SMoss

Greetings Survivors! As we move forward with January's stable branch update (0.53) the focus of the gameplay programming and production teams has been primarily on security. As mentioned prior in the September 15 Status Report - only so much can be done in tandem with engine and gameplay changes coming with every update (and maintain a rapid update frequency to stable branch). That said, as the primary vulnerability on the security side for DayZ right now is less on engine and/or scripting and more on modifying/accessing the process memory we have several Q1 goals we are aiming to complete. Deployment of a new form of BattlEyeThis has been delayed to allow testing/regression around any potential bugs and/or compatibility issues so as not to cause any major issues to those participating in Early AccessServer side sanity checks and protection against certain currently exploited methodsCloser work with Valve and the VAC teamThis will initially be seen by allowing players to report in-game suspected cheaters and will expand from there to a program that best fits DayZ and how it operatesExpanded vigilance in reporting all known tools and methods currently used to access the DayZ process for less than honorable methods.Beyond that, Q1 has a good deal of exciting work for DayZ. Be it work on the new infected AI, to implementation of the central economy or diseases - this should be an exciting few months. On the note of work to come, I'd like to expand upon confusion around persistence - how it is intended to operate, and the role that weekly persistence wipes currently serve. Persistence is a core pillar of DayZ and its design. Currently persistence functionality is tied to the incomplete economy functions. As we expand upon the systems surrounding the central economy - What is saved/How it is saved, Cleanup, Respawn, etc will be handled properly. In addition to that, the secondary cause of persistence wipes (issues with reading modifiers on saved items, improperly saved items, etc) can be addressed. Once we have addressed these two issues, persistence can and will be moved from an "opt-in" feature, to a core function of DayZ - and something that is universal across all servers. Once this is complete, I personally look forward to truly seeing the "Camp/Base building" side of the title start to be more universally adopted. Be it vehicles, barricaded buildings, tents, containers, or even farms setup via horticulture. In addition, if you have any questions surrounding this topic (or any others) - I encourage you to head over to the Developer Discussion subforums at the official DayZ forums. Eugen and myself both are accessible via the Service section. I wish I could bundle a microphone with every copy of DayZ. - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

2015 We live in the future people. 2015 looks to be a pretty awesome year for DayZ, I'd like to kick off this months Status Reports by talking a bit about how the team has settled in during our first week back, as well as some awesome points of inspiration for us. First off, I was forwarded a link to Eternum Pictures DayZ fan film - which has some outstanding emotional points about friendship, and loss. The loss that the main character in this fan film experiences is something that resonates with me. I can recall how it felt to meet, befriend, and then lose a stranger in my early DayZ mod days. As the option to instantly respawn after death somewhat limits this experience, it brought to the discussion table some server options that we've had on the drawing board for awhile. Speaking of servers... Over the next few months we'll be rolling out some expanded server options to extend support for administrators, and introduce more customization options for private shards. - Admin Logs, covering: Connections/Disconnections, Chat, Player Deaths (Env & PvP) - Hardcore Mode: Initially we'll only support this on Private Shards, while we see how the mechanics impact gameplay - However the intent is to offer server operators the choice to restrict how long since a players last death they can respawn. Eg: A hardcore server could conceptually restrict players from respawning until 12 hours after their last death. We'll gauge how much impact this has on the design, and decide if it stays restricted to private shards, or we open this up to all public (consumer rented) hive servers. Now that the team have returned back to the office we've begun going over data compiled from stable branch since Christmas, and looking at what is left to do for the 0.53 release at the end of January. We've got some awesome stuff on the table for 0.53 and 0.54, and as always we'll be pushing to experimental to test things out as development on the update progresses. Speaking of the end of January, PAX South in San Antonio is coming up and we have some awesome things in store for the first Penny Arcade Expo in the great state of Texas. We'll be sending out information on that via our twitter and facebook channels next week. In addition, the finishing touches are being put on the DayZ website - as we look to centralize where you all get the latest news on DayZ development, and interact with the DayZ Dev team. Over on the Official DayZ forums the team leads have begun using their new sub forums to interact directly with you, the Survivors of Chernarus. Head over and take a peak, we'll start to use these more and more - giving you guys a direct line to the people that guide the vision that is DayZ. forums.dayzgame.com I look forward to increasing visibility into DayZ development in 2015, and evolving what it means to survive in Chernarus as we march forward to DayZ 1.0. Chocolate Milk Bath, do it. - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer Peter / Lead Game Designer "Welcome to the first devblog of the 2015, I hope you enjoyed the holidays and spent some quality time with your families, friends and DayZ! I will keep it really short. We all know that this year will be very important for DayZ. With all these big ongoing and upcoming changes it will be quite tough but the outcome will be splendid. Currently we are focused mainly on new controls/interactions. We would like to use them before we start switching character to the new animation system so we can identify possible issues with the old one and address them. Apart from that we are looking forward to the new scripting language which should be ready as soon as possible so we can start rewriting currently used scripts with it, optimize and polish them which also bring some performance boost (server side, yay!). Design for manual transmission for vehicles is ready for the review and when we settle down on last little things after discuss it with programmers its implementation will begin. We are also making a prototype for non intrusive group identification so that you can easily identify your companions. Have an amazing new year and don't forget... see you in Chernarus folks!" Chris / Lead Artist "Character Art: We're still working on new character clothing and new zombie templates. This is ongoing, long term work that occurs during luls when the art team isn't needed to support new features being added by design. We've finished the quilted jacket and a new batch of zombie templates. An M65 Field Jacket is also WIP. Environment: Work has begun on a school building. Its giving me flashbacks to my days dodging balls in the gym. We're working on desks, chairs, bells, and gym equipment. This is a piece I'm personally excited about. Weapons: We're nearly done with a new pump-action .22LR rifle based on the FN Trombone. We've also recently completed a Winchester Model 70 and two new guns I think people will be excited about are currently WIP. In addition, over the last couple of weeks, we've churned out a series of new melee weapons for people to try out. Community: Some of you may have noticed that we've introduced a new area on the official forums where it is possible to interact with the team and I've been busy this week visiting and answering questions. I'd encourage you to drop by and check it out." Standup Notes for the week of 05 Jan 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: • M65 Field Jacket • FN Trombone • Vehicle design standup • School structure • Winchester Model 70 Animation: • Bugfixing • Hand poses for weapon attachments • Hand Poses Design: • Bugfixing • V3S Changes • Cooking • Diseases • Independant content of canisters • New scripting language • Traps Programming: • Security vulnerability fixes • Vehicle persistency • Loot distro per building for new system • Close range weapon sound fixes • Suicide fixes • Zombie/Animal AI • Vehicles - Manual transmission • Server side logging

It looks like you might be experiencing the issue described in this Steam kb article: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=4487-YUOC-6922

Wednesday maintenance is usually just that - maintenance on the servers and database as well as a persistence wipe (the persistance wipe does not affect items carried by characters). As krazypenguin mentions; the wednesday maintenance is scheduled at 07:00 GMT.

It hasn't been fixed yet, but the guys have the issue in hand: http://feedback.dayzgame.com/view.php?id=5169

Yarhh, same here! Managed to corner the deer by some bushes. The next iteration of the animal AI will most likely prevent me from doing so again though.

If any of you guys ever feel that your server reports go unanswered/unheard, just add in [email protected] on CC in your email when you contact the GSPs. I'd be interested in having a look at such cases and try to gauge the extent/severity of the problem.

Just out of curiosity, have any of the GSPs requested evidence from you guys when reporting servers?

The team does pull data from every version in order to analyze if item spawns are wildly askew for example. This can be used later on for balancing purposes related to "pushing" world interaction more, such as hunting/farming, but I could imagine that this is not the highest priority on their list just now.

Now that 0.51 has reached stable branch we've had the pleasure of watching how the survivors of Chernarus interact and experiment with its content and mechanics. Be it player to player interaction through the extension of the meat harvesting systems, or traveling together across the map in search of a V3S. For now the team is focused on critical bugfixes and server side performance optimization for 0.52 midway through December (due to the upcoming holiday season). For me, the first two quarters of 2015 hold a great deal of excitement. The last year has had a large amount of work ongoing behind the scenes that effect gameplay, and playability for a significant part of the active Early Access userbase. As someone that has spent over three thousand hours in Chernarus this year I am genuinely excited for the possibilities. Speaking of my time in Chernarus, as you all know the military tent (packable) was recently added into stable branch. This as I envision it is one among many possible "persistent objects" that survivors can find, and use to create their own base camp in Chernarus. Ranging from tents, to barriers, horticulture, containers, varied levels of fireplaces, and so much more - I see this feature expanding upon the initial pup tents of the mod into something that resembles a true improvised and -scalable- survivor camps. Speaking of survivor communities, our Private Shard contest has concluded and while I am happy to announce the winners - I have to say there were far more entries than I had expected, and the decisions were not at all easy. There are a lot of fantastic DayZ communities out there, and at the very least I now have a whole list of servers I need to take time to visit. The winners, in no specific order are: - FriendlyFlashMob - The Midnight Crew - TAW.net Congratulations to the winners, make sure to reach out to [email protected] to start the process of claiming your private shard server. For those who entered and did not win, don't be sad - Of all the tons of submissions, there was not one that was not outstanding. We'll be rolling out new support and options for private shards in January, so keep your eyes open for those. Still not a bandit. - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer Chris / Lead Artist "Long time, no talk! Sorry about that - but it was for good reason. Lots of things are going on with the art team! Character Art: Current character work is focused around the upcoming changes to the zombie AI and animation systems. We are re skinning the old zombies and exporting the skeletons into a new proprietary format. This has not, however, this has not held us back from creating a new batch of zombie model templates with which we can quickly create loads of new zombie types of various shapes/sizes/and ages. This is particularly important since the latest news regarding testing of the new zombies suggests we may soon be able to significantly increase the number of zombies spawning. Work in this area will be ongoing and my still take some time to finish but it should pay dividends in the long run. Regarding survivor clothing, we finished a bomber jacket and will be also adding a new quilted jacket, which should have fewer model clipping issues than the current bubble jacket, which it is intended to eventually replace. Weapons: We added the AUG in a somewhat unfinished state as it currently does not work with any attachments. However, we do hope to transform it into a highly modifiable platform and adding a RIS is the first step in that direction. The model is ready and soon, perhaps, I'll release a picture as a teaser. We're also working on a Winchester Model 70 Alaskan which means I need to get off my butt and figure out a design for scope situation (i.e. one scope for many rifles). Also, its possible that I was told to make sure the suppressors are looking pretty so that they can be triumphantly re-added. Vehicles: Now that design is settling on some technical requirements as it relates to art for vehicles, we're formulating a vehicles roadmap to plan for the number and types of vehicles that design has requested. It will be exciting to see the vehicles feature expand in the coming weeks. We also recently added a new helicopter crash site which looks quite a bit better than the old UH60s." Mirek / Lead Gameplay Programmer "This week we have pushed the current work on new Infected/Animals AI into internal testing. The core AI system was developed by the Bratislava team and is also using the new animation system, which will help us to have better navigation for AI units and more complex combat systems. For the initial implementation, there is not many new things about the infected, but it should improve better server performance and navigation. It will also allow us to have more infected on the map and to implement stealth mechanics into the game. Current testing is aimed for performance and if everything will go fine, we're planning to push it on to experimental servers (once we’re happy with how it performs). After that we're planning to tweak stealth and combat and we would like to push it on experimental servers with 0.53 version. We're also continuing on tweaking vehicles, improving loot distribution and loot respawning systems and other long term tasks, such as new game control mechanics and a new inventory system. Stay tuned for more details to come." Peter / Lead Designer "Long time no seen my dear survivors. I hope that surviving in Chernarus is a little bit more satisfying now with your new best friend - Praga V3S (by the way V3S is an abbreviation for the 3-ton military special). Indeed that rolled out version has rather stripped down functionality however you should enjoy the free ride while it lasts. We started to work on more complex mechanics for maintenance and repair. The battery will be most probably the next part that will be needed to get your vehicle functional so without it you can try to start the engine as many times as you want but it won’t get you anywhere, which also means that we are adding in the actual action for turning the engine over and off. If everything goes fine we will add animations for entering and exiting the vehicle as they were removed in last minute before release due some issues with action conditions that leads to undesirable results such as entering/exiting vehicle through closed doors. We are also working on setting up the inventory container for the V3S as with the current state of inventory implementation it is not trivial as it seems. New color variants of V3S are ready to go so you will be soon have the chance to drive also gray, orange and blue one. You may ask what else is being worked on not regarding the vehicles? I'm glad that I can tell you there is a bunch of upcoming stuff that was hinted a long time ago, specifically silencers, chainsaw and suicide. Recently a feature to use more shooting sounds per firearm was added thus we can now made the silencers useful and bring them back to loot spawns. It also opens possibility for crafted ones so you will be able to decide if you keep that PET bottle as a water container or made a silencer from it. The chainsaw was put on hold for few reasons that were connected to animation and melee systems but now we feel it is quite a good time to push it in the wild finally at least in some crude form. We decided to redo the way how suicide was supposed to work completely. We ended up with a fluent part of the gameplay which doesn't break up the immersion. Suicide starts with a gesture and while you are in this verbose pose you can still decide if you really want to pull the trigger and end your misery at once or leave it be and try harder to survive even with bad cards on your hand. Added value of this solution is that you can do such pose even with empty hand. Apart from all that we are still improving the horticulture with the possibility of making fertilizer while cooking is being refactored with some advanced functionality in mind for example you will be able to put your ammunition to fireplace and examine what it will do with them over time. We are also supporting the hermit way of play. In the near future you won't need to scavenge surroundings for loot and become self-sufficient if you wish and choose such a way to play. For now we will be adding new items and crafting possibilities including primitive stone blade and guts, next step will be to add bones, torch and alternative way to ignite the fire without matches. Don't forget to save some fuel for chainsaw... see you in Chernarus folks! " Standup Notes for the week of 01 Dec 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: • Full length ghillie • Quilted Jacket • Bomber Jacket • High fidelity V3S instrument panel • Winchester Model 70 • Cleaver • Hatchet Animation: • Support to new Zombies • Optics • Vehicle animations • Chainsaw Animations • Sword animations Design: • V3S Praga Bugfixing • Config and scripts for suicide • Silencer configs • Chainsaw configs • Loot defines for new centralized loot spawning Programming: • Critical inventory fixes • Walkie/Talkie support/fixes • Sound System support • Loot distribution redesign/improvements • Audio/Global Messaging bugfixing • Vehicle simulation diagnostics / bugfix • Character connection issues (protecting players from attack while logging in/before being able to move)

There should already be functioning silencers/suppressors for rifles as of 0.52.

In celebration of its passionate community, Bohemia Interactive has organized special Meet & Greet events at PAX South 2015, providing fans with the opportunity to meet some of their favorite story tellers from YouTube and Twitch, as well as DayZ’s Lead Producer Brian Hicks. Each day, Friday January 23 to Sunday January 25, Chernarus survivors attending PAX South in San Antonio are invited to set up camp from 14:30 to 15:30 at the Astro Gaming booth. Here they will be able to share their stories with Lead Producer Brian Hicks and some of DayZ’s most popular video content creators, including Mr Blackout, KDWolf, JamJar, Echoics, GoldGloveTV, 2MGoverCsquared, Smak, Calindel, Soma, and Sacriel. The Meet & Greet schedule has been written down here. In addition to the Meet & Greets, DayZ Lead Producer Brian Hicks will also be participating in a PAX panel on the topic “Post Apocalyptic Gaming & Its Draw” , together with Brian Fargo from inXile entertainment, Jeff Strain from Undead Labs, and Jimmy Whisenhunt from Sony Online Entertainment. The panel will take place on Saturday, January 24 th and starts at 10:00 AM. Later that day, on Saturday from 13:00 to 13:30, Lead Producer Brian Hicks – alongside livestreamers Soma and Sacriel – will also be joining the official PAX Live Cast at the Twitch booth for an interview on “The future of Steam Workshop, modding, and events for DayZ”. Last but not least, for those interested in a closer look at last year’s progress, Bohemia Interactive shared its public DayZ 2014 Year In Review. This document intends to provide a reflection on DayZ’s first year in Early Access, and offers an easy glimpse into some of the most significant developments that occurred. Looking ahead, Bohemia Interactive has already set its ambitions for 2015, with several much anticipated features and improvements being prepared for public deployment in the first quarter of this year. The full development roadmap for DayZ in 2015 can be found here. For all the latest intel on DayZ, please visit www.dayzgame.com and follow DayZ on Facebook and Twitter.

They face a global ban on their Steam account. Security does indeed have priority, and even though new items are being introduced into the game, that does not take time away from the part of the team that are addressing security related issues.

The devs have touched on the server performance subject several times in the past status reports (many different elements affect this). Don't worry, server performance will be addressed during development.

Confirmed.

Ahh, the olde strafe-hit two step dance.

Your concerns are valid (except I disagree on the no-progress issue) and I can of course understand that the current state of the game might not be exactly what you expected. However, all the issues mentioned are known issues which will be addressed during development. If you feel that you should take a break until the problems are solved, that is fully understandable and up until now, we are of course grateful for the feedback you have provided us! You can always follow the weekly status reports and changelogs and see when it becomes interesting for you to join in again. Also, on that note, along with all future status reports/changelogs, all the old reports/logs documenting the progress the team has achieved is available here: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/forum/134-developer-discussion-status-reports/ http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/forum/76-announcements-information/

Usually that message occurs when you're lugging around way too much gear in your inventory. If you file it on the feedback tracker, the guys can check the character and flush the inventory so your friend can access the game servers again: http://feedback.dayzgame.com/

It's not Chernarus of course, but Accolyte was kind enough to invite me to a game at the baseball stadium in Prague this summer. I'm sure that there'll be some bats lying around just waiting to be scavenged here in central and eastern europe.

Nono, not hundreds :) It will most likely take some time to plug up all the holes, but since it's quite an important issue, please rest assured that the issue will be addressed continuously during development.

Not yet, the trucks were only introduced very recently. The following topic by Eugen has the status quo on the vehicles that are in-game: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/215707-dayz-vehicles-first-implementation/

During testing, players/testers manage to find new ways to dupe in gear and since there's no global fix for duping in general, the guys have to address each method individually. Of course it's frustrating when some players abuse the methods, but all things considered, the game is still in development, players are reporting these issues and the devs in turn will be able to fix the problems.

Like with just about any other melee weapon in the game, there's a lot of weapon balancing that still hasn't taken place yet.

As mentioned, the melee system is not finalized. Please feel free to follow future updates of the game for changes to the melee combat system :)

80-something for me, I call haxr0z on all of you!! Combining boxes of matches should be possible in the future. Please keep in mind though that this task will most likely not take prio on the designers' to-do-list.