamping, tweaking, and creating animations for many various actions. User actions are the backbone of the game, and as such, they require thought out implementation; what items can they be done with? What stances are they realistic in? Should the character be able to move during the action? All of these play a huge role in their realization, concept, and execution.

I’ve implemented animations for on back actions (mainly important ones; drinking, eating, etc), tweaked some action animations to be faster or slower and cutting out unnecessary parts, depending on which type of action. I’ve also created and implemented animations for placing heavy items (barrels, generators, etc) and smaller items (bear traps, mines, etc), and I’ve also revamped the horticulture action animations, such as cutting down a tree with a two-handed axe, or one-handed hatchet, cutting down bushes, and getting bark from trees with knives or machetes. As a part of these actions, I also implemented some smaller QoL (quality of life) representative action animations for viewing compass and viewing the map to properly convey what the player is currently doing.

We’re in “full steam ahead” mode with the actions and their corresponding animations, and every week we’re working on new actions and polishing the animations for the ones we already have!

- Adam Oresten / Technical Animator

Dev Update/Adam Franců

In our Status Report from 22 November 2016[dayz.com], we shared our plans to upgrade SimulWeather/TrueSky - a 3rd party library used to render volumetric clouds in DayZ. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, we had to ultimately cancel this plan and rather focus our attention on the current implementation that is present in DayZ since the beginning of Early Access. This has not only allowed us to make necessary performance adjustments but also to take a closer look at the visuals of clouds and what could be improved within the limits of the current implementation. Here is a short summary of what has been changed:

Regarding performance improvements we have reached a point, where we have decided to remove the ability to disable volumetric clouds on the client side - this change will take an effect once revamp of graphical options is finalized. There have been major changes in the cloud configuration, which are mainly aimed to make the clouds more visible and distinct from the skybox background. We improved the interaction of fog (in distance and height) and volumetric clouds, so that clouds should blend better with the horizon when it is foggy.

The silver lining effect of clouds has been greatly boosted during the early to late sunrises and sunsets. The movement speed of clouds during windy conditions has been reduced and we've brought additional improvements to the skybox background textures (overcast-dependent) along with some minor tweaks to the global lighting config to support the changes in the skybox and volumetric clouds.

In addition to the changes of clouds, we have also taken a look again at the visuals of rain. These new changes include:

Closeup raindrops are much more visible now.
Re-added effect that tries to visualize light refraction on raindrops.
Fogginess parameter has been tweaked so the rain blends better with the background.
Closeup rain drops are more visible during the night-time around light sources.
Rain speed has been increased.

Both clouds and rain changes should be available to test once the next major Stress Test branch update happens. We are looking forward to your feedback on these improvements!

- Adam Franců / Map Designer

Dev Update/Filip Čenžák

Hi all,

The latest sound feature we started to work on are voice sounds for the character. So far we've implemented breathing when the character runs out of stamina, the sounds for holding breath while aiming in iron sight mode. and hit reactions when the character takes damage. We plan to add more sounds to create a more immersive character representation. Some of the sounds will be connected to animations, like grunts while jumping, or picking up heavy items, or sounds to emphasize melee combat. Others should be connected to character states, like the feeling of hunger or representation of disease.

So far, all sounds are placeholders and in some cases, only male sounds are played.

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Community Spotlight

Hello everyone, the last two weeks were both really exciting and busy for us.

The release of Experimental was a big milestone all of us have been looking forward to for a long time. Even though we are aware of some issues on Experimental, we are happy, that you finally can play 0.63 almost whenever you want. If you haven't done it already, check our Highlight page[dayz.com] featuring all the good stuff from this update!

[dayz.com]

Another big event was our Community Live Stream. We knew that just a day after the release of 0.63 Experimental, there were going to be a lot of questions. Unfortunately, after announcing the stream, our beloved Eugen got sick and it was clear, that he wouldn’t be able to attend the stream. We still wanted to hold on to our promise and decided to take it as an opportunity to do our first Community Live Stream. We introduced new members of our Community team, opened Boydy's package (thanks again!) and tried to answer as many questions as possible even without the devs.

As I said before, we had a Community Live Stream. I just want to explain what it means. In future, we want to stream in two formats – a developer and a community stream. On developer streams, you can expect information directly from devs and detailed answers for your questions. The second format is more community-related. Our community team wants to talk with the community about events, content from creators and all the stuff from you because you are really important to us. We tried the first community stream and we had a lot of technical difficulties (as always, it is not fun without it, is it?). Here is the VOD from the stream:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/273523726

You asked who made the music on the stream. It is a member of our community from the Netherlands called L_K_P1 [soundcloud.com]who makes DayZ inspired music and we love it in the dev team! The song from the stream is named DayZ meme and here it is if you are interested:

Soundcloud[soundcloud.com]

Do you need a new wallpaper? I have a cool one for you made by ChernoMerlo from the DrDesync’s screenshot.

And here is another one. I have it on my desktop already!

Shane O’Sullivan sent me a really interesting piece of a newspaper. It is named Bohemian Post and he made it by himself. There you can find news about the infection spreading across Chernarus.

Now I want to show you a special project by DayZUnderground called #TwitterPlay. It is an interactive DayZ story within Twitter and it is updated daily. People are making a story through their votes in polls and they can decide what happened with a survivor, about whom the story is. It is a really nice idea and we love it! Join the story and make your own part! You can find the latest part HERE.

Cage, who we met personally at Pax East, sent us his custom advertisement inspired by our Nota Cola and Pipsi drinks and they are pretty creative.

And the last two pieces of content are videos. The first one is a cinematic trailer about surviving in Chernarus and it is sick. Everyone from the dev team loves it, this is amazing work by HookOak Productions!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAqpdS7FwtE

The last short clip is made by our loyal member NeuroticEUROtic and he is sharing his feelings when Experimental was near.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtOjKsAiWdk

Time for a riddle. The riddle from the latest Status Report wasn't so hard, the rock is situated on the North-West of Svetlojarsk above the train yard. Who guessed it right?

Megamente
Polski Tytan
Beehive1982
Kerbo

This time we prepared this picture with Adam:

If you know where is it, tweet it to our official Twitter account with #DayZriddleTime and you can be on the wall of fame next time. Thank you guys for your content and I hope you will share your creation with us next time!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by WaffelsBR.

DayZ 0.63 Experimental Update

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 16:51 CEST

Dear Survivors,

today, we are releasing the DayZ 0.63 Update to the Experimental branch! With this update, you’ll be able to experience some of the key engine changes brought to DayZ. Developing this new technology backbone for the game took the better part of the past 4 years in Early Access, and we’re very happy that we can finally let everyone play what we call “the new DayZ”.

Check out this article for more information. [dayz.com]

Status Report - 5 June 2018

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 21:26 CEST

To start off this Status Report, we are going to let Stress Test #18 run over night, so have a good time. Today, Eugen is going to talk about the upcoming weeks as our Stress Test versions gain more and more stability. Peter gives an introduction to the conditions of our new Central Economy system and Adam explains the ongoing changes to the Balota airfield. We close with some of the most memorable highlights of our community. Let's dive into it!

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Peter
Dev Update/Adam
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,

As we are pushing a large amount of fixes into the current Stress Test Branch, our aim is to stabilize the build enough to launch an Experimental Branch that will be available on official Experimental severs, as well as community servers, as server owners will be able to switch over. We expect the 0.62 Stable to be played less often and we will move server resources to Experimental depending on the player interest.

We expect a couple more Stress Tests to be happening this week, aimed at least a couple fixes for crashes and locked character issues. We would like to confirm these fixes over the next couple of days and have the build available during the weekend for an extended Stress Test. This will be the version we will be launching for all the players interested in moving to experimental.
In the meantime, we have planned out the features that will be reviewed and connected to the new engine. This is done on the Internal branch of development and will move over to the Experimental in bundles. Last week we have moved to review/bug fixing of:

Hidden stashes
Chambering loop (Enabling weapon classes such as the Mosin in-game)
Character - Unconsciousness
CPR
Gestures
Repairing
UI - Main Menu Polished
Sensors audibility/visibility (Infected)
Sheep/animations, behavior

This week is dedicated to the implementation of:

Softskills
Fireplace
Environmental exposure
Jump
Weapons - double barrel
UI - Server Browser Polished
Goat/animations, behaviour

When these features will hit experimental, soon after the Experimental release we expect to switch over and keep doing Stress Tests for the newer builds before they move on to Experimental. The process itself is focused on connecting these features to the new character as a lot of them have been under development for a long time now. Each week we aim to deliver the implementation and dedicate the second week to bug fixing. Switching these over to Experimental will be done depending on the feature review and the community feedback that might affect priorities.
- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Peter

The new Central Economy (CE) is in charge of the spawn and clean up of items, infected, animals, vehicles and dynamic events. It is easier to setup than the old CE and allows us to be more flexible with the categorization and areas of occurrence. A more precise placement can be achieved as well. After a series of internal tests during its implementation, we deployed it to DayZ 0.63. The CE is a complex system, as its behaviour develops over time and reacts to player interaction. Testing on our side was limited in scale and time.

To check how the new Central Economy is behaving on a mass scale in the wild, we gathered data during the 11th Stress Test. From 18.5. to 20.5. we saved the storage files every hour across all servers which were constantly under full load. Loading this data back into the game allowed us to reconstruct how the CE behaved over time.

From all the items spawned by the CE we picked the ones that are crucial for survival - food (beans, spaghetti, peaches, sardines, tuna), drinks (Cola, Pipsi, Spite, Kvass, water bottle) and firearms (Makarov, FNX45, Skorpion, IZH18, MP5, UMP45, AKM). The presented data is from the UK 0-8 server. The overview maps show where these items were spawned over time and similarly, the graphs show their overall quantity on the map over time (note that one dot means at least one item or more). To put things into context there is also a map of character spawn areas.

Areas of character spawns along the coast.

https://youtu.be/TnqF2boItvI
An animated occurrence of food across the map from Friday to Sunday.

Amounts of food across the map from Friday to Sunday.

Positions of food in the map at its lowest, Saturday 11:00.

Amounts of drinks across the map from Friday to Sunday.

Positions of drinks on the map at their lowest, Saturday 09:00.

Amounts of firearms across the map from Friday to Sunday.

Positions of firearms on their map at their lowest, Saturday 15:00.

From available data granularity, it can be seen that in general, there have been enough food and drinks across the map to survive, as well as firearms to provide empowerment of survivors. Interestingly, the sum of all initially spawned food in 0.62 is lower than the sum of all spawned food at their minimal quantity in 0.63 (when an item hits its minimum threshold it will start to respawn back to its initial value). It would be nice to see players adapting to a new mindset of getting prepared before starting their next trip by checking more houses and structures at their location.

However, there are things which will be addressed down the road to improve the CE behaviour and its balance. It’s clear that some parts of the map are rather empty, especially in the bottom right corner. In such cases, areas for character spawns will be tweaked and more structures will be added where it makes sense. That goes hand in hand with lowering the safe radius around characters which prevents items to pop up, as in high traffic areas this can cause the lockout of entire cities.

Next, it’s the settings of the CE itself playing the decisive role. The randomisation of the lifetime of more common items has to be set in a greater range, as we noticed there were cleanups of large amounts at once causing noticeable dips. Moreover, the difference between nominal and minimal values of an item makes items spread across map even more unevenly. Most importantly, the short time frame we had to ‘boot up’ the new Central Economy and the truncated list of given items to spawn, led to a sub-optimal items categorization and defined tier zones. This is the area of the CE which will become crucial when more items start to flow back into the game and we really need to nail it.

With the new Central Economy we definitely have a great toolset to tune loot and its distribution as good as possible, but given the nature and complexity of it, it will take some time.

Let the looting begin... see you in Chernarus folks!
- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Adam

As mentioned in our Status Report from April 25, we are re-designing Chernogorsk and its surroundings. If you have played on the 0.63 Stress Test Branch and visited this area, you may have seen where we are heading with this re-design. I should remind you that map changes, unlike other parts of the game, are something that is not receiving updates on the Stress Test Branch that often, because of the difficulties with the branching of map data. Anyway, I am happy to say that quite a lot of progress has been made over the past few weeks and we are nearing the final stages of polishing and optimizing the overall area.

If you have played the more recent versions of the 0.63 Stress Test Branch, you may have also noticed that we have decided to re-design the Balota airfield. This change was planned for a long time and originally set to be made at a later stage of development, but since the re-design of Chernogorsk is covering the area from Balota to Elektro, we have decided to include the Balota airfield re-design in it too. Balota is such an odd spot for any type of airfield to begin with, but we feel the need for a number of airfields across the Chernarus.

Now with the NWAF re-design close to being done, we have got a proper military airbase on the map and we feel like there is no need to have other military air bases. And so the airfield was completely de-militarised, the concrete runway was removed and the whole airfield was rotated a bit more facing inland (so the corridor is pointing away from inhabited areas). Given the relatively small and odd place, we have decided to transform this airfield into a local airstrip, maintained by a local flying club and have re-used NEAF buildings to support this idea (and if you ask, yes, we do have further plans for NEAF too, but not for 0.63). To give this newly re-designed airfield a backstory, it has been captured by the military forces, with most of its entrances sealed off by mostly improvised structures.

- Adam Franců / Map Designer

Community Spotlight

Hello guys,

Let's check out what the community has for us after two weeks.

I need to start with something really sad. Our community lost one of its members and a great streamer. Jen, known as Poisonantler[www.twitch.tv], died under unfortunate circumstances on 8th March. We decided among the dev team to commemorate her by placing a small cross and a bench in the place where she disconnected for the last time.

Our Brand Manager Martin Čulák accepted an invitation from our favourite Australian content creator Boydy and joined him in his podcast. Check it out, you can find interesting info in the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT50aSzwUFg

I didn't expect much from a video with just walkie-talkie recording. But I was really surprised by how entertaining the video is. This is a recording of a few people's conversations from The Village server which has a very interesting ending. I really recommend to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QilcAfCPMxQ

It is good to see that hand painting is not dead. This DayZ logo on a canvas made by danyuls0n's girlfriend makes us happy. We hope it is already hanging on the wall somewhere near a PC.

I know we didn't have a location riddle for a long time. Our Twitter is now overwhelmed, because of Stress Tests, so we need to identify the riddle tweets. Just tweet the location with #DayZriddleTime hashtag and I will find it!

Have a nice day(Z), Survivors!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by zombi.

Status Report - 22 May 2018

Tue, 22 May 2018 19:19 CEST

Following the 0.63 Stress Test weekend we are back with a new issue of our biweekly Status Report. Today, Eugen looks back at the first results from the weekend, Peter talks about missing visual indicators in the current Stress Test builds and Viktor gives a glimpse into the progress of the animation team. The Community Spotlight is defined by your first reactions to 0.63. Let's dive into it!

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Peter
Dev Update/Viktor
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,
at first, I would like to thank you for the amazing participation during the weekend Stress Test. It has helped us to identify a number of new issues that we are investigating as I write this. Let's take a closer look at some of those issues.

Crashes and general game stability issues

There have been about 200 crashes altogether over the period of two days with a couple of different causes. Some of them are new, but most are known. Hopefully, the amount of data generated will identify the pattern to replicating these issues internally and getting them fixed.

Character locked in database

Besides the stability issues, we are still tracking situations where a player character gets locked in a database. Although happening less often than previously, this is still a major problem that is most likely tied to a server/client crash/freeze not closing the connection gracefully, and not unlocking the character as intended. We have a possible fix for these outlier issues and crashes in our internal main Development Branch of the game and should roll these out in next few Stress Tests.

Basic Central Economy balance

There is an investigation ongoing into Central Economy loot distribution. Specifically, we're looking at cases where the intended gameplay loop is not properly supported by items presented/spawned to players exploring even the most remote corners of Chernarus.

DayZ Central Economy

The Central Economy is a complex system that controls the distribution of loot across Chernarus. It's supposed to sustain a barrage of ongoing player interaction on a given server (player picking up and dropping loot, taking it across different servers...), with the goal to keep the core gameplay loop during a gameplay session challenging, encouraging players to learn, and eventually master the survival in DayZ. At the same time though, it needs to be a fun gameplay mechanic.

It's important to note that the Stress Tests are our first real opportunity to really see how the Central Economy behaves in 0.63, as we're just not able to internally reproduce the behavior of large amount of players in the game. That ultimately puts us at the very beginning of all the balancing. During Stress Tests, we are extracting economy states over periods of time to understand the players movement and their interactions. This in turn helps us understand where our priorities should be within the spawning system.

The second part of our loot/basic survival mechanic problem is the character representation itself - meaning how healthy/hungry/thirsty your character is. That sets the pace to this core gameplay loop of keeping your character fed and alive. Any potential tweaking of character representation values depends on the findings of our loot distribution tests. We will have to cover a lot of possible border cases that happen to players.

Additionally, we will (as previously suggested) also play around with the overall player numbers per server, and we will need to see how to scale the Central Economy with the player numbers going up, possibly all the way to a 100 players per server.

How do we prepare the Stress Test release packages

Since I've mentioned our internal Development Branch earlier, I also wanted to explain the process behind the scenes that goes into releasing a Stress Test itself. Internally, we have created a new branch of DayZ for data and changes that we specifically need to run public Stress Tests.

Software Branching

Branching, in revision control[en.wikipedia.org] and software configuration management[en.wikipedia.org], is the duplication of an object under revision control (such as asource code[en.wikipedia.org] file or a directory tree[en.wikipedia.org]) so that modifications can happen in parallel along both branches. More in a related Wikipedia article[en.wikipedia.org].

We've been merging various fixes and surgical tweaks to the game on that branch, while the regular development has been ongoing on our main Development Branch. With Stress Tests, we are trying to gather data on specific problems that require a high-stress environment with tons of players coming in and out of the server, pushing all gameplay systems to their limits. That is specifically the case with loot distribution and all player interactions tied to it.

Stabilizing these interactions and making them somewhat consistent with a decent amount of variety is our primary goal. We want you to experience that feeling of discovery when you find what you need at a certain moment. Especially if it's a rare item. Looting is a big part of the DayZ gameplay, we know how much this can affect the enjoyment from fighting for your life in Chernarus, so with each Stress Test, we set a goal and a particular combination of data that we want to gather within a specific gameplay element or system. Then, we add extra logging to these interactions, helping us to decide on the next action we should be taking.

It's only a small part of the development though. The Development Branch has seen a lot of additional optimizations already, even including fixes to several different issues that you have been experiencing, so our goal now is to leave the Stress Test branch to keep the development pace going forward. Our Development Branch is where the progress towards experimental goals happens, so it's about time we make sure this branch is viable for live playtests. To ensure we really are ready to do that switch, we will release a short Stress Test based on the code/data of that branch before we go on for another longer Stress Test.

Once again, I want to say a BIG thank you for the feedback coming in, it's what makes this community special. All of us want a great game, no doubts about it!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Peter

In the last Status Report I was commenting on the community feedback regarding firearms in our DayZ Stress Tests. Today I will continue with different elements which are related to them.

Weapon switching animations

As is pretty obvious, the animations for swapping items from the inventory to the hand slot are missing. Especially with weapons, this creates a gameplay problem, as a lack of visual communication turns a harmless disarmed character into a threat in a split second.

Currently we are implementing these item switch animations and, along with them, we are changing one important thing - shoulder slots will be no longer be dedicated. That means you will be able to carry two long firearms or two melee weapons as needed. As we progress with 0.63, a slot for a belt will also be added, opening possibilities for an additional pistol holster, knife sheet, or quiver. A slot for the bow is considered as well, but there needs to be a bow implemented first to see how it will work with non-dedicated shoulders.

Hit feedback

Another part missing is animation feedback of a target being hit with a projectile, as we turned that specific feature off for the Stress Test. We ran into a problem where even additive impact affected the aim of a firearm. Such an authentic affair quickly becomes a very unpleasant mechanic, preventing a reaction by putting you in a disadvantage after being hit - the only chance was that the shooter will miss or have to reload so your aim can recover in the meantime. We will have to address this issue as we would like to have animated feedback following a projectile hit.

Bleeding

On a different issue, bleeding and its treatment are basic DayZ mechanics. Unfortunately, without the new parent-child hierarchy, which is being implemented as we speak, we cannot pin particle emitters to the character properly and animate them with it. We've decided to postpone the visual representation of bleeding particles as well. Admittedly, this is a bad timing, as in 0.63 you have to treat every bleeding source individually. With slightly unresponsive progress arrows of the blood stat icon (more about indicators later) and no way to tell if there are some bleeding wounds left, it’s hard to say how many times you should bandage.

Overall balance

Apart from that, please be aware that many elements you see in the game right now have not been not through a basic balance pass just yet. From digestion, regeneration speeds and stamina, through damages of melee and projectiles to the weight of items, their sizes, and cargo spaces... it’s safe to say that basically everything will be adjusted more or less and it is connected to some degree with the lack of features, mechanics, and content, which will be added down the road during the 0.63 Experimental phase.

Oh, and it will be a ride... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Viktor

The animation team is now focused on several parts of the player character. We are now in the phase of improving and finalizing the prone system. Animations for crawling in prone on the back, which have been missing until now, are being added. The cameras and some poses are not final yet as well. And of course, after the animations are finished, we will have to do a couple of rounds of bugfixing for prone on the back before we tick it off as done.

Another important part that is in progress, is overcoming obstacles. We now have a working prototype for jumping, but we are still in the process of adding missing animations. Meanwhile, there has been some work done on climbing over higher obstacles. These are divided into multiple levels, and different animations will be played depending on the height of the obstacle.

Close combat will see some changes as well. As we want to have more variation to the combat, we are adding new animations for the baseball bat. These should better reflect the item. In the future, we want to continue with this and add more item specific attack animations.

Last but not least, there is ongoing work on firearms, vehicles, user actions, infected and also tons of general bugfixing. All of these areas are a longer term task, but you should see constant improvements in the game with everything related during Experimental. But for now, let's check out some gifs! Cheers!

- Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator

Community Spotlight

Hey Survivors,

I hope you had a weekend at least as amazing as I did! Why was it so amazing? Because of you! You were simply being a fantastic help during the Stress Test! 30 482 of you have already tried the first version of update 0.63. Wow, thank you! We've had so much feedback, that I wasn't able to read it all in just one day!

We were watching streamers the entire weekend and we are really happy to see your love for DayZ. You had a lot of fun, we saw all the emotions, it was so awesome.

For a while, DayZ was the second most watched game on Twitch this weekend, it reached more than 76 000 viewers and it has been played by some of the biggest streamers such as Summit1g[t.co], Anthony Kongphan[t.co] or shroud[twitch.tv] and they were having a good time too.

https://clips.twitch.tv/SweetSingleSparrowUnSane?tt_content=player_title&tt_medium=clips_embed

https://clips.twitch.tv/SmokyAstuteSharkPeteZaroll?tt_content=player_title&tt_medium=clips_embed

https://clips.twitch.tv/BetterImpossibleAniseBIRB?tt_content=player_title&tt_medium=clips_embed

You did a great job with videos this week.

I found this cinematic made by DaGuyd and it is pretty impressive. Check it out, it is only under 2 minutes long:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlDXNh2oTdI

Another cinematic short named Loot Lost is made by our favorite Status Report reader Septic Falcon. And we like it a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Iu0gJhTZpk

And here is a creepy story about a cannibal doctor who loves the flesh of his patients by MarcusGalic. Eating people is bad, isn't it? Who knows…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPKrkNui700

Look at this true hero! His name is Reginald and he is a humanitarian in Chernarus. His mission is help to people and he is very good at it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL3oMU62or4

The last video is from the well known double trouble creators - Vertiigo and MrMoon. It is a really funny story of friends lost in the wilderness - they are best friends until the hunger comes… I almost died laughing watching this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZNxnoxXLEY

I love your creativity and your passion for DayZ on both real and virtual paper. Art pieces like these make me happy and I thank you for them.

This one is made by AStupidAnt from Reddit. It took him about 4 hours and he did a really good job.

This photo is from a true DayZ fan, ScarecrowCOD. He even has a gas mask! And check the painting on the wood he made. Nice!

That is all from me, have great two weeks and see you on the next Stress Test!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by BubsonHD.

Status Report - May 8, 2018

Tue, 08 May 2018 20:37 CEST

Following an entire week of Stress Tests, the team has gathered around to report on the results of our first public testing phases for 0.63. We’ve received so much feedback from you guys and we’re going to dive right into it; but first, there is someone you probably haven’t read in a long time!

Dev Update/Brian
Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Peter
Dev Update/Mirek
Dev Update/Filip
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Brian

Greetings Survivors,

I can't begin to tell you how great it has felt for myself, for Peter, and honestly for the whole team to see all of your reactions to the work that has been done on .63, and DayZ as a whole. For what seems like years, a big part of the team (especially Design and Animation) have worked on documentation and internal prototypes without hardly any feedback. To finally be able to start sharing some of this with you all (and thanks to platforms like Twitch, Youtube, Mixer, etc - SEE) and hear your thoughts has been the most uplifting since the Early Access launch on Steam.

It’s a good day for DayZ and the DayZ community. I can not wait for .63 to hit experimental (and stable as well of course!) and begin to be able to spend more time with you all in this new DayZ experience in longer play sessions.

With that said - I feel DayZ has reached a point in which I, much like how Dean felt years back - am no longer needed. I've spent years talking to you all, working with the team, and collaborating with Peter on where we want DayZ to be, how we want DayZ to feel. Now that you have started to see, and touch DayZ .63 I feel like our plans, our dreams are finally within grasp. Peter Nespešný and the design team have a rock-solid grasp of what DayZ is, and what it needs to be. All of our systems have been discussed, documented, and discussed again.

For the last year, I have been slowly taking more and more of a back seat (as I'm sure some of you have noticed) and tried to push folks like Peter, Adam, and others to let their voice be heard. Over that year I have made plans for what is next for me and worked for free with Peter Nespešný in a design consultant role.
I won't lie - it hasn't been easy, and there have been times where Peter and I both were uncertain about how .63 would be received, or how it would perform under full-scale load. I don't want to be a broken record - but I am so happy that all of those concerns have been washed away.

DayZ has been my life, made my life - and been so ingrained in who and what I am that I won't be able to just walk away. Hell, I've just crossed 7,000 hours between two accounts. From here, I look forward to opportunities back home in the States, being closer to family, and playing DayZ as much as I possibly can. I certainly have not forgotten my promise to TSM Smak to do a 24-hour stream when DayZ hits 1.0.

See you out there in Chernarus folks, the sun is rising and the future looks bright.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear Survivors,
before I start, I have to thank Brian for his contribution to DayZ over the years and wish him the best in his future endeavors. His passion is an inspiration to many. And I’m pretty sure we will be seeing each other in DayZ all the time :). I know we both wish for the game to grow and improve and finally testing the 0.63 has been a step in the right direction although a lot of work remains to be done.

On that note, I want to thank you for participating in the last few stress tests. Feedback is coming in from every channel and we read all of it; from our forums, Reddit, Twitter, and more. I noticed a couple of topics that are coming up, and I want you to know we will be looking at these in the testing of both stress test build and experimental. We will prioritize resolving issues depending on their severity or their impact on the gameplay, while also working on more advanced features like climbing, vehicles and base building alongside that. I want to remind everybody that these will be part of the experimental build but probably won’t appear in its first iteration. It is extremely important to test these during experimental because as soon as we move the build to the stable branch, we want to focus on bug-fixing and tweaking. Don’t forget that as soon as we hit experimental, customer servers will be able to switch over.

Now let’s get back to the things that were tested thanks to Offline DayZ being available, although it is definitely not representing the DayZ experience yet.

Distant sounds, not hearing a gun or where is it coming from, or megaphone audio not traveling far enough; all of these things require tweaking as most of the initial configuration has not seen a revision yet, we will be looking into these as we progress with experimental.
Distant lights, either a flash from a gun or a camp far far away; now these issues sadly have no simple solution, but we are talking about possibilities and will experiment with those as we get further down the development.

Inventory visuals and functionality; a lot of the underlying tech is in, and visuals are still WIP. However, there are a lot of things we want to improve and work on during the ongoing testing. We want the game to feel physical and consistent in its behavior, as well as making sure things are telegraphed to a player when they need to be, focusing on the user experience of crafting and manipulation. The idea is there it just needs a lot of bug-fixing and tweaks.

Besides the issues mentioned above there is an amazing amount of gameplay feedback, from the crosshair interactions, reload mechanics, aiming, shooting, controls, actions and more. We will be looking at what has been said and discussed and I know Peter will talk about these in much more detail over the next few status reports. As already mentioned before our next goal is multiplayer testing with infected and I’m definitely looking forward to that one!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Peter

Two weeks passed since the first Stress Test of DayZ 0.63. In the meantime, there have been another three more Stress Tests plus we added the possibility to play in an offline mode if you are interested in trying out what’s on the table with the “new” DayZ.

During this time we gathered a lot of qualitative and constructive feedback from you - our community, which I am very glad for (read past Status Report to find more about my feelings designing something without feedback for so long). Now I would like to comment on the most important things through the Status Report, which is the most effective way on how to reach most of our players.

As most of you know, our goal is to make everything to feel as tangible as possible, so you really need to be making things over time, at least most of the core actions. In this respect, we chose to have reactive raise of hands. To maintain the active stance, in which you can endanger others or defend yourself against them, you need to hold a dedicated button. Once you remove your hands from controls, the character should be rendered as relaxed and harmless. Telegraphing intentions and what’s going on is one of the most important aspects of DayZ.

However, from feedback it seems like there is no problem with holding raise to become actionable, but more with the actual switching to iron sights while the firearm is raised. Currently, this is bound to MMB/LSHIFT, which obviously feels awkward and clunky, especially when it’s on another hand than the one controlling aim and shooting itself. One solution is to a double-click of raise and then hold it to enter ADS directly, but unfortunately, proof of concept which was available in first Stress Test, was implemented in a very crude way and it felt very unpleasant, confusing and it did not meet with understanding.

Personally, I think a chain of actions is fine, firstly I’m raising my firearm to do some immediate shooting or I enter aiming down sights to get better precision, especially on mid to long range. On the other hand, I know that I will be upset finding myself in an advantageous sniper position and having to hold raise for the whole time waiting for the right moment to strike the target. I can assure you that we are very aware of this discrepancy and we want to solve it. As many of you already suggested, and we are tending to it for some time already, the solution is to simply have raise still on hold, but ADS (aim down sights) togglable from a lowered stance. While I’m not a huge fan of such kind of “togglability” of states (you won’t believe me how much it triggers me off watching friendly survivors talking by a fire while aiming at each other's faces), we will definitely try some other ways to address this until we end up with implementing this simplest solution.

Another thing which is causing some tables flipping around is ‘hip fire’, respectively how accurate it is. Actually, it’s not hip fire, as the firearm is in the same position as while being ADS - the only difference between these two is the camera position - but for simplicity’s sake let’s call it ‘hip fire’. In the first place, it needs to be clear that ‘hip fire’ is not meant to be accurate by any means. It should be used for immediate reactions at very close ranges. Anyways advantage of it in its current state is coming from several factors. I already mentioned non-ergonomic switching to ADS above. First off we changed how the direction of the projectile trajectory is calculated while shooting from ‘hip fire’. Currently, it’s always heading from the weapon to the center of the screen. In the previous version .62, bullets were always fired out in the direction of a barrel of a gun, which didn’t make sense to anyone, which led us to introduce a floating crosshair to show where the barrel is pointing at (you kinda know to estimate that direction even when firing from hip IRL). However hunting this floating crosshair which is jumping across the screen like crazy is unpleasant and in the end, doesn’t make sense. So why not simply shoot towards the center of the screen - hence the change. Of course, the current implementation has a few worst cases where it’s not working properly or very badly to be honest, but those will be fixed one by one.

Another thing is that after the rewrite of the weapons we are missing implementation of dispersion - random cone-shaped spread defined by angle. Previously it was used as kind of an inaccuracy from the manufacturing process where long barrel weapons were most accurate and short barrel ones were least. We are not using it anymore as I think ‘fighting’ some random nonsense on mid to long ranges is over the top, as players are already challenged enough by mechanics like sway, recoil, zeroing, actual bullet speed and drop - all that combined with character movement, which is enough. However, if it’s applied only while using ‘hip fire’ it can help to introduced much welcomed inaccuracy on mid to long ranges. For now, we will try to address it with modified sway while not in ADS to see how it works out.

Next thing is the overly precise crosshair for ‘hip fire’. The former crosshair was ugly for sure, but in its size, it wasn’t precise at all, thus it was hard to assess the center of the screen, but still good enough to show the direction of shots. After a massive outcry about how ugly the crosshair is, we change its look as it is very simple to do - and to show you how a simple change can have a huge impact on gameplay, which, not surprisingly, you don’t like. In the past during internal playtest we ran a series of tests without a crosshair, but people were mostly unable to shoot anything even on close ranges during stress situations which required fast reactions. Personally, I’m for the complete removal of the crosshair, but then there are plenty of 3rd party software or monitors allowing to overlay crosshair on screen, making it unfair to those playing fair. By the way, you can disable crosshair (along with dot) from options (game>crosshair>off). Forcing disable of crosshairs will be also available server side.

As a mix of all the above, there is a possible exploit now with ‘hip fire’ where you can fire immediately after pressing the button for raising firearm where the dot can be abused for super precise aim. Of course, this will be fixed down the road.

Advanced firearms manipulation and subsequently accentuate usage of quick slots as pockets with instant access to items in them, is related to the philosophy of DayZ’s survival element - being prepared for possible things to come. Using quick slots for anything else beyond the switch of items in hands is not standard at all and it needs some time to get used to it for sure. Compared to old DayZ (.62 and previous versions), we changed loading weapons to hold-action, instead of just click, for a reason that weapons with internal magazines will be loaded continuously - same as how feeding detachable magazines works now. Next, we enriched the usage of quick slots for initiating any combining actions, basically crafting, but I have to see someone to using it like that yet, as it can save a lot of time and inventory access.

Anyways quick slots have that disadvantage that they are kind non-ergonomic, especially for hold-actions which is of course a problem. Just the fact, that R key isn’t working as it’s used to work across all action games, which is so deeply rooted standard, inflames most of the players. I would like to point out, that currently, we cannot present you the big picture, where the pieces fit together - and that’s manually charged firearms like bolt action rifles or pump shotgun - which internal magazines can be continuously loaded and have to be manually charged prior to every shot, where R is used for now as it’s manipulation using a mechanism of the weapon. Even if it will be still unclear and uncomfortable after that, we have already plan B prepared, which makes R key to behave in ways people are more accustomed to. In that case, R would reload magazine or chamber (most probably from pre-prepared items in quick slots) while holding R would manipulate with the mechanism, or unjam it in such chase. We will be able to see and evaluate once manual firearms are implemented.

There is also critique regarding weak recoil. It’s good to know, that the new system for recoil is good, however, there is only one setting used across all weapons for now if I’m not mistaken. As it was tweaked for low caliber pistol, of course, it seems very off using an AKM. Better recoil patterns will be added gradually.

From other stuff related to gunplay which is also being questioned is hold breath. To be more specific - its default keybind, which is currently set to left CTRL. At first it seems to be non-ergonomic, but on the other hand, it makes sense as it’s paired with the walk modifier. With the upcoming new input controller we will separate these actions from each other, so we will be able to bind them independently. It’s worth to mention that most actions of the new character are hardwired to the actions of the old one which is gone for a long time now. This means we are in some occasions limited in achieving the desired result (for example we are still missing hold-action for environment interaction - currently bound to F, which limits us in the introduction of continuous actions, like drinking from the pond). Until the new input controller is in I would advise you to not rebind controls as it can completely mess up a new character in some cases.

Seems like I already made it into a solid wall of text even as I wanted to comment on other stuff as well in no particular order, like weapon changing animations, bleeding, hit impacts, falling, stamina, HUD and tendency icons, headbob, fake inertia, clipping issues in FPP, inventory, infected behavior, melee combat, balancing in general, lack of content and more. But I would better stop right there and leave those for next Status Report.

Brian, thank you for all your hard work for DayZ, your passion will be missed... see you in Chernarus man!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Mirek

Hello survivors,
today, I'd like to write about current Stress Tests, how they are helpful to us programmers (especially server-side stuff) and what's the plan with next Stress Tests. Secondly, I will write about our progress on the infected.

First of all, I want to thank all of you who are participating in these Stress Test sessions. They already helped us to find performance bottlenecks, some thread deadlocks, sources of crashes and connection issues. We fixed several of these issues and we're working on the rest. We've prepared some performance optimizations, which are in our internal branch and are ready for internal testing.

Our current Stress Test scenario, where all players are spawned in the same city, is probably the worst case for server performance and network traffic. Although we're quite happy with the numbers we received, we'll continue to improve performance till DayZ hits stable in version 1.0.

The next Stress Tests scenario (I'm not sure now when it will happen) will look like your ordinary DayZ session, which means that players will be spawned at different places and infected will be present. In these sessions, we will try to continuously increase player and AI numbers to see how intense we can populate Chernarus. Please keep in mind that the AI can be still buggy in these test so don't be angry if you'll be killed by infected which went through a wall (I will explain why this is happening in next paragraph).

So, now about the infected status. Some of you have met them in our recently released offline mode and noticed that they can go through obstacles sometimes. This is known to us and it's happening because we decided to save some performance on collision detection, therefore we've disabled collisions between AI units and static objects during movement - the navigation system should keep AIs on the navigation mesh and that's the reason why we disabled this collision detection. This bug is one with the highest priority and hopefully we will fix this navigation issue soon.

About infected and their features - basic movement, stealth mechanics, and fight logic are in place and we are iterating them. Designers are tweaking infected senses, which means they are balancing how infected can spot a player depending f.e. on player's stance or clothing which they wear.
We're adding some more movement features right now - turns and crawling. Crawling will be there a little bit later because not all animations are ready now for this movement state, but here you can at least see transition animations in the game:

Turning - I think it will be best if you look at these samples, to see what that means - I believe these will make stealth and fight funnier:

'

And that's all for now. As you can see, stability improvements and infected are our current milestone. Hopefully next SR we will be able to show you more from other game features.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Programmer

Dev Update/Filip

Hi all,
over the last couple of weeks, we've made several improvements. We’ve implemented ambient sound attenuation for interiors and added a smooth transition between outdoor and indoor states. The number of ambient sounds that can play simultaneously is now higher plus we’ve added a few new controllers, so sound can react more dynamically to weather changes. Regarding doors, we redesigned door open/close sounds and added over 200 new sounds in the process.

On a different issue, the localization of sound sources in 0.62 did not work very well. The visual position did not correlate with the position of the sound. Especially with animals, which you can hear over long distances, this slight offset made them hard to locate. This is why we decided to redesign vector panning. We are very happy with the changes we did for stereo configuration and now we are concentrating on surround configuration.

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Community Spotlight

Hello Survivors,
it is finally beautiful weather outside, but who cares when you can play the Stress Tests! We released four Stress Tests already as well as an offline version of DayZ and we received a lot of feedback from you. We are glad you are helping us to fix all these annoying bugs and crashes.

Let's check what you've sent us through our social networks.

This is really cool. An old friend of Sweetest_Kill gave her a DayZ-themed bat with her name on it. It is a nice gift, but please, don't use it on living creatures.

Guys, I want to show you a great video made by HandZ. It has everything - sadness, regret, violence, moral decision-making, betrayal and death. Great work HandZ, it is one of the best live action videos we ever saw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwUjeJmc66E

DickieTheChamp made a cute DayZ inspired USB. It is a small can of Pipsi and I want it so bad!

If you think it is only violence and blood in DayZ, we want to show you that you are not right. You can find love there as well. Mach and FubarBundyy can confirm we are right because they met in DayZ and they fell in love with each other. They are just celebrating one year together! So adorable!

Willkillshill shared his selfie photoshoot with us, from when he was playing on one of the Stress Test session. And it is hilarious.

And now some real Chernarus thing - on Reddit, zverus showed pictures of the real Nord East Airfield named Nalivaikivka airstrip, which is located near Kiev in Ukraine. Check it out, it is really interesting:

That is everything from me today, If you have anything you want to share with us, just send it to our official Twitter account and I will check it out!

- Baty / Community Manager

Header image by Punchy McSlap.

Status Report - 13 April 2018

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 21:14 CEST

Latest Development news from Eugen, small teasers of the upcoming changes to radios and other VoIP devices, as well as the final particle effects for gunshots, and also a nice summary of our trip to PAX East! It's not Tuesday, but it's still Status Report time, so let's read!

Contents This Week

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Jan
Dev Update/Boris
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear DayZ players.

All of us here are both playing and tweaking the version for the first Stress Test. You might be asking why it's not out yet, and how on earth we are enjoying it and not sharing that with you? :). The current state of the build, although fun and quite consistent, is still a bit unstable. And what I mean by unstable? In the worst gunfights with large numbers of players and looting, we can still see at least up to 10 different crashes averaging in up time of less than an hour. We fixed about 500 bugs so far for this Stress Test alone, and there is about 50 left. About 10 of those are crashes that have been plaguing our most recent internal playtests. The good news is that we were finally able to debug the reasons behind these, and are working on fixes as you read this.

[i.imgur.com]

Quick look at the issues that need fixing for 0.63 Experimental as of this afternoon (not including features that still need to be implemented).
Click to Enlarge[i.imgur.com]

Once these fixes are confirmed, and if nothing else pops up (usually does, but fingers crossed!), we will evaluate the state of the build again and start with Stress Testing. We are as anxious as you to get this ball rolling :).

Now for the work invested into things that are not launching with either Stress Tests or with the first Experimental build: there are about 1000 bugs fixed so far for Experimental and we are doing some heavy work on UI visuals and functionality to go beyond the basics needed to develop on the new engine. Jumping has got into the game with its first iteration and will be followed by climbing later as we polish animations and possible edge cases where players get stuck.

On the notion of having other means of movement rather than walking and running, we are still working on 0.63 vehicles, and also the first helicopter iterations for internal testing. These are still heavy work in progress as vehicles, base building, and several other features are still waiting for a commit (= implementation to the main game code) of technology that we have mentioned a couple of times: enabling hierarchy between entities in the game. We will move on to that commit once we confirm that there are no larger issues during Stress Tests.

Just to give you some scope (since I started using numbers) over the years, we have tracked around 30 000 issues and resolved about 25 000 of them, where resolving means that some have become irrelevant on their own either due to change of tech or design (Expired, Won't fix, Duplicate, As Designed and other resolution types in the chart below except for Done or Fixed). Part of the remaining unresolved issues is also related to post 1.0 content and features:

A quick look at the issues that need fixing for 0.63 Experimental as of this afternoon (not including features that still need to be implemented).

I'm excited about what's to come with the first stress test and feedback that we can work with. I'll be there trying to survive there with you! :)

Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Jan

Hello everybody!

Voice communication is something we haven't really talked about for some time. So I'm here to introduce you to the changes we've done on the gameplay side. But since this is my first Status Report, I'll start with a small introduction. My name is Jan Huňka (on the internets, I go by the nickname Zoidy) and I work on DayZ as a Gameplay Programmer specializing on networking - but I also worked on the new damage system, login/logout process and a bunch of other things.

The main goal of these changes was to make the communication as seamless as possible. As soon as your radio has a battery in, you can talk on the selected frequency. If you turn it off, you're automatically using direct communication again.

Currently, we have three types of communication devices in the game. Megaphone, personal radio and also a Public Address System.

Radios

Personal radios are very easy to use. You don't need to hold the radio in your hand, it can be anywhere nearby like in the inventory or just on the ground and you can still use it. Other survivors nearby can also use your radio if they're close enough. To transmit on larger distances, you can use big radio stations. Signal strength is based on the maximum distance. The closer you're to the maximum distance, the more noise you're gonna hear. The same goes for the text chat. The closer you're to the max distance, the more can your text message be corrupted.

Public address system (PAS)

We placed quite a few PAS loud-speakers across the cities of Chernarus and now you'll finally be able to use them. PAS broadcaster can broadcast your voice to all loud-speakers in range. You just have to stand close to the broadcaster. It is also possible for multiple players to use the broadcaster at the same time. Listening players are hearing voices of the speakers from the loud-speakers based on its distance and direction.

Megaphone

Megaphone needs to be held in hands to use and it basically allows your voice to be heard on larger distances than just talking.

Server keeps information about nearby communication devices that every player is currently able to use. This information is then cross-referenced against other players and the result is a "list" of players that you can communicate with. All voice messages and also text chat messages are routed to appropriate clients using this information. Thanks to this, you can transmit your voice to multiple devices at the same time. For example, if you want to set up some radios on different frequencies nearby your PAS broadcaster and then broadcast your amazing speech on all possible channels and PAS at the same time, it is completely possible.

Contrary to the original plan, you cannot use one device to transmit to another device. Like leave your personal radio nearby PAS broadcaster. The chains of devices that could be created using this feature could become very complex really fast. We would also need to constantly check all communication devices on the whole map to update these chains, which could get costly in terms of resources. But we'll try to keep this in mind and maybe this feature could make it to the game on some smaller scale.

We added and tweaked the sound filters for different types of devices. Radios still have their typical noise, but megaphones and public address system received some nice echo effects, so you should be able to tell what device is the source of the sound.

If, for example, there are three radios around you on the same frequency, you're gonna hear the same voice with a little echo, so you can recognise the same voice is coming from multiple sources. The echo is calculated based on the number of devices and their distance from the player.

Thanks for reading and I hope you're gonna have a lot of fun with the new communication system in Chernarus!

Jan Huňka / Gameplay Programmer

Dev Update/Boris

Survivors! I have some news from our scripting team - I'm happy to say that the system for weapon particle effects has been finished for some time now, so here is a small sample of the quality of muzzle flashes you can expect to see in the 0.63 Stress Test:

Note that rapidly firing for a prolonged amount of time will heat up the barrel, causing a continuous stream of smoke until it cools down. In later experimental updates, badly worn out weapons will tend to smoke more as build-up collects in them, which prompts players to use the weapon cleaning kit to avoid malfunctions.

The next task related to gunfights is the improvement of bullet impact effects (including blood splats), which are meant to better visualise our advanced ballistic system. Currently, we have a simplified placeholder system implemented until the final solution is fully prepared.

Fire away, survivors, but mind the heat of your gun barrels!

Boris Vacula / Scripter

Community Spotlight/Baty

Hello guys!

I don't know if you noticed, but me and my colleague Martin were invited by Microsoft to show you the Xbox One DayZ DEMO at PAX East in Boston. Yes, we already have a playable single player 0.63 demo that runs really smooth, and this was the first time we presented the Xbox version to public!

We were a bit nervous about the reactions, but your enthusiasm about the demo calmed us down and we were really happy that you liked it. Xbox players had a chance to try the demo for the first time, running around and exploring what DayZ is all about. Meanwhile, experienced PC players were testing new features, because it was also the first opportunity for the to get their hands on 0.63.

If you want to see a personal experience of one of our players, here is a video from Jake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGOH6h2KZtk

And of course, we've met so many nice people who we know only from online communication. For me, that was the highlight of the show. Thanks everyone who stopped by and talked to us or just tried the demo!

Our little station was right there. Massive thanks to Microsoft for inviting us to their booth!

Pax East was so crowded!

We've met a couple of survivors in DayZ cosplay!

Some streamers like MarkstromTV, TheLoyalPatriot, LtDanOfficial, Mr. Moon, Deadly Slob, GamerDad, Johny Rotten, Puhdado, Acesfury and Jakon tried our demo too.

So many amazing people came to Pax to meet us. We love you guys.

Community Events

Let's check out some events on private servers.

The first one is organized by DayZ Underground server and it is called "king of Severograd". Be ready tomorrow at 4PM EST. Don't forget to register[www.dayzunderground.com]!

Another one will be on Saturday at 7pm CST on the DayZ Noob server and it is melee weapons only. You can win a fully decked M4A1, AK101, AK74, FAL and AKM. Nice prizes!

And the third one is today, so run and join other survivors on TopeRec&Spaggie's server (185.16.86.37:2602) at 20:00GMT as soon as possible.

Community FAQ

The last thing for today are some of your questions (we'll do the riddle next time):

Is PC your primary platform?
Yes, it absolutely is our primary platform. Every piece of new content, every feature, every new bit of technology always gets into the PC version first. Both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 run only what already exists on PC. Ultimately any development progress made now is always implemented on PC first.
Should we be worried about DayZ being on consoles?
No! Quite the contrary: we need to squeeze every frame, and every possible line of code optimization out of DayZ in order to make it run well on consoles. This massively contributes to the overall improvements of the PC build. Exploring new platforms with DayZ also opens more possibilities to cooperate with different partners - if we did not make DayZ on Xbox, it would be harder for us to visit you in person or events, for example.
Is it going to slow down PC development?
No! Remember, PC development is console development. It's not two different things. There is, of course, some amount of work associated with specific platform support and bug fixing, mostly in programming and QA, but we're not taking the time of any developers that are critical for reaching our Experimental, Stable and 1.0 goals for PC.

And that is all from me today. Don't forget to send us your videos, pictures and everything DayZ related you've made, because we love it!

Header picture by Lith3on

Baty/Community Manager

Status Report - 27 March 2018

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 21:21 CEST

We're back from a trip to GDC, and also back to the regular Status Report schedule. Let's read more about our upcoming 0.63 public stress tests, our progress on Xbox, and plans for PAX East!

Dev Update/Eugen
Dev Update/Filip
Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Dear DayZ players,

There is a lot of commotion in the office as we get near our first 0.63 public stress test (which I will talk about more today and share details of why and how we are approaching this step, and what should be the outcome for both you, the players, and us - the developers). Besides the obvious focus to get things into public hands for testing, we are dealing with issues related to weapon collisions with environment and zombies. While also working on climbing and jumping to make traversing through the environment a much better experience.There is a lot to cover in the coming weeks, and we are looking at the missing pieces[dayz.com], as well as pushing for the level of polish we want to achieve before we finally move 0.63 to the Experimental branch of DayZ on Steam.

0.63 Stress Tests

As we've mentioned during our 0.63 Dev Live Stream, the initial releases of 0.63 will take the form of time-limited, focused stress tests. To differentiate these stress tests from the more traditional Experimental testing phase, we'll create a completely new "Stress Test" branch of DayZ on Steam, which anyone of you will be able to switch to, and play on test servers provided by us.

Once 0.63 gets ready and releases on the Experimental branch, this option will be gone, but we expect to have more than one of these stress tests happening in the next couple of weeks, so you might get a chance to hop in early and test the game in a limited capacity.

Our main goal with stress tests is to test server load and see the number of players we can handle on one server. These stress test can both happen very often, or there might be some delay between them. We will be auto collecting logs and servers crashes for further analysis, as well as profiling the server performance. A big chunk of the work will go into making sure we get lots of data to sort through and evaluate.

We will announce the time of each stress test on our social media channels so that you can prepare at least a little bit ahead of time. Besides the timeline of availability, we will try and provide you with a list of things that we've assigned the highest priority for getting feedback on.

I know a lot of data miners are going to look into everything we've done with the game, as there is tons of work in progress features hidden inside the client data, possibly including some not yet covered details that may cause a little bit of premature excitement. While we totally expect that this will happen, we will be, however, pointing our focus towards a more limited set of things at one time in these tests. For the first test, we will try to take a close look at the new implementation of gunplay and player synchronization.

You will be spawning in a much more concentrated manner on selected locations in Chernarus, already equipped with basic gear that we have ready for testing. Many things in those builds will still be either disabled completely or not spawning. On the other hand, we will try and increase the player numbers per server to see how far we can go. It's going to be a bit of a bloodbath, that's for sure!

For the first bunch of stress tests, there will be a limited time window, with a limited number of items spawning, and also with a somewhat limited functionality so that the data we are collecting is helpful. We are at a point where we need your help, your feedback. It's necessary for us to move forward, and to make sure that when the game goes live for everybody, it’s as consistent and reliable as it can get. For now, there will be broken animations, bugs and different annoying details that we know about. However, I cannot state how important for us it is to start testing now, and not wait any longer. Some of the issues we might encounter will take some time to solve, and will only be able to be reproduced in the high traffic environment of public testing.

Now to answer the question why we do so with a limited feature set and in a limited time window: any data collection past the initial findings and blockers is diluting the effectiveness of such efforts. Problems can be hiding in layers - as you fix one, another appears because with the first problem in its way, it never had a chance to occur. We think we know about a lot of them - if not most - but we realize there is more to do. It's going to be fun either way - we are ready to face this head on, and roll fixes in quickly. Ramping up our communication both ways is an important part of the process that's coming both during stress tests and in Experimental.

For feedback, videos are one of the best mediums for us to understand what’s happening, so if you have a chance to share them with us on the Feedback Tracker[feedback.dayz.com] and the DayZ forums[forums.dayz.com], they are more than welcome! We'll talk about this when we release the notes for each stress tests, but as mentioned, we will mostly be looking for inconsistencies in player movement and gunplay. You'll definitely experience a lot of weird inconsistencies or bugs with things like melee, environment actions, or crafting, but we're working on those, and these just require time, but meanwhile, we can already run tests on those focus areas that will help us move forward faster.

As for when do we start those stress tests - again, as mentioned in the Live Stream, we were looking at the initial releases of 0.63 as something that's weeks, not months away. It's been two weeks since the Live Stream now, and so it goes without saying that we'll all get to some testing rather soon!

Keep following us on Twitter, Facebook, and our Forums[forums.dayz.com] to be notified when a stress test goes online!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Filip

Hi all!

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we have worked on several smaller tasks and features such as swimming, footsteps in water, ladder climbing, user action and fireplace sounds.

We've also finished the work on the interior controller for weapons and character sound. Now we can have different tails for indoor shooting, reloading magazines of footsteps. Indoor ambient sounds are still in progress.

For next few weeks, we will be focusing on melee fight. We will re-design sounds for attack animations and also make many new melee hit sounds.
https://youtu.be/s_jVKGVzOmM
- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

Community Spotlight

Hello Survivors,

In case you haven't noticed, we skipped the last Status Report and we broadcasted a Live Stream of the 0.63 build instead, with dev commentary. And we are really happy with your feedback, thank you for that! We are improving our streaming skills and we are hoping to stream more often in future, to share our DayZ development goals with you!

If you missed the stream, we exported it to our YouTube channel and you can watch it here:
https://youtu.be/-RmJrnp85K0
Part of our team was attending GDC last week, where we've met with a bunch of journalists at a closed event organized by ID@Xbox - to all of them, we've presented a short Staroye DEMO of DayZ on Xbox One. People who tried it were amazed by how smooth the game runs, and how good it feels. Here is a short video of the press event on Tuesday:

If you are sad you couldn't have tried it at GDC, we have another chance for you to get your hands on our DayZ Xbox demo! We are going to PAX East in Boston next week and we will be there ready for you from Thursday 5th to Sunday 8th at the Xbox booth.

[i.imgur.com]

I know you always have questions about the console versions! I chose the three hottest ones:

Are you developing DayZ for Xbox One X only?

No, we’ll be releasing on all Xbox One consoles, and on PlayStation 4 as well!

How about the frame rates on Xbox One X?

It’s all work in progress, but we’re already peaking at 50-60 FPS in 1080p on Xbox One X, and we plan to support 4K@30 FPS. We’ll see where we end up though!

Will there be cross-platform between platforms?

That’s unlikely - while it’s perfectly viable from the technology perspective, we’d rather not mix PC and console players because it would cause a noticeable disbalance in gameplay.

Let's check out the content you have done since the last Status Report. There is a lot of it, so I had to choose just some of the things you sent me.

I know we highlighted Gaming Roach Entertainment before, but he is so original and we love his videos very much! He made a DayZ parody of the TV show "Friends" and it is stunning. You need to see it!
https://youtu.be/g-X3RMdartg

I saw a picture on Twitter that made me hungry. And I hope it will make you hungry too. This amazing package was sent by PetitPoney to his DayZ friends. Looks like human meat, doesn't it? I asked the recipient EVILZ if he likes human meat so much, and he replied to me that it is just pork meat and he made a backpack from its skin. Okay, I am going to trust you for now.

Look at these cans, can you recognize them? They are just like the ones from the game! This picture was sent to us by Wallamys Uchiha, who made some for himself in real life. Do you want them too? You can make it yourselves, Wallamys shared the labels with us here[mega.nz].

I love your artworks guys. Please send more to me! This one is made by Dominik Figlhuber and it is in 80s style. Amazing work Dominic, I am looking forward to your next fanart!

Let's check some events that servers prepared for you.

Do you know the server Mafia of Balota? Admins prepare events every week and they have some safe zones around the map, so don't forget to read the rules before joining. The event for this week is in medieval style. If you want to participate, just join their Facebook group and learn more there.

The Village server prepared a screenshot contest for you. They are looking for the most beautiful post-apocalyptic screenshot taken on The Village server[barelyinfected.com]. The contest ends at the end of the month so hurry, you have just a few days to participate.

And your favorite riddle!

It was really hard last time. The house is between Black Moutain and Svergino and these guys are hardcore fans who really know the place:

Uncuepa
Jake
Goof3y‏
CanisDirus
CryDoXz
GaryWalnuts

And the new riddle is a really hard one, too, because it is from Adam again - he likes to challenge you!

[i.imgur.com]

If you know this place, tweet the location to our official Twitter account and you can be featured in the Status Report next time!

Thank you for your amazing work guys and I am looking forward to seeing your content in two weeks. Don't forget to check our Instagram[www.instagram.com] next week, we will post some pictures from our trip to PAX East there! Love you all <3.

- Baty / Community Manager

Header picture by RageBruh.

0.63 Experimental Release Check list

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 15:59 CET

How long do we still need to wait before the 0.63 Update is released on the Experimental Branch? That's a question we get asked every day. While it's still hard to estimate exact release dates at this stage of development (we've learned our lesson about estimating dates), we at least wanted to provide an overview of the work that remains to be done before the release is a go.

Before you start scrolling through the list, we strongly recommend that you take a peek at the detailed Status Report we posted on November 2017 last year - back then [www.dayz.com], we provided a list of 0.63 goals that served as a basis for this particular checklist. In general, that Status Report contains a pretty decent breakdown of our development plans all the way to the 1.0. release - go ahead and read it if you haven't done that yet!

We'll do our best to go through this list twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays - even if it would mean that the state badges for each feature/system stay the same. With each update that has some new things marked as "Ready for Experimental", we'll also share that information on our social media channels! We hope this will make our development progress a bit more transparent, and hopefully, you'll also get at least some sort of estimate for the Experimental release.

https://dayz.com/blog/0-63-experimental-release-checklist#/

DayZ Stable Version 0.58.129143

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 21:22 CEST

DayZ stable version 0.58.129143 has been released on Steam.

Added:

Chambering animations.
Jerrycan drink and emptying.
New improvised torch model.
SVD chambering animation.
3 variants of Canvas Pants to Default Character options.
Animations for player catching rain into a pot.
Animations for consuming tablets in prone and erected stances.
Oil barrel.
Nurses Dress.
SSh68 Helmet.
Car Tent.
USMC pants.
GP5 gasmask.
Glow plug.
Basic models of Picea Abies trees.
Pouring water into barrel.
New steering pose for V3S .
Crossbow Holosight.
Lighting torch using handrill.
Lab Coat.
Door slamming sound for V3S.
Wheel (spare) for V3S and tire repair kits.
Torch can be extinguished with liquid.
Truck battery.
Drinking added to domestic herbivores life cycle.
Random items to spawn in fridge world container.
Tripwire model.

Changed:

Universal light can be attached to UMP45.
New Berezino (upper part).
Tisy updated.
Chernogorsk roads is broken now.
Wooden timbers and wooden piles is in.
ItemSize of BurlapSack and BurlapStrips.
Torch can be ignited also on ground.

Fixed:

Dynamic events are not respawning.
Excessive amount of military loot is spawning in military/evacuation camps.
Anti-teleportation protection now takes into account higher possible speeds. Solves rubberbanding of high-speed cars.
Animals fly over Chernarus and eventually teleport.
Switching "weapon" to "magazine" via quickbar makes "false duplicate".
Zombies slide when deciding whether to aggro on player or not.
Player gets stuck when leaving V3S shortly after the server was launched.
Arrows shot into a tree crashes the client if tampered with.
Unable to remove items from "in hands" slot.
Swapping items by drag and drop makes false duplicate in the inventory.
When using rounds and firing the last one, 0 quantity round remains in the weapon.
When swapping 1h item with a 2h item the 1h item disappears.
Player can manipulate/loot inventory of 2nd player after he/she wakes up from unconsciousness.
When crafting something with full inventory, result is not visible.
Switching weapons when entering water / ladder makes weapon disappear, hand slot stuck and creates false duplicate.
Security cage around ladders.
Unable to take magazines into hands via quickbar.
Disabled the issue where player was able to swing 2H weapon while sprinting. This should be no longer possible.
Raincoats and armbands are now repairable with a sewing kit.
Some vests, jackets, hoodies, hats and shoes were not repairable with (leather) sewing kit.
Fireplace can be moved from inventory to vicinity and vice-versa.
AK muzzle and bayonet attachments can't be attached at the same time.
Not possible to place multiple fireplaces into one spot.
Suppressor position for AKS74U.
Tanned leather is now repairable with a leather sewing kit.
Changed recoil for izh18.
Tanned leather is now impossible to craft from ruined components.
Nail box needs to be in the inventory in order to be unpackable.
Skater helmet, gorka helmet and firefighter helmet should not allow masks to be worn at the same time anymore.
Damaged/destruct materials for numerous items.
Damaged states for Hatchet.
ItemSize of HikingJacket and TacticalShirt.
Extending neck during getting in to a cargo position on V3S.
The player can now rotate during vault animation.
Disabled aiming in vomiting animation, which was causing a clipping glitch when activated.
Suicide with a rifle: Player now can disarm without getting stuck in the animation.
Removed duplicate spawn location for fridge.
Player is able to see through the black screen by pressing escape during respawn/countdown timer.
Ammunition type in UMP45 25rnd magazine.
Bark stack size.
Hand drill torch ignition.
Create sound trap with cans.
Bleaching allowed for white tshirts and armbands only.
Damage states for WaterProofBag.
Unable to reload full magazines of different types.
Police cars disappear very shortly after spawning.
Cannabis buds cooking states should be fixed now.
Melee suicide gesture returning to an armed state without a weapon in hand. Fixed by changing the gesture destination to unarmed.
Attachments - Camera moves with zoomed in optics when changing stances.
Torch cannot be ignited inside inventory.
broken quickbar when spamming it with many requests from and to hands.
Torch cannot be ignited multiple times during igniting animation.
Fixed the neck stretching during sitting reloads.

Tweaked:

All nervous, grazing, and walking poses tweaked for new roe deer skeleton.
Spawn location for fridge to prevent levitation.
Additional transitions to running for multiple skeletons.
Recoil tweak for AK74, AK101, AKM.
Tweaks to CLE for several different structures.
Player can wring clothes/bags only when their cargo is empty.

Known Issues:

Door States are currently experiencing issues. In these situations, sometimes players can hear the sounds of doors opening/closing that might not actually be being interacted with.
Cooked Meat can in some cases cause survivors to become ill.
Server / Client position tracking improvements are still being worked on. In some cases, desynchronization of this information can occur and server/client or client/client disagreements will happen.
While the long running animation state problem of survivors constantly shouldering weapons seems to have been slain, we still have some edge cases where odd animation state behavior can be observed.
There are a few low repro server crashes still present, the frequency of these are fairly low and investigation on repro steps is ongoing.
Passenger Vehicle Position desynchronization is still below acceptable, and is slated for priority work on 0.59.
In some cases, while manipulating your inventory or crafting certain items a "false duplicate" item can be created. While this issue is currently under investigation, players can mitigate this by logging out and back in.
In some situations, all clients involved in a gunfight will not receive all proper gunshot sounds. This is currently being investigated.
Player camps of large size may experience issues interacting with and manipulating items.
Survivors are encouraged to spread out camps of large size (2+ tents) until this issue is resolved.

Source : http://steamcommunity.com/games/221100/announcements/detail/101683288079759143

DayZ Status Report - 18 August 2015

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 12:59 CEST

Evening survivors,

For this week's Status Report, Lead Producer Brian Hicks will be informing us on the upcoming plans for the CLE as the team moves closer towards BETA. Additionally, he'll tell us a bit about what will be in focus for 0.59 Experimental once we progress past 0.58 release on Stable branch.

Contents This Week

Development Board Spotlight [dayz.com]
Dev Update/Hicks [dayz.com]
Community Video: "The Chronicles of 0.58" [dayz.com]

Development Board Spotlight

[trello.com]

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors!

Much like the last Status Report - we've still got the gameplay programming team working on the blocking issues preventing 0.58 to hit stable branch. The primary issues of which were a result of some tests on resolving animation looping, and related problems we are still aiming for 0.59 to address. We've been working hard to resolve these issues so we can provide as compelling a gameplay experience w/ 0.58 as possible while still in development.

Once 0.58 leaves incubation on experimental branch, survivors will notice a sharp difference in how loot is distributed across Chernarus. We're still pretty early on in where we want to be with the central economy by release from Early Access, however we do now have much more precise control over the distribution. The system allows us to dynamically modify quantities, spawning frequencies, spawning priority, and so on without having to push an update to stable branch. We'll be closely monitoring active item concentration across official servers, and adjusting based upon this. Those more stalwart survivors might notice higher quantities of canned food goods than are specifically required - we've found that the best method to acclimate players to having to scavenge for supplies versus the placeholder prototype systems distribution is to slowly dial the quantities incrementally down - until the balance reaches a playable state.

Above you can see the current top 10 distributed items on an example experimental branch server. Non persishable food currently has the highest priority / quantity for entry level items in the respawn system. Primarily to allow folks to acclimate themselves to the need to move *around* Chernarus to continue to find the supplies they need. Ideally, we'll dial these quantities back in increments of 10 until we find a comfortable balance. Past non perishable goods, basic tools have the highest quantity of items spread across Chernarus. Wood Axes, Matches, Burlap Sacks, Water Purification, and so on.

Again, once 0.58 stable hits and has time to settle - with a larger player base than experimental roaming across the environment we'll make changes according to how the distribution looks and performs. Moving past 0.58 and looking at 0.59 experimental - in addition to the new features, content, and so forth - We'll be looking into more QoL improvements for the stable player base. Vehicle position sync optimization (no fun riding around in new vehicles if your passengers want to vomit from desync!), animation state sync between clients, animal herd behaviour, position & projectile synchronization bugfixing, and much more.
As well, with 0.59 experimental we'll be testing the potential effect of players spawning with radios and how it may or may not impact player interaction. The range of the radios should be temporarily (for the duration of the test on Exp 0.59) increased to cover the whole of Chernarus. Once this hits experimental, I encourage you to head over to the official DayZ forums[forums.dayzgame.com] (forums.dayzgame.com) and share your experiences (be it good, or bad) with how this impacts your gameplay!

As mentioned during our RTX panel presentation, longer incubation times on Experimental and dedicating more time to QoL issues on the primary branch may end up costing us some time here or there, but we firmly believe it will present a higher quality player experience during DayZ's development. Of course, there will still be plenty of bugs - but we'll do our best to make sure the experience is still enjoyable.

- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

Community Video: "The Chronicles of 0.58"

This time around we present you with a series of videos called "The Chronicles of 0.58" created by:

The 5 episode series chronicles a 10 hour session Mr. Blackout completed together with Brian Hicks. During the session, the duo showcase playability in version 0.58 which is available on our Experimental branch servers. While the guys embark on their trek through Chernarus, the guys show their looting, friendly encounters, hostile encounters (where Hicks assists Blackout by soaking bullets like a sponge, hardcore MLG style), and all that good stuff.

At the end of the series, some 1,5+ hours had passed by without me really noticing, so if you have the time I'd definitely recommend you having a go at the episodes. Quite impressive that Mr. Blackout managed to go through a 10 hour session that included hostile encounters without even dying once.

If you find yourselves hungry for more from Mr. Blackout, you can find tons more content via hisYoutube account, you can watch his streams via his Twitch[www.twitch.tv] account, and you can contact him via Twitter and Facebook.

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 theGallery[forums.dayzgame.com] section of the DayZ forums and we'll happily have a look.

Header image credit: Jack Smith

- Michael aka SMoss / Community Manager

Source : http://steamcommunity.com/games/221100/announcements/detail/101682628864192946

DayZ Status Report - 29 July 2015

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 12:02 CEST

Evening survivors,

For this week's Status Report, Lead Producer Brian Hicks will be informing us on what the team has been working on for the upcoming update on Stable branch. In this regard he'll go over subjects such as the loot distribution and persistence.

Contents This Week

Development Board Spotlight
Dev Update/Hicks
Community Video: I'M HUNTING

Development Board Spotlight

[trello.com]

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors!

The team has been crunching away on our last blockers for stable release, as well as working on values for loot distribution. Tomorrow morning we should see our (hopeful) final experimental release hit Steam, which will be tested over the weekend. Assuming we notice no new issues, we're hoping to hit stable branch on Monday or Tuesday next week.

The only issue we currently see as a blocker on experimental (0.58.128852) is visually represented as "floating loot" currently caused by an issue with items that have been "swapped" by players. (Most commonly seen as loot floating above deer stands, police stations, etc). As mentioned above, tomorrow should see an experimental push that will see this resolved - and this build will be tested over the weekend to see its viability for Stable Branch.

While this fix has been underway, we've been dialing in the balance for non perishable food, firearms, and military loot. Currently, the highest quantity and priority in the economy is given to non perishable food goods. (Tuna, Beans, Rice, etc). With civilian pistols being the most common firearm, followed by civilian rifles such as the trumpet, blaze, IZH43 Shotgun, and so on. Military loot is distributed across all military points across the map, mostly of which are up in the Northern areas. Military grade firearms are relatively rare, and there is no guarantee that visiting the military bases will yield you the weapon you want. With most items on a 30 minute timer (without being "refreshed" by being manipulated by players) - getting fully kitted up as a "military" player with all the gear you want could take some time.

Super Rare items (M4A1, Steyr Aug, SVD, and so on) that spawn on dynamic events operate on an even rarer chance. Dynamic events have a varied pool of potential items that can spawn, with only 3 active helicopter wrecks at any given time - and an approximate 4 hour clean up, continued hunting will be required to find that super rare weapon or item you are seeking.
Please keep in mind, we are now fully able to update quantities and rarity without requiring an update - so if we should see issues with loot concentration, or quantity once .58 hits stable branch, we will be able to address this rapidly.

Fortunately, players can now create camps and store their supplies and weapons at them during their treks across Chernarus. Different containers / objects have different lifetimes. Currently, they operate as follows:

- Medium Tent (Pitched): 45 Days
- Military Tent (Pitched): 45 Days
- Car Tent (Pitched): 45 Days
- Barrels: 45 Days
- Ammo Boxes: 45 Days
- Protector Cases: 45 Days
- Backpacks (All types): 3 Days

Current functionality on experimental does not allow for refreshing the lifetime of an object without picking it up, so tents and barrels were set to a lifetime that will cover the time to .59 + some safety room in case of .59 stable blockers. Once .59 is pushed to stable, we will support the refresh of a base objects lifetime via interacting with it (moving, placing, picking up any item inside it) - which will operate as follows:

- Medium Tent (Pitched): 7 Days
- Military Tent (Pitched): 7 Days
- Car Tent (Pitched): 7 Days
- Barrels: 7 Days
- Ammo Boxes: 7 Days
- Protector Cases: 7 Days
- Backpacks (All types): 3 Days

This system will also allow for the refreshing of advanced basebuilding objects, once they are implemented.
Speaking of advanced base building - I'll be speaking at RTX 2015 in Austin, Texas on Saturday, August 8th at 5:30 PM to discuss a recap of things covered at E3 2015, what we'd like to do with advanced base building, what soft skills means exactly, and show the new vehicles coming in 0.59. For those unable to make it, we'll be providing the presentation + audio in the Status Report following the event (Wednesday, August 12th).

- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

Community Video: I'M HUNTING

Hey survivors,

While looking for some videos of players doing some hunting and fishing while living the hermit lifestyle in Chernarus, I came across a video simply called "I'M HUNTING". I could see in the description that it was probably not exactly what I was looking for, but I decided to give it a go just the same. Sure enough, the content didn't disappoint. In the video we get to see a glimpse of the unjust killing of a freshspawn and the subsequent hunt and sweet, sweet revenge towards the end.

The video was brought to us by the following content creator: Musse Plays

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[forums.dayzgame.com] section of the DayZ forums and we'll happily have a look.

Header image credit: Jack Smith

- Michael aka SMoss / Community Manager

Source : http://steamcommunity.com/games/221100/announcements/detail/101680812176197368

DayZ Status Report - 30 June 2015

Tue, 30 Jun 2015 21:10 CEST

Greetings Survivors,

While development keeps moving along as usual, a lot of you have patiently been waiting for info on the new renderer, and for this week's Status Report Lead Producer Brian Hicks touches upon that very subject. Also, Senior Designer Jan Tomasik gives us some input on the ingame FOV; the theory and thought process behind the design solutions as well as decisions for the current iteration of FOV.

For this week we also present you with a link to the DayZ Trello board where Lead Artist Chris Torchia provides us with a small peek at environment updates, and lastly, we have a small feature on one of DayZ's content creators - Super Dan.

Contents This Week

Development Board Spotlight

Back to Contents

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

This week we'll touch on two topics. We'll start off discussing the work ongoing with the new renderer for Enfusion, and then wrap up discussing the current behaviour and mechanics behind sprinting, holding breath, and so on.

Players who have been actively following the development of DayZ are aware of the large task the engine team undertook to separate the legacy RV renderer from the simulation, and replace it with a more modular and updated version. The task itself of creating a new renderer is not huge, the length and weight of the task is related primarily to:

- Separating the legacy renderer from the simulation
- Ensuring the separation is complete, as the RV engine and its functions tied to it are extensive

Once the above was complete, the new renderer itself was broken into three primary modules. (Bear with us, this can be moderately technical)

* Pipeline module (1)
   * the pipeline of objects rendering is new (defines the "way" how the objects are moving from entity in world to set of rendering commands)
   * is responsible to prepare meshes to be rendered
   * is multi-threaded
   * filling of pipeline will be also multi-threaded, in phase of testing and debugging

* Material system module (2)
   * objects are rendered using new material system, old one is still present to have the comparison
   * each mesh has assigned a material (not rvmat) with material class which is responsible for it's rendering
   * setting of material is editable in workbench editor and you see real-time the changes in render
   * each material class was written from scratch, visualisation currently as much similar as possible to old render but now we can add simply new features (like PBR)
   * huge simplification for filling GPU command buffers, can be easily sorted to minimize changes in command buffers
   * all renderable game objects have now representation in material class

* High level rendering API module (3)
   * GPU API is DX11 for now (With DX 12 supporting coming later)
   * implementation of GPU API now hidden behind rendering API, no one is allowed to use direct GPU API commands
       * it allows us to add new GPU API like DX12, XBOX one, PS4...much easier
   * Initial implementation done, currently in testing and bug fixing phase (optimization still in progress but looks promising)


In addition:

* GUI manager
   * GUI pipeline and rendering system is completely new   and different from the one in original RV engine
   * GUI layouts will be defined in workbench using graphic editor not by config system (huge improvement for designers)
   * rendering works, currently debugging and working on the editor
   * In a future experimental build it'll be possible to try it using command line switch (startup switch)

* other notes
   * postprocesses were completely rewritten into new system of effects
   * more worlds can be renderered in one frame, it allows to create independent scenes
       * needed for workbench
       * usable also in game to create e.g. mirrors, cameras...

As work on the new renderer continues and we look at our plans for the eventual push to experimental we have several goals:

- Testing partnerships with Intel, AMD, and nVidia to ensure compatability with market leader and average hardware configurations
- Marked performance for gameplay in large cities (Elektro, Cherno, Novod, Severograd, Berezino, etc)

Next up - There has been a good deal of discussion, and questions on exactly how hold breath, lung capacity, and dispersion when characters are tired. Below we have a few example videos with debug data on screen so you can see the specific values.

In the first video you see the user start out stationary - not tired, and begin to hold his breath. With the inaccuracy value falling sharply upon holding his breath, as the character continues to hold his breath and his lung capacity drains - the inaccuracy slowly starts climbing.

With the second video, we have a character who starts off tired (has been sprinting for an extended duration - 90 to 120 seconds of solid sprinting) who takes a knee (supported firing position) as his tired value decreases, his lung capacity increases - and he begins to hold his breath.
Mind you, this is only how it performs now (on 0.57 stable) and this is prior to the implementation of weight and character stamina. That said, we would love to hear your thoughts on the current behavior of the mechanic. Please make sure to head over to the Official DayZ forums and discuss this in the latest Status Report discussion thread!

Finally - the gameplay programming team has made headway on the annoying issue of sounds playing globally (splitting ammo, bandages, etc) and 0.58 should see the issue resolved! If you happen to still manage to repro, please open a ticket at feedback.dayzgame.com!

- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

Back to Contents

Dev Update/Jan

Since there's been some discussion regarding changes in the character zoom mechanic I decided to jump in and explain what are we trying to achieve.

We should probably start by asking the question "Why have a characters-eye zoom in the first place?". It's the old problem with emulating a 3D world on insufficient hardware. The human field of vision (fov) is around 190° and the area where the vision cones of both eyes overlap is around 100°. Unfortunately, most of todays monitors viewed from a regular distance usually tend to cover only 45°of human fov in real life. This means that if you want for target on screen to appear in real-life size you are only able to display around ~1/2 of what you would see in reality, stereoscopically.

And so as a designer you have to choose - Should I display objects in the distance properly but sacrifice the overall vision or set the fov to 100° but deform the whole picture? The trick of Arma is actually not to choose and instead introduce an "eye zoom" instead. This way you can keep the surrounding awareness by setting the default fov to 100°, but when necessary to perceive a depth of field properly occurs (ie. you are shooting), you can "zoom in" to 45°.

0.57 Unzoomed Eye Vision

0.57 Eye Zoom

But is it ok to force fix a fov on players? We thought not. Not only because 100° fov does not feel right to everyone, but some players can't even physically play with it. (Motion sickness, performance of PC, different monitor setup...). So the FOV slider was introduced and with it multiple problems we are ironing out now.
The most important step was to even out players by moving fixed fov to ironsights. This way you can most of the time play with whatever fov you like, but when the fov becomes a matter of life or death (shoot outs) it is set same for everyone to keep the game fair.

We know that zoomed fov or ironsights must be 45° because it emulates the eye and we stated earlier that 45° is realistic. But what should the unzoomed fov be? It can't be higher than a number the player can set through FOV slider. (This way would going into iron sights actually shows the unzoomed picture which is definitely not something you would desire). So the fov of ironsights should be also the the smallest fov we allow players to set by the fov slider.

We decided to set range of fov slider from 60° to 90°.

0.58 Eye Zoom

It's important to keep in mind, that double pressing + or - extends it to 45° or 105°, so the range is not so small as it might appears. It also doesn't matter what is your current fov - double pressing + key will always set it to 45°. This means you can quickly switch between observing surroundings and focusing on objects "modes", while being able to play with your prefered fov for most of the time. I belive this descision helps equalize players and reduce fov slider abuse.

Of course all those settings are opened to iteration and changes if they prove to be wrong, or they just feel bad.

- Jan Tomasik / Senior Designer

Back to Contents

Community Spotlight: Super Dan

Hey all,

It's been a bit of a hard decision in selecting which content creator to feature for this week what with all the great stuff produced by players! For this week though, we present to you the work done by: Super Dan

Super Dan has created a good amount of DayZ videos where he showcases plenty of different player interactions as he meets random players across Chernarus. The first video for this week shows the choices players sometimes have to make when finding themselves in a tight spot (it could also be the choices that some players make when they just want to be mean towards others, heh). Nice enough though that Super Dan's victim is a good sport about it all :)

In Super Dan's library, I also came across the following video in which he uses the chance to encorporate a bit of cinematic feel into his video based on the experiences he has with a couple of other players. It's all fun and games until you start outliving all the players that you come across. Nicely done Super Dan!

As the last video for this week, we bring you Super Dan's video “A Normal Day in Chernarus”. What starts out as a seemingly friendly meeting of random players takes a funny turn for one of the survivors as he tries to form an alliance with another one of the guys:

Source : http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-30-jun-2015

DayZ Status Report - 23 June 2015

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 22:05 CEST

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

Back to Contents

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

Back to Contents

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!

Back to Contents

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

Back to Contents

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

Back to Contents

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

DayZ Status Report - 09 June 2015

Tue, 09 Jun 2015 22:03 CEST

Greetings Survivors,

Work continues on experimental branch as the team keeps hammering away at the next Stable build candidate. It's been a tough wait, we understand, but major issues encountered during development required fixing before the push to Stable branch. This week, Lead Producer Brian Hicks will be dishing out some handy information regarding the Central Loot Economy - what it is, how it's supposed to work, as well as the thought process behind the design choices for the CLE. Also, Lead Designer Peter Nespesny will be telling us about future updates to the vehicles found throughout Chernarus. Peter will go over subjects such as operation, maintenance, as well as the design choices behind these upcoming updates.

Lastly, we have a couple of links[forums.dayzgame.com] to the DayZ Trello board and DayZ forums discussion thread related to the new bus animations, and at the end of our Status Report, we have a small feature on one of DayZ's content creators - Barely Infected.

Contents This Week

Development Board Spotlight[dayz.com]
Dev Update/Hicks[dayz.com]
Dev Update/Peter[dayz.com]
Community Spotlight: Barely Infected[dayz.com]

Development Board Spotlight

[trello.com]
[trello.com]
[trello.com]

Dev Update - Hicks

With 0.57 on the horizon, this week I'd like to take time to talk a bit about player progression across Chernarus, the Central Loot Economy (and its impact on this), and the challenges DayZ faces compared to the Arma 2 Mod experience.

First lets go over exactly what the Central Loot Economy is, and what it offers DayZ.

- Migration of control over what items spawn from legacy method (script) into a more easily and rapidly updated system
- This means the dev team can rapidly (and without requiring an update to the game) completely change / update the amount of items that spawn
- This is done on both a global, and a per server level - in the future allowing custom server operators fine control over their server and its item spawn quantities without requiring any base modification to the game
- Control over item lifetimes (speed of decay / time to item cleanup)
- Control over how many of each item time is supposed to be present in the world (Min / Max / Nominal)
- Control over item cost (rarity vs spawning methods)

Why is the Central Loot Economy critical to DayZ's design - versus the original prototype placeholder loot spawning script? Simply put - the original method was a very rough prototype, designed to start populating the initial memory points for each structure. In order for the design and environment teams to be fully free to create a comprehensive, living breathing world - we first needed to begin to have fine and robust control that can be rapidly pushed to all servers. The original prototype method was very time resource heavy for updating, limited our options to traditional DayZ Mod style building definitions only, and in short pidgeon-holed the team into very limited control.

One of the images that has been circulating the DayZ Community over the last week is a map covering player progression across Arma 2's original Chernarus map. The layout of the original Chernarus, as well as the very limited amount of enterable structures, and thus very limited amount of potential spawn points for items meant an inherent flow of player movement across the map. It required very little work on the design side - High end military loot spawned mostly entirely at Barracks structures, Basic Supplies / Weapons at Firestations, Grocery Stores, Barns, and so on, and Medical supplies at Hospitals. The structure of *how* items spawned within the original Chernarus just -fit- the limited scope of that map perfectly.
Moving into DayZ as a standalone project, one of the first tasks undertaken was the decentralization of core resource (points of interest) buildings - and the expansion of Chernarus into a more robust and living world. Nearly every structure was made enter-able, and thus nearly every single building on the map was a potential (or group of potential) points for items to spawn. At first this might not seem like it should have a major impact on the design, and flow of player progression across the map - but when you look at the statistics, it is rather telling.

- In DayZ Mod, with vanilla Chernarus - Potential item spawn points number in the thousands (Sub 10k)
- In DayZ Chernarus + the potential locations for items to spawn exceeds 1 Million.

Source : http://steamcommunity.com//games/221100/announcements/detail/130949078739679457

DayZ Status Report - 02 June 2015

Wed, 03 Jun 2015 01:10 CEST

Greetings Survivors,

As the team continues iterating and testing on experimental while moving towards the upcoming stable update, We'll hear Lead Producer Brian Hicks discuss a bit of the methodology behind dynamic events and vehicle positions versus player spawn locations. As well, Lead Designer Peter Nespesny discusses ongoing testing work over on the experimental branch related to player data updates, and scheduling.

As well, we've tossed in some links [trello.com] to the Development Board entry for Hermit Playstyle enhancements, and their accompanying discussion thread on the Developer forums. Check the end of the Status Report for some heart pounding Player Vs Vehicle action outside the Veresnik Military Base.

Contents This Week

Development Board Spotlight

[forums.dayzgame.com]

Dev Update - Hicks

I'm frequently asked about player spawns, vehicle spawns, and the mentality behind where and why they are placed. I thought I would take the opportunity this week to discuss exactly that.

For those aware of how DayZ Mod's gameplay flow operated - it was fairly simple. Players started along the coast - from Kamenka to as far as Berezino. Players progressed (for the most part) from the South - to the North. (For the most part, the North West) This gameplay required very little design side control to influence it. Natively the original Chernarus had very few buildings, and thus very few potential item spawn points (compared to say - Chernarus +). One of the initial goals of DayZ was to decentralize the flow of high value or required resources. Think medical centers, military installations, and so on.

When approaching player spawns - early on my approach was to try and replicate the familiarity of player spawns in the earlier versions of DayZ Mod. (DayZ Mod circa Summer 2012 was used as a touch stone) We quickly learned that this approach did not work with the massively altered layout of Chernarus. Not to mention some of the changes to key coastal areas. The next experiment we ran with player spawns was to flip the map of Chernarus, and look at the player progression as East > West. From a design perspective this approach seemed the most logical in how we wanted to layout the world, and seemed on paper like it should find strong success.

Never let it be said that nostalgia and familiarity has no merit.

Players were very vocal in their longing for the familiar DayZ spawn points, Chernogorsk and Elektrozavodsk especially. Internally we were very reluctant to change this up as the early loot spawning system did not allow us any region control, and the design of Chernarus was heavily leaning towards letting us use any building model we wanted, where it made sense. (Think Military Police buildings in Chernogorsk, Balota Barracks, etc) However, as early prototyping on a more robust control over where region-wise certain items spawned, the idea of spawning in some of those core DayZ Mod areas was revisited. Obviously some small changes would need to occur to the layout of the world, as the system would take a good deal of time to develop - so Balota and the Northeast Airfield both got a redesign - and spawns from Kamyshovo to West Chernogorsk were reintroduced.

As Dynamic Events, and Vehicles entered the equation their spawn placements were heavily influenced by where the existing player spawns lay, and how we wanted the flow of players across the map to operate. Obviously Dynamic Event types used to prototype the system were also used as a control point for "Very Rare" items - with the desired intent to ensure that in the final product, players could not farm one location across many servers to quickly gain an item the design team intended to be incredibly hard to find. (See: SVD)

Vehicles themselves followed a similar principle, as the prototype vehicle was a heavy vehicle designed to carry large amounts of both gear and players - the spawn positions for this were placed at the highest concentration in West / Northwest. As smaller, more civilian vehicles begin to be implemented we'll see more spawn types for them a bit closer to where player spawns are located.

I hope this brief look into the thought process behind these areas helps you to understand how they evolve a bit better.

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

Source : http://steamcommunity.com/games/221100/announcements/detail/130948446732465981

DayZ Status Report - 26 May 2015

Wed, 27 May 2015 22:18 CEST

Greetings Survivors,

This week we're switching over to a new Status Report format, and merging in some of the community focused features from the dev hub into a single weekly report. We'll need to work a few kinks out over the coming weeks, so bear with us as we get this new format to the structure we want. 0.56/0.57 Development continues over on the experimental branch - the team is rapidly approaching a candidate ready for a stable branch update.

This weeks Status Report features info on E3, goals for the 0.56/0.57 stable update, and some outstanding charity efforts by DayZ community members.

And remember - the latest news and info on DayZ development is always available via the Dev Hub.

Contents This Week

Development Board Spotlight

[trello.com]

[trello.com]

Back to Contents[]

Dev Update

Those watching the experimental branch over the last few weeks have seen a high frequency of updates, configuration changes, and restarts as the development team ramped up volume and stress testing in preperation for the stable branch update. Strong gains in server side performance were made, and thanks to player stress testing on experimental branch - critical issues were identified in the performance of infected AI. With the gains in over all performance (server side) with player and simulation handling, we were able to isolate and identify the AI related issues - and the gameplay programming team is hard at work on resolving those issues.

In the mean time, as development continues - a firm red line on server side performance for stable branch has been established. This is to ensure an enjoyable experience, as well as reduce the amount of noise to signal ratio on the feedback tracker, and greatly improve the quality of repro steps, and critical identified issues coming in from that branch.
Over all, we expect that the experience will be significantly more enjoyable than 0.55 (but not where we want it to be for the release from Early Access)

    In the interest of getting an update to stable branch as soon as possible, work on the programming side will continue internally on several key issues identified by players on that branch in 0.55 / 0.56 experimental.

- Intelligent spawning per building / Item per building capacity limits
  - AI Performance costs (Infected - Animal)

As these systems are actively being worked on by the gameplay programming team - the stable branch update will have the spawning of infected, and the persistence disabled on stable branch servers. This is only a temporary measure while these two issues continue to be worked on, and we'll see both base building, and infected return with a vengeance as soon as possible.

- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

Source : http://steamcommunity.com/games/221100/announcements/detail/130948446710011552