SMoss

I don't think that the designers would allow items to persist through death or provide stat based items upon spawning. In regards to the zombies; they are still wip, so there will be continuous review of behavior, damage output and such.

I'm sure another one will turn up

Perfic, am glad to hear. Have fun :D

Ok, I got in contact with Vilayer: "... I have got his server open and will check it over and contact them." Let me know how it all turns out.

No problem :) checking...

I'll be happy to ask around. Do you have server info (ip + port)?

You'll have to swap your backpack for it.

Persistence wipes are no longer part of wednesday maintenence, so your tents will be fine

Just found one yesterday in tent city (all the way out west)

Greetings Survivors, As expected, work continues on 0.56 stable branch release. This release as mentioned prior will hit in the early weeks of May rather than the standard end-of-the-month update for April. This is mostly due to bugfixing that needs to occur related to the inventory refactorization in order to get the build to a state that can be used by the Early Access audience. As well, the gameplay programming team are resolving the bugs discovered in the loot spawning system several weeks after the 0.55 stable date. Given that most of the core work these last few weeks has been on such major systems as the inventory, and central loot economy - I thought I would take the opportunity to discuss a few points people have requested hearing information about. First off, I feel the need to reiterate on Early Access, development builds, and what to expect. A few status reports ago I mentioned the fact that as we move forward through the development of DayZ, people *will* see more things break, more bugs, and so on. Part of getting access to DayZ as early as we've allowed via the Early Access program means that you're seeing the real ups and downs of game development. I've seen people over the last few months on forums, twitter, and so on mention the back and forth stability of builds as if this is an anomaly - an oddity in software or game development. Early Access is as the fictional character James Kirk once referred to the USS Excelsior - "The Great Experiment". DayZ approached this at its truest form, 3 months into our principle development - and as said development has continued, the scope has expanded to include the development of the next game engine from Bohemia Interactive, Enfusion. It should go without saying, that the development of any large scope video game takes years. A multiplayer only title, that also aims to fully support Steam Workshop modding is no short order. Developing said title, the game engine powering it, and maintaining a steady monthly cadence of updates to the consumer is no short order. So I ask you, the Early Access user - when you encounter a bug that frustrates you - make sure it is listed in the feedback tracker, make sure you read the Status Reports (although, it seems that if you are reading this you've already completed this step), engage with the development team on the DayZ forums. I've found that when it comes to the Early Access program and your experience with it, we'll all get out of it - what we put into it. Moving past that, many people have asked about the audio side of the Enfusion engine. Obviously fairly early on into the Early Access program, we realized that the existing audio technology interited from the RV engine wasn't going to suit the needs of the project. Problematic (and annoying) audio bugs began to reveal themselves, and resolving those within the legacy technology clearly demonstrated it would be time lost. Thus, work began on a new audio module to be paired with the in-development Enfusion engine. As with any core engine work, this is not a short form task. Obviously the goal for initial deployment is feature parity with the legacy audio technology, it is my personal hope that once this is achieved - we can look to expand the options for enhancing the audio experience in Chernarus, as I firmly believe audio in DayZ is just as critical as any core technology and part of the immersion into the world. My personal holy grail throughout the development of DayZ has, and will remain the server side performance. Much of what folks attribute to "lag" or "desync" can be traced back to poor server side performance. 85% of which comes from the performance heavy usage of SQF engine script for many gameplay systems. Mentioned in prior status reports, EnScript (the name for Enfusion's engine scripting language) is leaps and bounds ahead of the legacy SQF in terms of performance. This, the portion of the performance budget currently consumed by SQF usage is the largest roadblock between 50 player servers, and 100+ player servers. Moving the title completely away from legacy engine scripting tech, and onto the new engine scripting language for Enfusion is by no means a small task, and will be an ongoing goal for the team (and in my opinion 100% required for DayZ to reach 1.0) Last on my list for this week is some comments I wanted to make in regards to play styles, difficulty, and exactly how to play DayZ. Obviously, as DayZ is an open world sandbox title, nearly anything is technically possible (in regards to play styles). As the initial deployment of the new infected A.I., as well as the central economy ramped up the difficulty within Chernarus, there were people vocalizing how they disliked how difficult DayZ was becoming. Now, obviously I've spoken on this before - but I feel the need to reiterate, and clarify a few things. Surviving in Chernarus is intended to be difficult. I want you to value each bullet, I want discovering a roaming boar in the forest to be a stroke of good luck. However, this does not mean the play styles of "Coastal Chaos" or "Squad play" and so on are not viable playstyles. You can, and should be able to play DayZ however you want. Be warned however, every choice - every play style should, and will have its own cost. You can choose to spend your time in Elektro, fighting over sniper hill, or pitting your squad against a rival group up at the Northwest Airfield each have their own requirements to maintain, and overall costs (be it in time, health, resources, or life duration). Lastly, as the text below calls out - Standup notes are not a change log, they are a list of the things the teams have been working on this week, to give you all transparency into the current task priorities. So try not to get upset if you see a task thats being worked on not be in the latest stable branch update, and so on. See you guys up north, - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer Header image credit: [TDay]Spalte Its been a while since I've written so I thought I'd give you a short update. From my perspective, the pace of art creation has really picked up in recent weeks and below is a brief overview of some highlights: Vehicles We're working on 3 vehicles currently but I want to set expectations since renders have already been publicly shown for two of them - the extreme level of detail we are placing into the vehicles means they will each take a very significant amount of time to finish. I'm talking a couple months each - and that’s before the animators even touch it. Just because we've posted a render of the high poly exterior, doesn’t mean their release is imminent. Its a studio first that we're modeling not only a high detail interior instrument panel, but also an engine bay which players will have to interact with. We hope you'll agree the added time is worth it in the end. Characters We've finished 3 new zombie models recently and we hope to get those into Chernarus and scaring the pants off of you by our next stable release. Work continues on even more zombie types - including new female versions, to add more visual variety to the game. Gaspo, the very talented artist who works on zombie bodies and character heads will soon be finishing up with the new female zombie templates and will move back to creating character heads for greater variety. New character clothing is also in progress with a new hunting uniform being added, medical scrubs, and a MARPAT uniform as a nod to the DayZ/ArmA2 lore is in progress. Weapons We've finished or have WIP a fairly large number of new weapons or weapon attachments recently. Some may have seen pictures of the Mauser C96 Red 9, Winchester 70, VSS, SVD, IZH18 and UMP45 added to the DayZ Trello but not all of them will be immediately added to the game - some of them still need animations and sounds to be made and we also would like to wait until our loot spawning/central economy system is working as intended before we add the venerable SVD. Also new is an optic for the AK platform called the Kashtan C-1, which is something like an ACOG for AK side-mounts. Last but not least, we have made a hunting scope which will be able to be used on a greater number of rifles than just the Mosin - and speaking of which, the days of "slap the LRS on a Mosin" are numbered. Environment We have finished a new school building and have populated it with some school-related items in the classrooms. The map team will be able to begin placing them in Cherno soon, after their current tasks, which we hope will serve both as an interesting new location to explore, but also as a landmark for orienteering. We've also created a new Village store, some roadblock objects which might have been placed on major roadways during an evacuation, and we're continuing work on new building interiors. - Chris Torchia / Assoc. Art Director Standup Notes for the week of 22 Apr 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 VolgaIkarus 260Lada NivaLRS / Scope Attachment New Zombie ModelsMARPATRoadblock ObjectsDesign: Central EconomyFirearms RecoilTripwire TrapsFirearms Noise (AI Related)Drying FoodCooking via StickFall Damage mitigationSkeleton Damage bugfixingEnScript/SQF ProfilingObject PlacementPlayer / Infected StaminaSVD ConfigurationProgramming: Inventory refactorizationDynamic EventsVehicle Transmission bugfixingVehicle wheels simulation improvementsAdv. Loot Distro BugfixingPlayer StatisticsGrenades refactorizationPersistence BugfixingAdvanced Loot Distro bugfixingCharacter ControllerLogin Que DesignNew Damage Sys.Crash Fixes Animation: Mauser Red 9 AnimsLadder Anim RedesignInfected crawling state animationsGesture Implementation on new Anim SysRifle Aiming implementation on new Anim Sys

I get what you mean robophant, but I'll leave this excerpt from last weeks status report where Brian Hicks addresses this exact subject: "... The Early Access program provides you with development builds of the project, not access to a feature, or functionally complete game. As this year progresses, more and more parts of the Enfusion engine and its accompanying technology will be merged into the main branch. This means things will break, sometimes things will break -hard-. We utilize the experimental branch to flesh out any catastrophically game breaking issues (think client crashes, server freezes, high repro progression loss, and so on) and at the end of the month the most stable development build gets pushed to Steam for all of you to poke, experiment, and have fun with. Testing is done in three tiers, each tier scaling up in load and volume. Internal, Experimental, Main (Stable) - and make no mistake. All three branches are for testing. " Full status report here: http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-14-apr-15

The answer is almost right in front of you. Keyword here is "buggy". A quick search on the Feedback Tracker netted a good amount of tickets on the issue. All these issues have been "merged" in ticket http://feedback.dayzgame.com/view.php?id=23273 which is in status "Acknowledged". This means that the team is already aware of the bugged zombies and that the issues are scheduled for fixing. I can assure you that the guys did not deliberately add this behaviour as a "feature" or whatnot, as you mention, and even though the zombies are bugged, I'll dare stick my head out here and say that it's not exactly game breaking issues in spite of the Nightcrawler behaviour. Don't you worry, zombie behaviour as it is now will not stay unchanged :)

Afternoon survivor chums, While trawling through Youtube and Twitch streams, I came across Snaftii's channel. It is not one of the channels that has millions of subscribers, but the gameplay and editing in his videos looks really nice. While a lot of players enjoy roving up and down the coast line in search for easy fresh spawn prey, other players enjoy taking on a more friendly role. While having a look through Snaftii's backlog of videos on both Twitch and Youtube, viewers will see many examples of him attempting to interact with players first instead of shooting them down on sight. Unfortunately, in spite of Snaftii's friendly manner, not all players seem to play nice in return (@16:06): In Snaftii's Youtube channel, there are plenty of really good gameplay videos with a storyline behind them, and the "Dark Days Ahead" series was quite a good watch. As a lot of content creators show, a little editing goes a long way, and Snaftii makes good use of camera angles as well as some other subtle trickery in order to provide some nice intros to his videos. The intro to the second part of the "Dark Days Ahead" series for example had a nice touch (no spoilers) that tied both episode 1 and episode 2 together: Outside of Snaftii's different DayZ series, I also enjoyed watching videos such as “Story Time” which shows some nice interaction between players. While not exactly action packed throughout, it's oddly captivating to see the randomness that goes on in DayZ (what the hell are you on about Mickey?): All in all, Snaftii's content kept me good and entertained for a couple of afternoons, and his channels are definitely worth a visit. As always, if interested in more, please feel free to follow Snaftii via the following social media accounts: http://twitter.com/Snaftii http://www.youtube.com/user/Snaftii http://www.twitch.tv/snaftii http://www.facebook.com/Snaftii - Michael aka SMoss / Community Manager

Hotfixes are announced by the team, so in case of regular maintenance, it is basically just maintenance of the servers. This includes that servers are taken offline so that the guys can do a backup of the hive. Afterwards a cleanup of the database is initiated - removing dead characters, deprecated items and such. And, if needed, the guys perform config changes to the control panel - the ability to set time acceleration on the servers for example. All this does not require updates to neither server nor client and is what regular wednesday maintenance would entail (like today).

As the guys mention, if you picked it up 5 minutes before server shutdown, you should be all fine!

That makes for entertainment as well :)

Hmh, seems like this series could be an interesting watch.

I second that. The sledgehammer is a beast compared to other melee weapons at the moment. And no, no spears...

Thanks for the kind words :) And don't worry, the guys are working their fingers to the bone with both development as well as bug fixing.

I feel your frustration Pandachow, but I am most certain that there have been no mention from any team member that we simply refuse to fix bugs. I'll do a quick run through of your experiences: 1: Fully geared, in ATC and just died, no gunshot, friend heard no gunshot, nobody up there, all gear was still pristine. Filed here (assuming you were upstairs. If not, please clarify and/or feel free to file it): http://feedback.dayzgame.com/view.php?id=5169. "Acknowledged" status which means it is scheduled for a fix. 2: VERY geared, Ammo boxes, smersh backpack + vest, the lot. The same thing again and I just died in the camo building in the very northern abandoned military base. No gunshot, just blackscreen. Same as above. 3: Somebody lightly knocked my truck with their truck, both died. Doesn't seem to have been filed on FT. However, vehicles are still heavily tested internally, and the guys have been notified of your experience. Always feel free to search the Feedback Tracker and file bugs if they have not already been filed: http://feedback.dayzgame.com 4: This was a firefight, fair enough. 5: Fully geared, killed by a hacker in Cherno, explosions everywhere, before landmines. Wasn't near a gas station. Admin confirmed over global channel that it was a hacker. Development of the security measures have not at all come to a halt. Previous status reports touch on this subject matter plenty of times. Also, not a bug. 6: someone shot me, fair enough 7: Well geared, one shot by a zombie, was wearing a helmet and was healthy, zombie comes up to me and hits me in the head and I die immediately, then did the same to my friend. Don't expect for anything to be finalized yet. This stage of development is not really for polishing, so review and balancing of damage output is still to come. Not a bug. All things considered, I have to stress what Brian mentioned in the latest status report: "... The Early Access program provides you with development builds of the project, not access to a feature, or functionally complete game. As this year progresses, more and more parts of the Enfusion engine and its accompanying technology will be merged into the main branch. This means things will break, sometimes things will break -hard-. We utilize the experimental branch to flesh out any catastrophically game breaking issues (think client crashes, server freezes, high repro progression loss, and so on) and at the end of the month the most stable development build gets pushed to Steam for all of you to poke, experiment, and have fun with." For the full status report, please have a look here: http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-14-apr-15

Greetings Survivors, Build 0.55 has been on the Steam/Stable branch for a few weeks now, and with the new systems in place with this build we were able to gather some incredibly valuable bug data from all you eager beaver Early Access participants. That said, and before we get into details on this week and the plan moving forward a few words need to be mentioned. Much like the warnings placed on the DayZ Store Page, and the DayZ Launch Screen, as well as the stickies on the DayZ Steam Forums - The Early Access program provides you with development builds of the project, not access to a feature, or functionally complete game. As this year progresses, more and more parts of the Enfusion engine and its accompanying technology will be merged into the main branch. This means things will break, sometimes things will break -hard-. We utilize the experimental branch to flesh out any catastrophically game breaking issues (think client crashes, server freezes, high repro progression loss, and so on) and at the end of the month the most stable development build gets pushed to Steam for all of you to poke, experiment, and have fun with. Testing is done in three tiers, each tier scaling up in load and volume. Internal, Experimental, Main (Stable) - and make no mistake. All three branches are for testing. So as we move forward to 0.56 and beyond, keep that detail in mind. Systems will break, bugs and interruptions of gameplay will occur - and as I will detail below, nothing finds the cracks in the stonework like throwing a rotation of roughly a million active players at a build and seeing how it holds up. Through extensive monitoring of both private shard and public hive servers on 0.55 the team were able to identify two key bugs in the new loot and economy systems that did not appear in proper detail on experimental branch. These two separate issues affected the core persistence mechanic of DayZ in different, but similar ways. On one hand, we discovered aberrant behavior in item respawn positions, and the other (over this last weekend) we discovered loot respawning causing corruption in the primary persistence binarization (which caused some servers to believe it was "okay" to be operating at 20,000 items less than the defined red-line). These two bugs are the primary focus of the members of the gameplay programming team responsible for the loot economy, and player progression - and will be included in the 0.56 update (scheduled for early in May). In an effort to mitigate the issue in the mean time, during the Wednesday maintenance period this week we will be switching servers over to the legacy placeholder loot spawning system. Unfortunately this means some of the newer items won't spawn, but it will keep the economies going until 0.56 hits stable branch. Paired with this hotfix, we will be instructing GSPs to reset the persistence structure for each stable branch server. So pack up those tents post haste. Moving forward we'll be segregating the base building type objects from the main persistence structure, so in the case of any issues like this popping up again during development - player camps will not be effected. On a more fun note, The Survivor GameZ are holding the Survivor GameZ VI this upcoming Sunday - Frequently coined the "Super Bowl of DayZ" we'll be seeing some very well known personalities from across the Twitch and DayZ content creation sphere going head to head in a 2 man team based fight to the death. Live streamed on 4 seperate free roaming cameras and no less than 15 competitor twitch channels. Keep an eye on their twitter account @Survivor_GameZ for more information! - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer Standup Notes for the week of 14 Apr 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 VolgaIkarusUMP 45, VSS, Mauser polishingNew Zombie ModelsSchool Env. ObjectsRoadblock ObjectsDesign:Central EconomyFirearms RecoilTripwire TrapsFirearms Noise (AI Related)Drying FoodCooking via StickObject PlacementPlayer / Infected StaminaSVD ConfigurationProgramming:Inventory refactorizationDynamic EventsVehicle Transmission bugfixingAdv. Loot Distro BugfixingPersistence BugfixingAdvanced Loot Distro bugfixingCharacter ControllerLogin Que DesignNew Damage Sys.Crash Fixes

You should be good to go BCBasher; the wipe was performed during todays maintenance, so it's all done with. Persistence is forced "on" on both public/private hive, but please be advised though, on private shards the persistence can be reset on request from server admins. "...is persistence working right now until next Wednesday at least?": It should be, but as with so many other features/mechanics/systems in DayZ; only thorough testing will truly test the mettle of the persistence. If you run into any issues though, please do file them on the Feedback Tracker: http://feedback.dayzgame.com/

It wouldn't hurt us at all. There was no ulterior plot here to wait until the last minute with an update on today's maintenance which all things considered was not regular maintenance (revert to previous loot spawning system). Semantics? Feel free to call it such if you please, however the statement from april 9 still stands: persistence wipes will no longer be part of regular wednesday maintenance. Today was different, hence the notifications/warnings in the Status Report, on BattlEye as well as Twitter. I appreciate that you do not use Twitter, but messages from our #dayzdevteam Twitter account also do appear here on the forums in the "Devtracker" section: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/224040-twitter-dayzdevteam-persistence-is-scheduled-to-be-wiped-tomorrow-during-maintenance/. I posted that tweet as soon as I got the info, and if it constitutes as a fail that I forgot to post in the topic which at that time had been created six days prior; well, here I am. I'll take that one on my cape. All things considered though, please do feel free to keep an eye on the "Devtracker" section, as useful info also passes through in there: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/forum/138-devtracker/

It's a newly introduced system, and as it so often happens with newly implemented systems in software development, bugs are trailing in its wake. The guys are on it though :)

Don't worry, the military zones will feature the military loot again as you mention (the system is a bit bugged atm). Disregarding spawn rates of the military items, it should be at the military bases that you would primarily go to in order to source this gear.