DayZ Status Report

[[TiG]Damo]

Status Report - Week of 08 Sept 14

New military bases planned for the North West (Tisy Military Base), I wonder if this is where they'll relocate Balota tent city to?
Map



Text Version

Focus for the development team over the last week has primarily been on resolving server and client crashes discovered during internal testing of 0.49. Rather than address the crashes with a potential hotfix after the update (given the impact of the associated central hive reset and the steps taken to address the more prevalent duplication and abuse methods) the choice was made to unlock the update from our regularly scheduled maintenance window of Wednesday and rapidly iterate upon experimental. What does this mean for the average chernarusian survivor? We will be pushing rapid updates to experimental and iterating 0.49 until the build is in a state ready for stable branch. We believe this will only be a matter of a few days. When the build is ready for stable branch we will work with our game server partners to bring stable branch offline, and update steam.

Additionally, the programming and design teams have been working together to investigate and resolve several key cheating and bug abuse methods including but not limited to:

    Server/Character force re-initialization
    Rapid micro player location updates (slide/glide teleporting)

Community interest in exactly how the northern regions of Chernarus will be developed has been ongoing, and after discussion with Senchi our Lead World Designer we've put together a rough guide for the development of these regions.

http://i.imgur.com/hGfImUF.jpg

As you can see looking at the map above, the environment team has a clear plan for developing the north and inland regions. When work on the northern corridor has completed the environment team will begin revitalizing existing legacy villages and towns throughout the map. This means that once the villages and towns of the north listed in the above image are completed, the team will begin renovating the original Chernarus towns and villages to bring their look, feel, and layout more in tune with the reality of a post-apocalyptic world.

Lastly, this Friday will be the first of our now weekly dev streams on Twitch.tv. Head over to twitch.tv/dayz at 18:00 GMT +2 this Friday and members of the development team will be playing DayZ and answering questions from the chat. -- Brian Hicks / Producer

Peter / Lead Designer

"This week there has been ongoing work on advanced weather impact, which is being expanded, partially rewritten and tweaked to provide better utilization and feeling. Also newly added mercury thermometer comes in hand if you are unsure about your body temperature. The prototype of the dynamic events system - the UH-60 gets company from the eastern camp, the well known Mi-8 helicopter. A few new items were added recently from the PAX showcase, such as the stun baton and balaclavas and they will be available for public in next experimental version. As well hunting will be expanded with the useful snare trap shortly.

We are currently focused on cleaning and redoing configurations for all doors as their handling was fundamentally changed in the game engine. Improvements which will be noticeable at first is the easier interaction with them - forget about nightmare which door to choose from action menu to open those you want to while you are standing near to more of them as now it takes into account what your cursor is aiming at and it's not proximity based. The second welcomed change is related to the audio side - sounds of doors opening and closing are possible now and are already plugged in and you can really tell difference. (Although the variation in sound effects are not quite there yet)

More sounds will come later for example for locked doors because with recent door improvements we can finally start working on barricading. We have already done some design outline and analysis toward barricading mechanics - to allow you to take existing structures and occupy them for your needs. First thing to come will be (un)locking the door's lock with a lockpick which will be expanded with different padlocks and even combination ones. Later the wooden planks, nails and other material come to use in combination with tools which gain other purpose aside from melee only.

Keep your ears open while looting... see you in Chernarus folks!"

Chris / Lead Artist

Character Art

Since the last update, the biggest change with character art has come with the creation of a new base body type with is ~10% more slender than the previous. It is more fitting for somebody surviving in a harsh environment and will help reduce the number of clipping errors between clothing/player bodies. Because of this and recent changes to how characters are assembled and to their animations, we have been doing a lot of bug fixing. Unfortunately that means pausing the creation of new items by some of our artists to fix the worst of these issues immediately, however, we're mostly past this and will begin again on some new clothing ?sets?. Work on reshaping other items to reduce the severity of clipping will be ongoing.

Weapons (or the AKS-74-and-U)

Many of you were happy to learn about the AKS-74U and many asked me on twitter and on the DayZ forum which caliber it will be chambered for. Surely, we would not add a 5.56mm AKS-74U, right? I mean, they never really made a direct AK100-series equivalent for the AKS-74U after all.

http://i.imgur.com/TG3yE1H.jpg

Well, you'll be happy to learn we are, in parallel, working on art for 5.45x39mm ammo. In other news, The MP133s animations have been finished and are now pending sounds and the lever-action repeater is ready to deploy, following implementation by design.

Vehicles

Friends, I am happy to report that we have officially begun working on the art for our first vehicle. Until this point, our working prototype has been an old vehicle from ArmA2 but now, we are working on a brand-new V3S with many of its components (i.e. wheels, doors, etc...) separated into different meshes to work in a similar manner as weapon attachments."

Standup Notes for the week of 08 Sept 14

Art:

    V3S Transport Truck
    New civilian zombie
    NEAF civilian hangar
    New 55-gal drum
    Derringer
    AKS74U
    5.45mm ammo
    Radio Cassette player
    RGD2 smoke (white, black)
    Waterproof packable bag
    Waterproof backpack

Animation:

    Bugfixing
    Grenade, chemlight, flare related animations finished
    Repeater reload animations done
    Throwing animations in progress
    MP133 reload animation in progress
    Arming/Disarming animations polishing in progress

Design:

    bugfixing
    configs and scripts for new items
    added mi8 for random spawning
    advanced weather impact on player
    reconfiguring doors and adding sfx
    barricading mechanic outline
    ​finalizing new controls

Programming:

    Character and inventory items duplication fixing
    Melee combat tweaking
    Shotgun shooting over network fix
    Door reimplementation (now in internal testing and bugfixing)
    New gamecontrols
    Forced reinitialized players
    Desync issues
    Better sound over network
    Central economy (type related cleanup and respawn, dynamic tweaking)
    New basic zombie behavior ​* Partial reworking of respawn / cleanup system according to required type-related implementation

[[TiG]Damo]

Status Report - Week of 22 Sept 14



Over the last week core members of the development team have been focused on investigating, and addressing server and client crash issues introduced with 0.49. These include issues with the processing of persistent objects on server initialization, player rag dolls, and the clean up of trash (expired) objects. In addition, the programming team continued their work on addressing exploits related to rapid player position updates. (Sliding/Teleporting)

As these updates make their way to stable branch we are also working with our game server providers to put the finishing touches on the systems needed to properly support the renting of private shards of the central DayZ hive. As mentioned in previous status reports, this option will continue the initiative to progressively increase the customization options allowed to server operators and communities, while still protecting the core vision of DayZ. This tied with our continued collaboration with these game server partners to analyze and track data related to the optimum software/hardware configuration for DayZ server instances should allow us over the next month to greatly improve the play experience on all DayZ stable branch servers. Throughout this process we will endeavor to share data and statistics related to this whenever possible in our weekly status reports.

Those experiencing issues with respawning, or spawning into (any) servers should also head over to the official DayZ forums and read the information contained in this post. Anyone still having issues is strongly encouraged to reply to said post, so we can continue investigating the root cause of the issue. - Brian Hicks / Producer

Peter / Lead Designer

"Weather impact on the player character is still being worked on and body temperature is now dependent upon character movement. Drowning characters also received some attention and is now working like you would expect. There is also a new waterproof bag, so anyone who happens to find your soaked dead body will be able to use your dry things. There are two traps ready to be released shortly - snare trap for small game as I already mentioned and one used for catching small fish.

Apart from that we are refining design for barricading and vehicles. Some nasty bugs which were affecting gameplay were fixed, such as the lack of ability to be in both restrained and unconsciousness state at the same time or endless usage of consumable/food/drink items.

By the way if you missed live stream of Brian, Chris and I playing DayZ head over to our twitch.tv channel and check it out... see you in Chernarus folks! "

Chris / Lead Artist

"Much of what I wrote about last week is still WIP and there isn't a whole lot of new stuff to talk about right now. The prison uniform and medical scrubs are almost ready, as well as the first item of woman's clothing - 3/4 length pants. The art and design teams have agreed on a series of sketches related to the creation of leather craftable clothes so work on the models is underway there. We decided to make a command variant of the V3S and work continues on the vehicle parts. A hermit zombie was completed and I think the first time you see him coming at you, its going to be good for a scare.

We're also working on a lock picking kit related to the barricading feature Peter discussed during the Friday dev stream last week.

Also, a new large, military tent is WIP which you will be able to persistently store your gear in."

Viktor / Lead Animator

"Last month we added new zombie run variations. Now we've started to focus on other areas. After going through many already mocaped animations we were still missing some important moves we want to improve the zombies with. To be more specific I'm talking about zombie attacks and hit reactions. The mocap session happened on tuesday and we have mocaped some awesome attacks and reactions for zombies. I truly can't wait to see it in game. This will be our immediate goal.

At the same time we have started changing pistol moves a bit. Although it will take some time to have it fully polished there is a new pistol lowered pose and moves for standing, crouched and proned player. And one more thing... it's one handed!

The MP133 reload animations have been finished, however there are some minor issues we need to fix. And as usual we are looking into bugs. Last week many minor issues in the animation graph were fixed."

Standup Notes for the week of 22 Sept 14 (Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)

Art:

Prototyping procedural color changing for weapons
Polishing bush rag and 3D camo for weapons
V3S Command Vehicle variant
New fishing related items
Lock Picking kit
55 gal drum for dying leather
NEAF models
Various car parts
Medical Scrubs
Woman's clothing
Steyr AUG
Old man Zombie
Prison Uniform
Large military tent
New outdoor (picnic) table
​Bugfixing environment models

Animation:

 Player animation graph bugfixing
 Rifle raised walk
 MP133 reload animations polishing
 Zombie MoCap Processing
 Lowered one handed Pistol Animations

Design:

Bugfixing (restrain issues, endless usage of items etc.)
Configs and scripts for new items
Traps for small game and fishes
Drowning player
Weather impact implementation
Vehicles and their parts design and implementation
Horticulture implementation
Barricading design and implementation
​String tables

Programming:

Client and server crash fixes
Door reimplementation (bugfixing)
Security on player location updates
Player respawn/connecting fixes
Tents positioning
New basic zombie behavior
Sound-over-network enhancements & optimization
Server fps optimizations
Support for better weapon animations

[[TiG]Damo]

Status Report - Week of 29 Sept 14


Over the last week (and throughout the next few) a good deal of work has been done to gauge current server side performance, player and AI limitations, and the immediate steps required to increase the current limits. In tandem with work done with BattlEye, our game server provider partners, and our internal security team we have also continued work addressing immediate security concerns and ways to mitigate them in order to provide an enjoyable player experience.
Players will begin to see these appear in the following ways:

    Experimental Branch will begin operating at 50 players per server
        With the short term goal of deploying this to stable branch servers as well
    Experimental Branch will deploy and test new forms of detection from BattlEye
    Over the next few months we will use experimental branch to roll out changes to Zombie AI & Sensor functions
    Within weeks you will begin to be able to rent private shards of the central DayZ hive along with your DayZ server instance from your preferred game server Provider
    In October and November you will see experimental branch servers rolled out with varying player counts as the team tests optimization measures aimed at server performance and data management

Pairing this work with work currently under way by the design and programming teams to support the upcoming experimental release of both our first vehicle, as well as the first iteration of barricading via locked doors and the methods to break them down will greatly expand the player experiences as we close out 2014. It is important to pay attention to the project status reports, and developer streams as well as participate in discussion on the official forums to maximize your engagement with the development process. - Brian Hicks / Producer

 

Chris / Lead Artist

"I'm happy to say that our programmers are looking into a bug which was preventing us from creating better looking 3D camo so with any luck, I'll be able to show you some in-game pictures of what we came up with in the next couple of weeks.

Planned is to include wearable active camo, and some which you can craft onto your long rifle. I was pleased to see the overwhelmingly positive response received from the first pics of the hermit zombie in last week's report. We have devised a scheme to create a set of zombie 'dolls' which are skinned already and will allow us to rapidly iterate new zombie types by 'dressing the dolls' with new or existing survivor clothing models and baking them to a new texture.

Work continues on vehicle parts, new survivor clothing models, and the new weapon models (Derringer, AUG, AKS74U). The release of the MP133 and Repeater were held up pending creation of sounds as, rightly so, the new door sounds superseded weapon sounds in priority."


Standup Notes for the week of 15 Sept 14
(Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)

Art:

    Prototyping procedural color changing for weapons
    Polishing bush rag and 3D camo for weapons
    Rangefinder Optic view
    New fishing related items
    Plants for horticulture
    Craftable vest and coat
    3/4 length women's pants
    Various car parts
    Medical Scrubs
    Steyr AUG
    Zombie 'paper dolls' for rapid iteration and creation of new zombie types.
    Prison Uniform
    Large military tent
    ​Bugfixing character art and environment models

Animation:

    Player animation graph bugfixing
    Zombie mocap processing
    Unarmed player sprint
    Lowered one handed Pistol Animations
    Zombie Animations
    Player Pistol Animations

Design:

    Bugfixing
    Configs and scripts for new items (lockpicks, rangefinder)
    Configs and scripts for hermit zombie
    Configs and scripts for MP133, Repeater
    Weather impact on player and carried items
    Vehicles and their parts
    Horticulture
    Barricading
    Animal and zombie AI
    Advanced melee combat string table

Programming:

    Inventory fixes
    Security on player location updates
    Doors locking and destroying
    Zombie phantom sounds
    Performance issues
    Unintentional weapon switching
    Broken door states in navmesh
    Improved persistence saving
    Diagnostics for debugging

[[GIT]Fairy]

Changed name of server to TiG - The Irish Guard - Bettys Persistent Palace.

Also added message confirming restart times.

[[GIT]Fairy]

So get tents moved to our server, and then loot the shit out of other clans servers bringing ill gotten gains back to ours for storage?

[[TiG]Damo]

Sounds like you're the man with the plan

[[TiG]Damo]

status-report-week-of-06-oct-14

With the experimental branch updates on 0.50 rolling out this week, Raist and Eugen have worked together to deploy additional data tracking methods that should aid fine tracking and design adjustment related to player movement. Previously the team had focused most of our data tracking methods on loot distribution, spawning, and so forth - as we move closer towards the deployment of vehicles, expansion of existing persistent objects, and the central loot economy we will continue to use experimental branch and official stable branch servers to guide the design of gameplay mechanics via player movement, death, and camp analysis.

The above image shows the concentration of player deaths within a 12 hour period on one Experimental Branch 0.50 server. As you can see, the expected large amount of player deaths occur along the player spawn points. However, what is increasingly fascinating is the large spread of unique player deaths across the map. From as far out as Kamenka, to Tulga, Skalisty Island, and Devil's Castle. I like to imagine the lone player death at Green Mountain was an epic last stand gun fight, but we may never know.
In addition to the obvious value to the data above, analyzing data like this will become increasingly valuable for the development of core gameplay systems, as well as Chernarus Plus over the coming days and months.

In addition to the work done on player data tracking, the gameplay programming team has worked hard on increasing server side performance optimization as well as server side security updates related to player position tracking. 0.49 introduced a good deal of server side performance enhancements, and addressed quite a few critical issues with stability. However, with these fixes came several new issues that we hope to see resolved with the stable release at the end of the month. We hope to finish out October with 50 player servers, persistence enabled by standard, and faster server performance across all servers on stable branch. As we progress along our goals in October, the status reports will keep the player base updated on these goals and any potential blockers or delays. - Brian Hicks / Producer

 

Chris / Lead Artist

"Tech:

Work continues on fixing the graphical bug associated with our 3D camo and it has turned out to be more troublesome than originally thought. While the programmers were tinkering around with the shaders in search of a fix, we were able to have an additional channel added to the shader used for most of the loot items which will allow us to procedurally change the color of objects via config. The designers will evaluate how and when to implement such a feature but I am hopeful it will lead to a lot more color customization options on a lot more items than we currently allow. We also got support for a colorize in the grass shader so that we can vary the color of patches of grass in a large field, adding some visual flare to the environment.

Character Art:

The first women's clothing item is done: 3/4 length pants. It will be added in the no-so distant future, along with women's shorts and a sweater. The prison uniform, which was paused pending a few high priority tasks, is WIP again. We will have to pause the creation of new zombie types temporarily to work on some tweaks to the skeleton, which were asked for by the programming and animation team, related to new zombie AI/animation triggers.  The team in Bratislava is working on various crafted items from leather which I hope will be interesting to people who like to play in more of a PvE style.

Weapons:

The Derringer art is ready and will soon be ready to be passed along the chain: animations, sound, cfg. The AKS74U and AK74M are being polished along with the art assets related to 5.45mm ammo. I have set this as a goal for myself - that by the end of October the AK74 family will debut on experimental. "


Viktor / Lead Animator

"After introducing one handed pistol animations many visual bugs had to be fixed to provide smooth and polished experience. Part of that is polishing and replacing some unarmed moves while standing. First of upcoming minor changes is a new unarmed sprint and unarmed run should follow. When we finalize those we can polish other animations like running with binoculars, pistols and other one handed items.

We are still processing the last mocap animations as these should be ready for improved zombie ai. Many new attack for zombies are being created so we can prototype and test different zombie combat situations. We already have a first iteration of tools for new animation system and it looks great. If all goes as planned we would like to introduce zombies on the new system as soon as it will be possible. After all, we already have a deer running around using new system (just internally for now) and it's already visible improvement. But it is still a long way to go until we can use all of the great features of the new animation system."

Peter / Lead Designer

"Last week was pretty hectic. We brought a bunch of different assets from our backlog to the game like the leather sewing kit so you can finally repair your leather clothes and shoes, RDG2 tube also known as smoke grenade, sardines - this time alive not canned, welding and firefighter helmet to cover your head, brass knuckles and sledgehammer to crunch some bones. All of these things should spawn in game along with long time awaited MP-133 and R92.

As well, a good amount of bug fixing tasks were addressed. For example better placement of tents which takes surrounding collisions into account to allow for more intelligent pitching of tents in wild places. Proper placement of wrecks created by dynamic events. Allowing or forbidding of fireplaces to be ignited in some places. Temperature and wetness fixes and tweaks.

Apart from that we also opened discussion which will help us to outline construction design and it's mechanics. We are analyzing what's possible and where the borders are so we can decide upon crucial things like how they will be placed - freely or grid based? What the granularity of objects will be - down to logs, whole walls or perhaps complete floors? How the crafting of these objects will be done - just a recipe or actually stacking. There are many important things which will define player experience of creating, using and ambushing bases.

Interesting times ahead, probably we will need some dungarees in the future... see you in Chernarus folks! "

Standup Notes for the week of 06 Oct 14

(Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)

Art:

    Multiple crafted leather items
    Women's shorts, sweater.
    Procedural color changing for loot.
    Polishing bush rag and 3D camo for weapons
    Plants for horticulture
    Craftable vest and coat
    Various car parts
    Prison Uniform
    Steyr AUG
    Zombie skeleton tweaks
    Large military tent

Animation:

    Player Unarmed Sprint
    Player animation graph bugfixing
    Zombie mocap processing
    Lowered one handed Pistol Animations Polishing
    Zombie Animations
    Player Pistol Animations

Design:

    Bugfixing
    Configs and scripts for new items (lockpicks, rangefinder)
    Configs and scripts for hermit zombie
    Configs and scripts for MP133, Repeater
    Weather impact on player and carried items
    Vehicles and their parts
    Horticulture
    Barricading
    Animal and zombie AI
    Advanced melee combat string table

Programming:

    Critical inventory fixes
    Unintenional weapon switching
    Issues with animation sychronization
    Server performance issues
    Broken door states in navmesh
    Improved persistance saving
    Server performance issues
    Data/Common Stats tracking
    Loot distribution analysis

[kdoo12]

The aug is coming ohhhh yeahhh.

Where is the other proposed weapons? like the aks74u the shotgun and lever rifle. Surly they cant be introducing a new weapons when the others are still not in the game!

[[TiG]Damo]

status-report-week-of-20-oct-14

The subject of the central economy has been one of varied opinions within the community. The idea of centralized control over both rare items, and quantity control over more common items of loot is very polarizing. As we look towards the remaining months left in 2014, the team has been discussing our intended goals and level of functionality desired from the loot spawning system, and the central hives' control over it. As the current behavior for the spawning and respawning of loot is a placeholder system and the limits of this form are very visible when observing the current behavior on experimental branch servers we have outlined the following goals for the final functionality with the programming, and design teams:

•     Control over quantity per server instance for rare / high value items (Eg: M4A1, SVD, etc)
•     Loot table control per region/area type rather than per building class name
•     Even distribution of loot economy across the whole of Chernarus

As work moves forward on deploying the intended functionality into loot spawning/respawning, server side stats analysis will allow fine adjustments to the system to be made, and experimental branch updates on a weekly basis will allow us to iterate, and volume/stress test against a large user base. Status reports throughout the remainder of the year will keep people apprised on the progress of this new system. - Brian Hicks / Producer


Chris / Lead Artist

"This week, I'm taking a look at our skybox and lighting settings to see if there is opportunity to improve the experience visually - particularly at dawn/dusk and night.  I'm hoping that we will find a way to add the milky way spiral arm visible in the night sky to our game.

Work continues on several new character pieces (women's clothing, prison uniform, medical scrubs, craftable clothing and new zombie types) as well as various environment models which I have mentioned previously (new heli crash site, objects for the NEAF, building signs, other props).

The Derringer, AK74M, AKS74U and MP133 with pistol grips have all been passed to the animators, designers and sound team for their part to be completed. We are still be on course to add 5.45mm ammo and the AK74 before the end of October."


Peter / Lead Designer

"The art team has completed several new weapons and delivered the assets to the animation and design teams. One of these new items is one quite a special case, which we need to figure out how to do properly and it's a flare gun. So in the meantime you will get other dangerous toys to play with. By the way do you remember that little useful item from the mod which was used to heat yourself up? Character exposure mechanics were expanded again and good old heat pack is back and it's better than ever. When you use it, it starts to produce heat to warm you up as long as the pack lasts. With advanced weather impact we had introduced also some meaning for shoes you are wearing. But that wasn't enough for us within scope of the survival. Shoes have potential to became very important part of your clothes to take care of as they are gets damaged now depending on movement speed, surface type and distance traveled and eventually hurts your feet.

Previously, I had mentioned the new controls system which is currently being worked on and we have working prototype of it already. You are probably curious what changes it will brings to game and way it's played. We are focused to make the controlling of your character as fluent as possible so there will be no immersion breaking due to clunky controls. That means we want to eliminate user action menu, or at least have this possibility just for very special cases. Usage of items will be driven contextually, let's say you have an apple in your hand and you invoke action by pressing and holding use button - if you are pointing on someone you will start to feed him while you are holding the use button, if not then you will start eating it by yourself - when you release you will stop the action. You will be able to use items even during movement. Still have that half-eaten apple in hand when zombie suddenly appear? Just hit him hard with that apple in your hand - yes all items (of course firearms too) can became melee weapons. New controls allow us also to expand melee system which we are considering to do with addition of two types of attacks - fast and charged, or to add push instead of fast attack. We will see how the prototype of these goes and how it will play with server performance and synchronization in general.

Next time I will talk a little bit about the new inventory too. As usual apart from such exciting stuff we made some fixes such ammo-box container inception and other smaller ones. I nearly forgot that we spent some time on defining what animal companions should be, but that's something to talk about later.

Choose your footwear wisely... see you in Chernarus folks!"

 

Standup Notes for the week of 20 Oct 14

(Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)

Art:

    Improvements to the skybox and lighting
    Multiple crafted leather items
    Women's shorts, sweater
    Polishing bush rag and 3D camo for weapons
    Prison Uniform Pants
    Medical Scrubs
    Steyr AUG
    Large Tent
    Various new environment models

Animation:

    Sitting gesture changes/polishing
    Prone animations with pistol polishings
    New hand poses for items
    Wring clothes animation done
    Binoculars animation graph tuning
    Bow reload animations in progress

Design:

    Bugfixing (tent pitching, repairing leather items, struggling, containers)
    Configs and scripts for new items (heat pack)
    Shoes and foots damage
    Expansion of weather impact
    Loot tables maintenance
    Damage and destruct textures
    Advanced melee
    Barricading
    Animal companions
    Loot distribution
    Injured character
    Controls
    Inventory
    Vehicles

Programming:

    Critical inventory fixes
    Unintenional weapon switching
    New gamecontrols
    Loot distribution improvements
    Gameplay statistics
    Door states persistency
    Implementation of the V3S vehicle
    Zombie/Animal AI

[[TiG]Damo]

I think the addition of shoe's wearing down is a terrible idea...   Who comes up with this stuff?

[[GIT]Fairy]

More and more fur coat and no nickers tbh.  They really need to add something the players want.!

[[TiG]Deargdoom]

I hear they have Kafka on the dev team.

[[TiG]Damo]

status-report-week-of-27-oct-14


Greetings Survivors,

Over the next few weeks you will hopefully begin to see some small (but effective) changes to how the Status Reports, Dev Streams, and DayZ website are laid out. In order to facilitate this, the traditional format of our dev streams will change and the Status Report will begin to focus more on the tech side of DayZ, as well as the existing discipline soap boxes, and stand up notes. The DayZ website will soon feature an "Early Access" calendar covering our intended experimental and stable branch updates, play sessions, dev talks, special events, and consumer show attendance.

That aside, this week hopefully sees the release of 0.50 to Stable Branch on steam. Paired with the recent support of private shards for consumer rented DayZ server instances and the ongoing drive for server performance enhancements we hope to finish off the first year of development on DayZ with a strong support for player communities. Persistent storage stability, as well as transportation, and A.I. redesign are goals we aim to be able to begin implementing into our steam branches before the Christmas holiday. As always, we will discuss the progress of these goals in our status reports and external communication moving forward.

UPDATE: As mentioned via the DayZ Dev Twitter (@dayzdevteam) we are currently working to address issues encountered during pre release testing for 0.50 to stable branch. Current goals are aimed at a release during next weeks regularly scheduled maintenance, however we will keep you all updated as to the progress.
In the mean time, experimental branch is updated with the latest 0.50 build - for volume and stress testing prior to next weeks maintenance window.

Make sure to check the DayZ dev hub weekly, and keep an eye out for the changes to DayZ.com - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer


Peter / Lead Game Designer

"The end of the month is around the corner and that means only one thing: After the three experimental releases in a row it's a time to deliver the latest stable branch update to DayZ. The Last few days we were fixing the last few issues here and there and polishing current state of the internal dev branch version so it can be distributed to stable branch and shine there for another month. As well I can tell you that you will have plenty of stuff to try and do. Let me recap quickly the features and content added to the game this month for you.

With proper tools you are able now to plow the soil in the greenhouses and plant the seeds which will grow into plants and produce crops which can be picked. For this initial iteration of horticulture we went with tomato plants and with the fixed placement, in the near future we will add more plants and planting spots will become arbitrary. After doors were re-implemented in the engine we were able to add opening/closing sound effects to them as well as locking/unlocking their locks with lock picks which is the very first basic iteration of barricading. Doors can be also unlocked with brute force so don't worry that someone will lock you up and leave you for dead. Taking care of your character was also extended with shoes degradation which is dependent on shoes durability, surface roughness they are used on, movement speed and distance walked.  Character exposure to weather, temperature and wetness was tweaked and with addition of heat packs even snipers must not fear they will freeze out during their camping. Also other features were expanded as well, repairing items and clothes with duct tape and leather sewing kit. You can also use sewing kits to stitch your wounds. New animals were added as well, you can meet new the goat and hen now in Chernarus. As far as new items goes I just mention some of them. From weapons there is a set of long awaited ones containing MP-133, R92, AK-74, AKS-74U and as a bonus the handy Derringer. For melee usage there is sledgehammer, and brass knuckles. Clothes were enriched with now complete firefighter uniform and other pieces. Backpacks have also some newcomers like SPOSN and waterproof backpacks. We fixed some ongoing annoying issues like struggling from restrains, seeing thru burlap sack when logged in with it on head, unconsciousness compatibility with both states, character drowning, fireplace and tent placing, container inception and many more.

I teased you in the last status report that I'll write something about the upcoming new inventory. Current inventory is good and is doing fine but there are some little flaws. What I especially like is the micromanagement of items in given space which provide nice immersion - it's not just some text list and I also like easy usage of it with drag and drop functionality. We would like to expand on good sides and rectify not sufficient ones like virtual hands slot or some inconsistencies in manipulation with inventory in general. With new inventory system we will be able to do things like creating container on any object, locking it, dynamically change it's capacity,  dynamically change number of quick-bar slots according to given container and a lot more, maybe rotating items will be possible as well. Our senior designer Jan Tomasik is currently playing with GUI layout of inventory screen and here is what he has to say:

"Horizontally oriented inventory uses better screen space of nowadays 16:9 monitors. This layout reduce necessity to scroll through inventory to minimum and doesn't obscure view on players character and its surroundings. Player has better overview of items he posses and time for all management of loot is significantly reduced. Inventory is fully modular so it fits even on 4:3 and offers future possibility to be even organizable by players themselves. All slot sizes are same through whole UI so player is always sure whether item fits in slot or not. Player can choose whether he wants to have avatar panel on left or right side of the screen and can also organize order of containers.".


You can see Jan's concept of horizontal layout in attached screenshot, of course the visuals are just temporary mockup. 

Enjoy the new stable release and in the meantime... see you in Chernarus folks! "


Viktor / Lead Animator

"The animation team has been busy bringing new animations to the game like reloading for derringer, wringing clothes, using grenades, flares and chemlights and other.

We have also slightly redesigned the sitting animations. The new pose greatly reduces amount of clippings when holding pistols, one handed and two handed items.

There is also progress with the new zombies as they are internally running around using new systems. The animation graph and AI now has to be improved so it can start using new animations.

Last weeks we had many discussions about some great stuff coming to the game. One I am most excited about is the injured player also known as limping animations already showed a while ago. It wasn't the right time to bring this to the game yet because it is very tied to many systems and most of the default animations have to be done and finalized first. We have agreed on how many injured stages there will be and also we would like to represent some illnesses with an animations like cough, sneeze, fever and more. To be clear this is something we won't get sooner then sometime next year. But I'm sure it's worth the wait."

Standup Notes for the week of 27 Oct 14

(Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)

Design:


   

• Bugfixing before stable release
• Configs and scripts for new items
• Polishing current state of things
• Loot tables maintenance 
• Loot distribution
• Crafting
• Controls
• Inventory
• Vehicles
• Zombie AI

Programming:
   

• Critical inventory fixes
• Vehicle controls
• New gamecontrols
• Door states persistency
• Loot distribution improvements
• Zombie/Animal AI