Afternoon Survivors,
Brian, Peter, and Viktor give us the lowdown on the current blocker issues, as well as let us in on upcoming work from the design and animation teams.
Contents This Week
- Dev Update/Hicks
- Dev Update/Peter
- Dev Update/Viktor
- Community Spotlight
Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings survivors,
Now that PAX is over lets take a quick look at what we're doing to tackle the last Status Report’s listed blockers, and what issues are between us and .60 hitting experimental (so you're all in the know).
- Loot Distribution: The QA, Design, and Gameplay Programming teams have isolated the cause of the issue, specifically tied to stalling of item respawn - while initial server spawn, and server cleanup are functioning properly. The Gameplay Programmers responsible for this are hard at work nailing down a fix to this issue, and a possible solution has been handed to QA - we will run it through the QA department for verification.
- "Stuck Magazines": This issue has been resolved, and the QA Team are no longer able to reproduce it. Strike one more issue from the list.
- Sliding Players: All of the reproducible methods for causing this issue have been flagged and resolved by the gameplay programming team, and have been verified by QA.
- Playability of New UI Inventory - The team has finished all remaining changes needed to be ready for .60 experimental - once the build is in the hands of the experimental userbase, we'll be able to make any required adjustments or improvements based upon how they interact with it.
In addition to these previous issues, the engine and gameplay programming teams are currently working on resolving two issues we'd like to see solved prior to hitting experimental:
- FPS Drop / Clouds: Internal Testing discovered a 100% reproducible frame drop to single digit factors on limited hardware configurations. While the issue only appeared on 2 out of 30+ PCs, we're taking it very seriously. That said, the engine programming team has committed a fix and QA are verifying it as of the time of this report.
- Server Crash: We've encountered an issue with unconscious players reconnecting / logging in to a fresh server sometimes causing the server to suffer an unexpected crash. Obviously we'll need to get this resolved before pushing to a large userbase because no one likes playing on servers that are consistently crashing - and we all know there will be plenty of unconscious survivors throughout Chernarus. That said, the gameplay programming team have a solid repro, and all the crashdumps and server logs they could want, and are tracking this issue down as I write this.
As you can see, we're knocking issues down one by one, and each day brings us closer to pushing the first .60 experimental build to Steam. Keep in mind, this will be just like every other experimental upload and will have issues. So lets all chip in and make sure to submit good bug data when encountering them - Quality Assurance Lead Ondrej Klima gave some excellent pointers in how to submit the best bug data possible in our last Dev Q&A video on the official Youtube Channel.
All of us here at the DayZ dev team cannot wait get .60 on to experimental branch. The excitement and support at PAX East was overwhelming, and there are still so many more improvements to the technology powering DayZ to come!
- Brian Hicks / Creative Director
For the full Status Report, please use the following link: http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-26-apr-2016