Evening Survivors,
This week's Status Report contains good info from Lead Producer Brian Hicks regarding the Central Loot Economy, engine work, and the newly introduced Combat Scrum held over the weekend.
Contents This Week
- Development Board Spotlight
- Dev Update/Hicks
- Community Spotlight: NWAF is the place to be in .58!
Development Board Spotlight
Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings Survivors,
As the team prepares work on 0.59 experimental release (v1) we'll recap this week any applicable changes to 0.58 stable, and talk a bit about what to expect with 0.59 experimental.
Those of you who closely follow dev's personal twitter accounts might already know some of this information, but not everyone does - so we need to recap this.
With the hotfix deployed to stable branch servers, it is important that everyone understands how the item cleanup system works - both right now, and how it should be operating with 0.59 stable.
- Items have a 30 minute lifetime which can be refreshed by picking up the item, or directly interacting with it.
- Base Objects (Tents, Ammo Canisters, Protector Cases, Barrels, Vehicles) have a 45 day lifetime. This will eventually move to 7 days once systems are in place for intuitive lifetime refresh
- Backpacks (not including the improvised and crafted types) have a lifetime of 4 hours
- Crafted backpacks have a lifetime of 1 hour
When the first 0.59 experimental build hits, you'll notice a few things we'll be trying.
- 10 Offroad Hatchbacks will spawn
- 10 Civilian Sedans will spawn
- 5 Transit Buses will spawn
- 5 V3S Chassis will spawn
- 3 V3S Cargo will spawn
These numbers may not carry over to stable, as the intent is to test how both the server handles the amount, and the player-player vehicle position is handled. In addition, we'll be operating most servers at 75 players on 0.59 experimental. If we're able to get server side performance above the red line at 75 players prior 0.59 hitting stable, it will carry over. If not, we'll continue to work towards it with 0.60 experimental.
For 0.59, and 0.60 both - we're looking at a good amount of engine work being merged into the main branch. Part of this work includes the beginning of basic QA passes against portions of the new renderer. This is internally only, but requires some DLL changes to be present in the main distribution, so don't get to worked up if you see some DLL's referencing Enfusion, or Direct X 11. Past the programmers merging these engine changes in, they still need to be properly configured within the areas of the title that use them by the design team, tested by QA, bugfixed, regression testing, and so on. So don't expect massive changes all at once (a general good approach to the whole of Early Access, in general) - and please, if you're participating in the Experimental Branch, make sure to file bugs at feedback.dayzgame.com
Last Saturday we had the first Combat Scrum w/ PvP Evangelists - and we've compiled the rough notes of what was covered in this below:
Attending:
Brian Hicks
xSmak
Respawnonme
iwinuloselol
DeadlySlob
M1NDR
Break71
This initial combat scrum ran a whopping two hours, and bounced over a myriad of topics. We're looking into the possibility of moving to releasing these as audio MP3s in the future. For this scrum we'll cover the top four questions and their responses.
1) Player Desync / Gunshots not being heard / Breaking your legs while climbing upstairs?
A) While server side performance gains were made, this exponentially grew the amount of successful network traffic being handled by the server. No optimizations have been done on this across 2015, and thus obviously has to be a priority moving forward. This is a well known issue internally, and will be a focus moving forward. Network traffic behavior is just not acceptable right now, and must be improved.
2) Improvised Bow - Balancing? Changing the aiming style? Improving usability?
A) Obviously, the current method of using the improvised bow in combat is not ideal. It is -functional- but we have a good ways to go with it until we're happy. Most of that is either A) Going to be affected by upcoming changes to the animation system, and player controller and B) Going to come in beta, when our focus shifts from primarily feature development, to bug fixing. In short, in the end - we most definitely want bow combat to be both viable, and rewarding.
3) Weapon Sway / Realism vs Fun / Using the effect of hold breath to mitigate the cost of weapon sway & stamina?
A) This is a good point. Obviously DayZ is known for, and associated with a "hardcore unforgiving survival simulator" - and we want to maintain this moving forward. However, when it comes to systems such as weapon sway, hold breath, and stamina - and how they all play into each other, we need to communicate more clearly to the user exactly what is going on.
Part of this can be communicated properly via the upcoming new (togglable) UI, and even more can be communicated by -properly- displaying a (more) visible change in sway via the hold breath mechanic. As we're currently using placeholder tech from RV in this area, we're not able to do what we want to do with this. As we move closer to beta, we're all excited to move weapon sway, and associated hold breath functionality and the new UI towards a more approachable and understandable system. Much like learning to control your sound in DayZ Mod, we hope to see players learning through UI and visual cues how to control their weapon sway, and use hold breath the most effectively.
4) Are there any plans to reduce player speed / Address some sort of inertia system to mitigate players being able to make high speed 180 turns without consequence?
A) Firstly with player speed, anyone who played DayZ Mod can tell you how ridiculously fast the DayZ player speed is in comparison. Initially this was done to help mitigate the limited available methods of transportation in DayZ, as Chernarus is a very, very large play area - and the decentralization of points of interest by expanding and redesigning Chernarus into Chernarus Plus meant much more travel was needed. As we look forwards towards 0.59 and beyond, increasing the methods and availability of transportation we'll be scaling back player movement speed (iteratively, not all at once). When it comes to inertia, dexterity, and all of the potential gameplay areas that can have an impact on the player movement, there is most certainly room for improvement. Keep in mind however, we can't start effectively implementing and changing how this works in game until both the new player controller, and animation system are merged in and configured for use by the design team.
That said, we are most definitely interested in improving how the player handles, and expanding the simulation of weight, and dexterity upon the momentum of player characters in motion. The next three months or so should see some marked improvement, and changes to how this is handled.
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer
For the full Status Report, please use the following link to the Devhub