Over the last week (and throughout the next few) a good deal of work has been done to gauge current server side performance, player and AI limitations, and the immediate steps required to increase the current limits. In tandem with work done with BattlEye, our game server provider partners, and our internal security team we have also continued work addressing immediate security concerns and ways to mitigate them in order to provide an enjoyable player experience.
Players will begin to see these appear in the following ways:
- Experimental Branch will begin operating at 50 players per server
With the short term goal of deploying this to stable branch servers as well
- Experimental Branch will deploy and test new forms of detection from BattlEye
- Over the next few months we will use experimental branch to roll out changes to Zombie AI & Sensor functions
- Within weeks you will begin to be able to rent private shards of the central DayZ hive along with your DayZ server instance from your preferred game server provider
- In October and November you will see experimental branch servers rolled out with varying player counts as the team tests optimization measures aimed at server performance and data management
Pairing this work with work currently under way by the design and programming teams to support the upcoming experimental release of both our first vehicle, as well as the first iteration of barricading via locked doors and the methods to break them down will greatly expand the player experiences as we close out 2014. It is important to pay attention to the project status reports, and developer streams as well as participate in discussion on the official forums to maximize your engagement with the development process. - Brian Hicks / Producer
Chris / Lead Artist
"I'm happy to say that our programmers are looking into a bug which was preventing us from creating better looking 3D camo so with any luck, I'll be able to show you some in-game pictures of what we came up with in the next couple of weeks.
Planned is to include wearable active camo, and some which you can craft onto your long rifle. I was pleased to see the overwhelmingly positive response received from the first pics of the hermit zombie in last week's report. We have devised a scheme to create a set of zombie 'dolls' which are skinned already and will allow us to rapidly iterate new zombie types by 'dressing the dolls' with new or existing survivor clothing models and baking them to a new texture.
Work continues on vehicle parts, new survivor clothing models, and the new weapon models (Derringer, AUG, AKS74U). The release of the MP133 and Repeater were held up pending creation of sounds as, rightly so, the new door sounds superseded weapon sounds in priority."
Standup Notes for the week of 15 Sept 14
(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:
Prototyping procedural color changing for weapons
Polishing bush rag and 3D camo for weapons
Rangefinder Optic view
New fishing related items
Plants for horticulture
Craftable vest and coat
3/4 length women's pants
Various car parts
Medical Scrubs
Steyr AUG
Zombie 'paper dolls' for rapid iteration and creation of new zombie types.
Prison Uniform
Large military tent
Bugfixing character art and environment models
Animation:
Player animation graph bugfixing
Zombie mocap processing
Unarmed player sprint
Lowered one handed Pistol Animations
Zombie Animations
Player Pistol Animations
Design:
Bugfixing
Configs and scripts for new items (lockpicks, rangefinder)
Configs and scripts for hermit zombie
Configs and scripts for MP133, Repeater
Weather impact on player and carried items
Vehicles and their parts
Horticulture
Barricading
Animal and zombie AI
Advanced melee combat string table
Programming:
Inventory fixes
Security on player location updates
Doors locking and destroying
Zombie phantom sounds
Performance issues
Unintentional weapon switching
Broken door states in navmesh
Improved persistence saving
Diagnostics for debugging