Greetings Survivors,
Yet another week is checked off the calendar as the team moves forward with development of DayZ. In this week's Status Report, Lead Producer Brian Hicks will be filling us in on the challenges the team faces while on the road towards the next Stable branch update. Additionally, Brian will hand out a bit more info/updates in regards to the current state of persistence on 0.58 over on the Experimental branch.
Contents This Week
- Development Board Spotlight
- Dev Update/Hicks
- Community Spotlight: Carrot Survivor
Development Board Spotlight
Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings Survivors!
As we're in crunch to resolve the last few blocking issues for 0.58 we don't have too much *new news*. That said, we'll use this weeks Status Report to fill you in on the issues we're currently focused on resolving for 0.58, as well as some small changes to Experimental Branch over the last week.
Player Position Desync:
This issue has been present in a pretty bad state on 0.57, so obviously we want to do what we can to improve the situation for 0.58. No one enjoys having their character get stuck in one spot, or have someone they're in conflict with bounce all over their screen. While we'll probably not get this issue 100% resolved for this update, our aim is to mitigate it as much as possible and present as enjoyable an experience on stable branch as is possible within a reasonable amount of time for bugfixing. We'll be pushing test updates to experimental branch as work on this moves forward.
Degrading Server Performance:
Internally we have noticed severe performance drops on 0.58 experimental, below what we consider to be the acceptable line for a playable dev build. The team has focused on investigating the cause of this issue, and resolving it so as to return the build to a playable state. This, like the issue with player position desync is marked as a blocker for 0.58 stable release.
As well, we discussed last week the goal of having the gameplay programmers resolve the issue of animation glitching for 0.58. With the issues listed above, specifically player position desynchronization being a much more critical issue - priority on the animation glitching (weapon swapping, holding an invisible weapon) has been rescheduled for 0.59, in order to give the proper resources to resolving the issues listed above.
That said - with 0.58 large strides have been made on the loot respawning, and cleanup issues. Allowing us to look forward to the reintroduction of persistent objects frequently used with the building of player camps.
The following functionality is currently present on 0.58 persistence:
- Vehicle Position
- Vehicle Inventory
- Attached Vehicle Parts (W/ Exception to Tires & Fuel Levels)
- Barrel Locations & Inventory
- Horticulture Plots
- Fireplaces & Ovens
- Tents (Camping, Military, Car) Locations & Inventory
- Containers (Ammo Canisters, Backpacks, etc)
And of course - the base item persistence is functioning as well. Item cleanup & respawn should ensure that the economy functions at a base enjoyable level. If you encounter or spawn near a small village that seems to be barren, just continue on to the next town. Mapping the concentration of loot over the span of a week on experimental has shown proper saturation across the map, so there is a high chance that the next town will have everything you need!
As well, Lead Designer Peter Nespesny will be discussing our goals for vehicle maintenance (tools, parts, etc) on the Official DayZ forums later today. Make sure to head over, and let your voice be heard!
Lastly, as we look to pushing 0.58 to Stable Branch - We'll be issuing a full reset of the hive (private shard and public shard characters) as well as a full wipe of existing persistence.
We still have a long way to go, but 0.58 should be a fun build to play on - and 0.59 looks to be even better!
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer
Community Spotlight: Carrot Survivor
Hey all,
So, for this week it is time yet again for one of the DayZ content creators that have a mixed bag of goodies in his library. Without too much fuss; for this week we'll present you a couple of the videos created by: Carrot Survivor
Ahhh, the sweet sweet randomness when players take off into Chernarus to meet and engage other players sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in firefights. Our small selection of Carrot Survivor's videos depict the following settings:
1. An encounter where Carrot Survivor hooks up with two other random players. Eventually the group takes fire, and the guys subsequently have to figure out a way to deal with a pair of less than friendly players situated by the docks in Cherno.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYi1ci7qhhE
2. An unusual encouter where Carrot and a friend engage in a firefight with another player by Veresnik military base. They end up taking the player hostage, yet the encounter ends in a way you might not necessarily expect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4REuxp2Ywi8
3. Yet another hostile encounter where things do not go entirely quite as planned, neither for Carrot Survivor nor for his aggressor (dear god, Carrot's screaming is used liberally in several videos and it cracks me up every single time):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQF4T2iKrjs
As always, if interested in more, please feel free to follow Carrot Survivor via his Twitter and Youtube accounts:
- Youtube
Also, for this month we have an update on the bugfiler(s) for the month of june. As always, Darcion contributed with a load of issues for June, but we'd also like to recognize the efforts of Zyryanoff (again) as well as Impulz. A huge thanks goes out to all of you who took the time to file the bugs you came across in DayZ!
Header image credit: Jack Smith
- Michael aka SMoss / Community Manager