Contents This Week
- Dev Update/Hicks
- Dev Update/Peter
- Community Spotlight
Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings Survivors,
This week the Status Report might seem a little thin for those who follow development closely, as not much new has occurred between Friday when the presentation was held, and today. Focus is on recapping the stuff shown at RTX 2016 covering .61 and what we can expect for it - but aside from that we have some updates on current Stable Branch hotfix, some new renders of work in progress animations for the first of our predator animals, wolves, and Peter talks to us about body temperature and how it impacts DayZ gameplay.
Current Stable Branch Hotfix goals are:
- Known Server Crashes
- Item Duplication Methods
- Animation State Issues
- Tent Lifetime Refresh
- Spatial Orientation for Vehicles
A couple key things to note on the above list: Tent Lifetime Refresh is currently not functioning as intended on stable branch, meaning you are only able to refresh the lifetime of placed tents by packing and unpacking them. Intended functionality on these is to match the current behavior of containers such as barrels, and backpacks - which refresh their lifetime whenever an item is moved inside the inventory of the container. In regards to Spatial Orientation for Vehicles - the hotfix we're working on here should resolve complaints of vehicles not persisting. As current stable branch behavior does not properly save the directional orientation of the vehicle on server restart, in some cases this can cause the vehicle to be destroyed and cleaned up.
In addition, we've uploaded some animated gifs of .. oddly enough.. animations of the upcoming wolves to our Trello board. If you're into that sort of thing, go check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzn7UIKivNY
- Brian Hicks / Creative Director
Dev Update/Peter
With the release of DayZ 0.60 stable version there was a bit of misunderstanding regarding the body temperature mechanic and considering it currently as bugged since characters can reach hyperthermia state in a very short time which wasn't the case in the 0.59 version. I would like to point out to those who aren't aware of it, that the engine which DayZ runs upon is capable of marvelous things that aren't obvious at first sight. Trajectories of sun and moon (even it's phases), star positions, tide heights, complex weather forecasts with air temperature, wind, newly added fog and other game world subsystems directly depends on the time of the day, date and geographic coordinates configuration.
While geographic coordinates is tied to the map itself and cannot be easily changed, date and time is exposed in the server configuration so admins can change it freely. Unfortunately, date and time is not separated in the configuration file and the easiest way is to set it to the system date and time of the server itself especially to get more variety in time of day across the servers, and as most servers aren't running in the past or in the future, that's where things like the body temperature mechanic which is connected to those settings can seem off, even if it behaves correctly - I bet most of you will be overheating and sweating while sprinting hundreds of meters in full gear, long clothes and with gloves, masks, vests and helmets on top of it all in summer weather with air temperature around 30°C. As DayZ is visually set in eternal autumn it makes sense that this mechanic is balanced to that time of year, where nights are actually cold and days can be anywhere from a bit warmer to quite chilly depending on the forecast, not to mention plenty of foggy and rainy days. Of course, it could be hard-balanced without taking weather and air temperature into consideration, however, it would be a step backwards considering that DayZ will be open to modding and there being possibilities for us to expect maps in different times of the year and geographic coordinates - jungles, deserts, mountains anyone? To allow more control over it we are going to tear apart date and time in the server config so the date is not affected when the system time is used by admins. In the meantime, there was an offset applied in the calculation of body temperature for the experimental version so it behaves more according to the visuals of an autumn environment instead of an actual summer date set in the server config file.
Now is a good time to unveil a bit more regarding the temperature feature, even if it's obviously quite low on the priority list now. Many of you noticed there is heating up and cooling down of item temperatures already present in game. This can be used to affect the body temperature of your survivor as heat packs, and even improvised ones like cans heated up in fireplace embers, will raise the body temperature while cold items will lower it. We are going to add more purpose to handling temperatures by making food perishable, especially raw meat alongside with blood bags. With plenty of refrigerators in houses or at junkyards you will be able to store food and blood bags safely to keep their expiration under control after you connect the fridges to an electricity system. The addition of cooling box containers will help you to carry food and blood bags around in fresh condition and ready to use. Considering food as one of the most crucial things for survival and with lowering of the amount of non-perishable food in the world towards the end, it will lead to promoting interesting approaches to gameplay for both lone wolfs and groups alike, as it will offer short time solutions of immediate consumption balanced against long term solutions with incorporating electricity usage at barricaded houses, camps, and bases during the times of need.
Stay cool... see you in Chernarus folks!
- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer
Community Spotlight
Another couple of weeks have passed, and we have again received a good amount of bugs via the Feedback Tracker. Regularly, we still see quite a few reports on player characters having lost their gear, and we do have a set of repro steps for this bug:
1. Join a server.
2. Go to any M4 handguard laying on the ground.
3. Take M4 to your hands.
4. Swap handguards on your M4 with handguard on the ground via action menu or by drag-and-drop.
5. Relog.
6. Notice that the character is missing all the gear except for the M4.
If you experience loss of gear in any way different than with the repro steps above, please do let us know: http://feedback.bistudio.com/
Of course, we also have a video to highlight. This time around it's a video made by: PolishedGuy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4BaJFzBBD4
Also, in case you tend to find yourself a bit on your lonesome when roaming around Chernarus, BarelyInfected has a meeting event coming up on July 16 at 22:00 CEST. Have a look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahs_ORUi29c
If you also have an event coming up in the future, just let us know via our DayZ Forums and we'll help spread the word.
Header image kindly provided by: wstdsgn.
Thanks as always for all your help and support!
- SMoss / Community Manager