Greetings Survivors,
This status report came a bit later than usual as we wanted to include some of the results and findings from this weeks experimental releases, as well as shed a bit of light on the intent of said releases. As we tread on into May, we'll be rolling 0.56 into 0.57 development with the intent of a regularly scheduled end of month release. Ramping up to this, you'll see frequent experimental branch updates and experiments ongoing on that branches servers.
As internally we spent time investigating server side performance, as well as the effect of various systems on production server performance we discovered abnormally high performance cost related to infected AI. As said performance should be lateral at a certain point, we've been fluctuating configurations and builds on the experimental branch to properly replicate the production environment and profile the exact location and behaviour of the source of the performance drop.
On the player side, we've made strong gains performance wise. We're seeing a gain of 4x higher performance per average player count, and this is instantly visible in gameplay. As the programming team moves ahead on investigating infected costs on server side performance, we'll be disabling infected spawning on stable branch servers (post-stable update)to ensure the highest quality of gameplay on that branch. Experimental will proceed with infected performance tests so we can as soon as possible return the infected to Chernarus en masse.
If you're curious how this work is going, once the end of the month stable update (0.57) releases - keep an eye on experimental branch.
I'm personally excited to see the gains on the player and gameplay side - we've still got a long way to go until feature complete, but I'm excited to chase you all across Chernarus.
Really not a bandit,
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer
Standup Notes for the week of 14 May 15
(Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)
Art:
- GAZ Volga
- Civilian Bus
- VZ61 Scorpion
- New Zombie Models
- Civilian Hiking Jacket
Design:
- Transfer of skinning to EnScript
- Transfer of traps to EnScript
- Tripwire Traps
- Design of damaged barrel usage
- Bugfixing
- Profiling server performance for existing scripts
Programming:
- Inventory refactorization bugfixing
- Dynamic Events spawning bugfixing
- Loot Distro bugfixing
- AI Performance Analysis & Bugfixing
- Character Controller
- Login Que Design
- New Damage Sys.
- Server & Client Crash Fixes