Evening Survivors,
In this week's Status Report our Lead Producer Brian Hicks will fill us in on subjects such as the CLE and a bit on work on the engine. Also, Lead Designer Peter will be commenting on work that has been done in regards to firearms.
Contents This Week
Development Board Spotlight
Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings Survivors!
Much to the delight of our reddit community (I'm certain) we'll be covering some points on the ongoing refinement of DayZ's in game economy this week, as well as talking about some upcoming content to the game, and a quick recap on the progress of upcoming engine changes for Enfusion. Lastly, Peter will talk briefly about future changes to how ammunition is handled in DayZ.
Don't forget to keep your eyes and ears open during TwitchCon - as I'll be speaking about Aerial Transport, Contaminated Terrain, and an additional little surprise I hope you'll all be excited for as I am. (This should be hosted on twitch.tv/dayz)
We've normalized the 0.58 stable branch economy around 27,000 minimum spawned items across Chernarus. The most prevalent items of course are clothes, tools, and resources required to survive. Internally we've begun setting the system up to apply lifetime to items upon their creation (spawning) so that player interaction with items is no longer required. This should take the economy a step further towards keeping things robust and moving. Region control is the next major step for the economy, which will allow us to restrict certain items to spawn only in certain regions - This way we can ensure more of those basic supplies are kept spawning on the coast to ensure folks have what is required to move inland, regardless of player traffic.
For 0.59 we'll begin experimenting with making civilian firearms a little more prevalent, and ammunition will begin to be more of a rarity. The desired effect being that ammunition itself will have an increased value, so that the decision to take that shot has more factors to it. That said, loose ammunition types that are used by civilian weapons as well as military have had their potential loot spawns expanded so it can be found throughout Chernarus. (7.62x39 for the IZH, 45 ACP for the 1911, and so on)
Issues with duplication, and magazine quantity manipulation have been identified and are being resolved, and NATO military gear will be moving out of the Quonset Hut Barracks and back to their proper NATO chopper crash spawns.
The art team is working on finalizing the upcoming Enduro Dirtbike model, which will hopefully be joining the vehicle distribution in 0.60. This vehicle will probably be our most accessible type, but like all other vehicles will need the proper parts, and operational fluids to maintain and use.
On the engine side the team is working hard towards a functional merge for several areas, keep in mind just merging these modules and systems are just the beginning. Configuration, testing, and iteration will need to occur.
- Renderer has entered initial functional testing with internal Q/A
- Animation System development is in progress, and the animation team is working closely with the programmers to begin testing/implementation.
- Network Optimization is a top priority, with issues such as player desync, gunshot sounds, and vehicle position being tied to this work. Network profiling tools will be used on 0.59 experimental branch servers so we can gather data on exactly what is occurring.
- Damage System is being configured, and under initial testing with Q/A & Design Team
- Physics System has had several key issues resolved that may be related to some of the Infected AI server costs. This is under test/investigation
- Infected Bugfixing is still under way, and daily test passes are being run against the commits
We've got a lot of work ahead of us in the coming months, so please make sure to file any issues and bugs you see over at the Official Feedback Tracker.
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer
Dev Update/Peter
Firearms, who doesn’t like them? They equal power. One can obtain food through hunting animals, defend oneself against infected or even hostile survivors. There are firearms related mechanics which were added specifically for DayZ’s requirements such attachments, modifications, chambering and others. Also former functionality of weapons such as machine guns, rocket launchers or underslung grenade throwers will be brought back.
To get closer to authenticity of firearms some changes to their handling are being currently implemented. Chambering became a real part of the weapon instead of invisible magazine with 1 bullet count. This will allow players to attach a magazine to a chambered weapon effectively increasing the amount of available bullets which wasn't possible before. Reloading is also being revamped, as R-key will be dedicated to the manipulation with weapon like manually cycling the bolt, pull back charging handle in case of jam or even rolling the drum of revolver when you decide to play lethal games with some friends. Don't worry about losing R-key for reloading. As a replacement for R-key you will be able to reload your gun directly from the quickbar by choosing the corresponding slot with magazine in it. Magazines will be swapped during reloading action. Also loose ammunition will work in same way, choose right slot and gun will be chambered.
Another nice change is that bullets in magazines/piles are no more just numbers of amount but are really independent objects which means they can contain ammo of different quality. Combination of damaged ammunition and non maintained gun leads to higher possibility of jams. With different type of ammunition in magazines, tracers will experience their comeback and help us to revive night gameplay a bit.
Keep your pockets organized... see you in Chernarus folks!
- Peter / Lead Designer
Community Spotlight: Blazerunner70
Excellent, I was lucky to stumble across a small cluster of random DayZ gems on Youtube. Yep, there's a nice mix of friendly player interaction, a bit of pvp, and a bit of roleplay. The videos were created by Blazerunner70, and although the videos are a couple of months old, they still do show the kinds of adventures that players can come across in DayZ.
Now, the audio levels are a bit off but the content of the videos is quite nice still.
Saving bambis, one pumpkin at a time :D
Hopefully you'll enjoy the videos as well, and as always, if you have some nice DayZ videos you can always go to the Gallery on the DayZ forums and share them with us. Until next week everyone, stay healthy, stay safe!
Header image credit: ṂҒ | Marzipan
- Michael aka SMoss / Community Manager