Baty Alquawen

Hello survivors! New Year is here and with it the first Status Report. Brian would like to present major goals for 2017, Peter talks about reasons why the game is more hardcore than before and Baty summarizes your Christmas experiences. Contents This Week Dev Update/Hicks Dev Update/Peter Community Spotlight Dev Update/Hicks Greetings Survivors! Its our first Status Report of the year - and as we've had team members trickling back in through the first week of the year it might be a bit of a dry one, but lets take a look at the major goals going forward as well as what has occured so far in 2017. As work on 0.62 and the Beta milestones move forward, internal teams have contined in our goal to address the remaining issues in 0.61, and hopefully introduce vehicles to stable branch. Over the last few weeks the team has been cycling issues through exp, and onto stable directed at: Known Server Crashes Adjustments to Infected Behavior Adjustments to Hypothermia damage Fixes for Vehicle and Tent Lifetime Fixes for Invisible Body Parts Vehicles on Exp falling through terrain Fireplaces not being able to be placed in Stoves In addition to these adjustments cycling through the Exp/Unstable branch, the development team is tracking and working to address a number of additional issues: VOIP Volume/Proximity Dropoff Vehicle client side performance Server side performance drops (Causing issues such as player position desync, delayed actions, etc) Server side memory consumption Additional known server crashes Infected spawning behavior issues Contined polish and work on addressing remaining issues with vehicles As mentioned this is all in addition to ongoing work for both 0.62 and Beta milestones - Once we get internal builds in a state we are confident to start showing examples of both visuals, and client side performance for 0.62 we'll be sharing that. All of us here on the dev team are excited about this, as the small team of artists and support programmer begin to start preperation for branching for this milestone. I know this Status Report is chock full of cool and amazing things, but our first goals as we kick back into the groove for the new year are squarely focused on addressing the critical 0.61 issues you've all been experiencing, and pushing forward into 0.62 and Beta. We all hope you had a great holiday season, and were able to spend time with your friends, families, and most important loved ones. - Brian Hicks / Creative Director Dev Update/Peter With the release of 0.61 version of DayZ, one major issue raised by the community, which is still discussed back and forth, was the noticeable increase in difficulty of the PvE challenge in the game. I wanted to comment on this. Recently we took advantage of the new dynamic spawning system and because of that, concentration of infected is much higher then ever before (and I hope, there will be even more of them in future with the possibility of hordes when everything goes well). Now, when we finally achieved some reasonable numbers of infected in locations for intended gameplay purposes, it is unthinkable that they will just stand there, ignoring you while filling up empty space in settlements like scenery. It seems some don't remember how harsh infected were in the mod back in the days, when crawling on your belly for long minutes to observe a town to choose an entry point with the least resistance wasn't anything special. Don't forget that infected are meant to be a real threat to survival in Chernarus. You either need to avoid them or fight them (or eventually flee if you are lucky). There are some known issues in AI which need to be fixed and I understand that it may be hard to have a stealth approach with old habits that came from nearly nonexistent infected in the past, and without the planned presence indicator (combined with how much noise you make and how well you are visible) in the upcoming HUD, you can try to follow some general rules which might help you - stay low, keep distance and avoid their line of sight (yes, they have peripheral vision too). As far as close combat goes, it will be overhauled once the new player is ready and we already started to prototype it in meantime. Of course reported issues like infected running through seemingly closed doors, or spawning right next to you are unacceptable and will be fixed. If you would like to read more about design of the Infected, check out the Status Report released in 3rd March 2015. (https://dayz.com/blog/status-report-3-mar-15) Also, rain and ensuing low body temperatures become a factor to consider in the fight for survival. Which again, is nothing unexpected and you shouldn't be afraid of it, just adapt to it. When all the systems like metabolism, diseases, injuries, stamina, weather impact, infected, predators and others will fall in place and became fine balanced you will witness a definitive survival game, where you need to be careful, have to plan ahead and get prepared for possible upcoming situations - this is DayZ people. Stay strong and never give up... see you in Chernarus folks! - Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer Community Spotlight Christmas and New Year celebrations are now behind us. You might have done some of your celebrating in DayZ, where Christmas trees were added and as a little present you might have found cute little teddy bears with surprises hidden inside them. They were able to protect your equipment from damage if you kept them with you. You were so excited about them, that you kept sending pictures showing your happy findings to our official Twitter. Dystopian Gaming sent a screenshot from his Christmas celebrations with the message: "I ❤ my pink teddy! Merry Xmas!" Sam Kingswell was really thrilled about the number of furry soft toys that he encountered in Chernarus! Not everyone was getting presents only in-game. Streamer https://twitter.com/BlueandQueenieMrBlue got some DayZ style gear from his girlfriend. Awesome! And last but not least, we received a New Year greetings from Watchman. I would also like to wish you all a happy and successful new year, full of good health, love and fun. Header image by: berdu - Baty / Community Manager

Greetings Survivors, Creative Director Brian Hicks will share the latest info on where we are at in the development process, Mirek and Peter are talking about removing SQF and Adam wants to share with you our progress with trees - biggest change Chernarus has received for the past years. Contents This Week Dev Update/Hicks Dev Update/Peter Dev Update/Mirek Dev Update/Adam Community Spotlight Dev Update/Hicks Greetings Survivors, I don't have too much for you this Status Report, fortunately Adam from the Environment team, as well as Peter (Lead Designer) and Mirek (Lead Gameplay Programmer) are joining us this time around - so there should be plenty of new info for everyone to dig into. Recently I sat down over on our forums to discuss some of the questions or confusion we get around addressing issues on the Steam branch while development moves forward internally on upcoming builds. I encourage everyone to take a look at it - as it might serve to relieve some confusion around what gets fixed, when, and so on. In addition, our Producer Eugen wrote up a forum post covering the internal milestone we recently reached towards Beta, eliminating support and dependency on the old SQF scripting language that so much of the DayZ Alpha had throughout it. This was a huge step for us internally, and something many of us have been talking about and looking forward to for years. I'll make sure to link both forum posts at the bottom of my portion of the Status Report. We're continuing to push new builds through Experimental/Unstable branch and on to Stable branch as we try and address the remaining critical issues with .61. Since the last Status Report we've been able to address several issues with memory management on the client, pushed several improvements to server performance, resolved a few known server crashes, resolved several of the performance issues tied to light sources, and we are continuing to address: Invisible Infected Additional Client Crash issues Server Memory Consumption (Which can sometimes cause issues with player stuttering, battleye time-outs, and so on) Server crashes tied to vehicles and/or AI We're hoping to be able to show some teaser video content at PAX East over at the Astro Booth showing off some of the progress on the visual overhaul of wild Chernarus for .62, rest assured this will also be shared through our standard channels if we're able to have this available in time. As I mentioned earlier, both myself and Eugen made two forum posts that are very helpful reading to understand what our priorities are internally, as well as the impact the internal milestone of finally being able to move away from SQF has on development. Check out these posts here (you do not need to make an account to view them, don't worry :) ): We know the road to the next few major builds hitting Steam might seem long, but the work going into reaching Beta is extensive - and a major change for DayZ as a whole. I know I personally (and I'm certain the whole team as well) appreciate everyone's patience, and feedback as we move towards it. I'll see you all in Chernarus - and remember, gunshots attract attention ;) - Brian Hicks / Creative Director Dev Update/Peter Last week we reached one of our internal milestones, specifically the removal of SQF, high level scripting language which was introduced back in days with Operation Flashpoint. When we started to work on standalone DayZ we heavily relied on SQF with its rich API of commands built over years of usage across Arma series. Original plan was to prototype and implement systems and mechanics we wanted to have in DayZ in it, then hardcode them to Real Virtuality engine directly to gain performance back. This changed once decision to build new Enfusion engine, based on previous RV and Enforce engines was made. Latter one used powerful and fast low level object oriented scripting language with its own IDE and therefore it was logical step to carry it over and improve it. Once it was production ready, we start to rewrite all gameplay and support scripts from old SQF script to newly established Enforce script, which offered us to become largely independent from programmers and to keep game open for modding. This process was quite difficult and tedious, mainly because of missing backwards compatibility, specific design and technical dependencies, limitations found down the road, and all that mixed together with our commitment to release playable version of DayZ in Early Access program. All these led us to maintain and develop basically two versions of game side by side - obsolete one for public to play in meantime and new one for us to make game as best as possible for public to enjoy later. Recently, new animation system began to be synchronized between server and client, which was long awaited impulse for us to switch exclusively to "all new" mindset to push things forward internally. Now every piece starts to finally fall into place, forming something I like to refer to as DayZ 2.0. The King is dead, long live The King... see you in Chernarus folks! - Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer Dev Update/Mirek In the last status report, I mentioned that we started removing the legacy scripting language. We're done with it now, so Enforce Script is the only scripting language which runs on our internal version. We will continue removing other legacy systems: the next stop is the animation system. Synchronization of the new animation system is done, now we have to apply new synchronization rules to the user action system and to events performed only on server side. New player controller is now receiving support for melee combat, which will allow our animation team to tweak the combat animations in-game. Also, it's important to note that our Bratislava team is applying the new animation system to AI units. This will allow us to have much better interactions between players and infected/animals. Otherwise, we are still working on some major issues for 0.61, which we also need fixed for the 0.62 update, so every important fix is directly merged into the 0.62 internal branch, too. - Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer Dev Update/Adam As many of you already heard, the upcoming 0.62 update will introduce a first set of audio-visual changes to the environment of DayZ. You may remember that we've already shared some progress on this matter last year. In this status report, I would like to touch on the subject of updating forests in Chernarus a little bit more. This is by far the biggest change Chernarus has received for the past years of its existence within Arma 2 and DayZ. This would be really tedious and unwise thing to do manually (there is a lot of forested areas), so we have internally developed a forest generation tool that will allows us to generate most of the forested areas on Chernarus. While the whole process of getting generated forests on top of anexisting map (that has all kinds of other objects already placed) requires some polishing work of course, we are very satisfied with the results so far. One of the most important things for new forests was to have enough variety. There are four key features that allowed us to have more varied forests. First, we have got roughly 6 different generation templates for each tree species (you can imagine this simply as young, mixed, older forests and so on). Achieving such variety would not be possible with the old models, so we have got at our disposal a completely new set of vegetation that contains roughly 3 times more models than the old one (and it is still growing). To give you an idea, lets take a look at the standard beech forest case (Fagus sylvatica). Following picture shows an example of available models for beech forest. This is quite a big change when compared to the old vegetation set (where we had like 3 available models for this specific species) and the picture is not even showing all models (we also do have dead tree variants). I should also mention that this is not just the case of beech trees, we do have similar-sized sets for oaks, pines, birches, larches and spruces. Just imagine combinations that can be done within just one species alone, not to mention what can we do when we combine them. We of course have some other types of species prepared too (for rarer use within forests and of course for solitary ones within fields and settlements). The third thing (that helps us achieving forest variety) is the tree colorization feature, which we already announced in one of the last years status report. This feature enables us to differentiate individual trees by changing their color ever so slightly to achieve a better autumn feel. And finally, fourth is the addition of 8 forest surface textures. This allows us to greatly increase variety on the ground level, because configuration of randomized miscellaneous objects is done per one surface texture (we can have one with more grass, one with taller ferns, etc.) Before: After: Please keep in mind that what you see on this picture is still work in progress and does not represent final look, these two are here to give you an idea how the transformation from old to new forest look on a small patch of forest within Stary Sobor fields. We are well past of setting up the generation process of the whole map and tweaking the visual feel of individual forest templates (assigned to forest parts on the whole map). Our primary focus now is to make sure we won't introduce any major performance problems. There is no question about the fact that while the new vegetation models were done to be much more performance friendly, we won't just aim for the same density as the old forests were. The introduction of Enfusion renderer with .60 provides us with an opportunity to go further. We are currently working with roughly doubled object count (that equals roughly 2.6 mil of vegetation objects). Our PCs are running map benchmarks overnight (multiple times on multiple machines if necessary) to get an overview of how does the current version of Chernarus with new forests perform. We can then use this information to make additional changes to the generation (forest density). Following picture shows what kind of results we get from one type of benchmarks that we do. There is still lot of work ahead of us, but it is awesome to see that things are finally coming together. We cannot wait to share more info about things to come with 0.62 update (yes, there is definitely more to talk about). - Adam Franců / Lead Map designer Community Spotlight Valentine's day is behind us and some love went to Dayz as well! You sent us some nice and creative love poems on the "Roses are red, violets are blue…" theme and we want to share them with you. This poem is made by Pedro Silva and it is not romantic at all. But love is not missing here! The love for weapons. Roses are red Violets are blue i love winchester but i like SVD too Jordan Strang send a poem where he talks about his love for killing enemies. Roses are red Violets are blue I have a mosin And your head too And short and clear one from Armin Cortez. Roses are re-- bääämmmmm Dave M. Seybert is sad because his PC is no good for playing DayZ :(. He made a poem about it. My eyes are red, my heart is blue, my computers too old, to play DayZ with you.... :( And an amazing last one by Stefan Asseryd. Militarytents are green To the right or left you can lean... Fireaxes you can colour black Remember you can make a backpack from a sack... If you get hurt it splashes some red Beware of enemy players, wolfes, rain or you will be dead We need to share a love story from our Facebook page by Sara Kpoint who met her love in DayZ as well. Awww! Actually over 2 years ago I found my valentine up in the north in the wilderness of DayZ :3. He was the kindest one I´ve ever met: He made a market with his friends, shared pullovers, apples and even a weapon, when I had absolutely nothing... 2 hours later a guy came and shot the whole group :D. But fortunately I had the same Nickname ingame and in Steam <3. And finally we have an older love song by the famous Team GEO. It is a survivor singing about his true love. Enjoy if you don't know it, because we love it! If you have some video, screenshot, poem or your own artwork you'd like to share, send it to our official Twitter account. Header image by: S3X - Baty / Community Manager

500 infected are maximum on the server now. :)

Greetings Survivors, As we wrap up 2016, we'd like to take a moment and look back on what has been done so far, and what is to come. 2016 has been a pivotal year for DayZ development, both on the public Steam branches, and internally. For those who haven't followed development closely, lets start with the changes that have made it to Steam this year. New Renderer: Anticipated for a long time coming, 2016 saw the introduction of the new renderer for DayZ onto Steam's stable branch. An ongoing task throughout DayZ's development, this update to the engine powering DayZ was one of the most complex changes for the development team. The legacy renderer was originally intertwined with the engine side simulation going back to the earliest dayz of Real Virtuality. Seperating this, ensuring that no core systems or mechanics were broken, and introducing the new renderer technology to DayZ while ensuring a 1:1 visual fidelity was the base goal for introducing this to Steam. With the addition of volumetric fog, and the massive improvements to client frame rate the whole team was elated. 2016 took that one step farther with .61 tackling the issue of dynamic lighting and shadows, finally removing the thorn in the side of night time gameplay by preventing light sources from ignoring structure geometry, players, and so much more. Add into this dynamic lighting changes to .61, and light sources such as camp fires, flares, and more finally became viable for night time survival. Randomizing attachments, loot spawned in containers, and on infected: While it may seem like a small part of the larger puzzle, the "looting" side of DayZ's gameplay is integral to the experience, and should not be ignored. Adding in support within the Central Economy and item configs for arrays with multiple classnames, as well as having the infected themselves be a potential source of loot added a much needed boost to the search for those critical items survivors need to deafeat the obstacles within Chernarus. Dynamic Spawning of Infected: Throughout DayZ's development we have spawned a large amount of infected globally, spread throughout the world in an effort to reduce the meta-gaming and systematic learning of the mods script based trigger spawning based upon player proximity. Unfortunately, this led to us never really creating a feeling of dread or danger from our infected, as while they massively outnumbered players - they were spread throughout a huge 256km2 landmass. Utilizing the dynamic event system that powered things like helicopter crashes, and police car spawns to increase infected density in cities, towns, and villages that are within the 1km network bubble of players has reintroduced that long missed feeling of the infected citizens of Chernarus being a true threat within gameplay. While server optimization moving forward into beta will allow us to slowly increase these amounts, as well as beta itself allowing us to continue to improve the threat they offer - 2016 saw a reintroduction of a core element of DayZ gameplay. Network Synchronization Improvements: As long as DayZ has been on Steam, one of the most frustrating bugs for users to encounter has been the seemingly random breaking of legs, death from running over a small rock, or experiencing crippling desync within a player versus player encounter. Our gameplay programming team introduced with the first builds of 0.61 an architecture change on how our client/server networking communication occurs. Addressing approximately 90% of all known issues related to client/server position desync, and finally putting a nail in the coffin of the sudden "broken legs" while navigating larger structures. In addition, overall client/server communication throughout gameplay was improved, and a significant improvement of responsivity was the result. While beta will see continued iteration and improvement in these areas, this is arguably one of the largest and most impactful changes to the playability of DayZ Early Access, and we think you'll all enjoy it. Predator AI: Talked about initially in the early years of DayZ development, 2016 saw 0.61 introduce the first of DayZ's predator AI in the form of wolves. Known to roam the northern and far western reaches of Chernarus, wolves have introduced an off-road threat present even when no other players, or infected are to be seen. Traveling in packs, and stalking vulnerable players these enemies have quickly become a reason to save your shotgun ammo. Eden Sound Engine: Thanks to close cooperation with the fantastic team working on Arma 3, the DayZ development team were able to introduce the new audio technology that powered the Arma 3 Eden update. Allowing the DayZ Audio team to begin work on expanding the impact of sounds of gunshots within Chernarus. Beyond just proper volume attenuation, this update allowed a massive injection of immersion and paired with cooperation of the gameplay programming team, a much needed focus on addressing issues with gunshot sounds playing for all players, and a fantastic side effect of drawing players towards each other through gunshot sounds resonating through the hills and valleys of Chernarus. Moreso in 0.61 than ever before, the choice to fire a weapon in Chernarus has become a multi faceted one. Concerning both attracting large numbers of infected, and the unwanted attention of other and potentially more dangerous players. Moving into Beta and onto 1.0, this technology will allow continued improvement in all areas of the DayZ soundscape. Server Login Queue & New Server Browser: At the tail end of 2016, 0.61 saw the introduction of both the first iteration of our new server browser, and the much requested server login queue system. The new server browser is the first step towards our drive to properly presenting the official, vanilla experience as the first thing new players see, and will continue to evolve as we move into beta. On the ease of use side, the new server login queue removes the need to hammer that connect button, and beyond that - addresses critical vulnerabilities present in previous builds when large amounts of players try to connect. A huge gain for server side performance (and thus stability, and playability) the server login queue was originally slated for beta, but pushed up to address server stress after the 0.60 experimental push. As exciting as the changes that made it to Steam are, even more work was done internally behind the scenes that aren't quite ready to hit Steam. Lets take a look at the things that were done behind the scenes internally on DayZ development in 2016: Design Team: Its no secret that the development team halted the addition of new mechanics, weapons, and most content on the old SQF language, animation system, and so on. While work pushed forward on mostly engine, and infrastructure changes (as well as the design work required to properly configure them), the design team have been hard at work on both moving over all of the gameplay systems written in the old SQF scripting language (Approx 90% completed so far!), as well as creating and supporting new mechanics flagged to come in our beta milestone such as electricity, base building objects, and more! Animation Team: The animation team has had a mountain of work in front of them for 2016. From working hand in hand with the programmers responsible for creating DayZ's upcoming new animation system, to collaborating with designers and artists on all of the required new animations for new content, mechanics, items and so on. Not to mention redoing all the animations for existing gameplay mechanics, and items created on the legacy system from 0.28 to 0.60. With progress examples including but not limited to: 90% of all required animations for our Beta milestone completed 44 Weapons redone (Each about 10 anims per weapon) 24 new weapon unjamming anims (2 anims each) 2 New Vehicles (Approx 35 anims each) 2 New Gestures (Approx 9 anims each) 30 New Combat Anims 24 New Action Anims 1,744 Adjusted, Refined, and Exported Anims As we move past 0.61 in the tail of the year, and the bulk of the team is focused on our beta milestone, their work internally has paid off extensively, as the team can now begin working with our final animation system and the fruit of their hard work over the last year finally begins to make it to the main DayZ internal branch. Sound Team: Over 2016 the SFX team have been working hard collaborating with gameplay programmers, and support from the Arma team to introduce our new audio technology, as well as hand in hand with Art and Design teams to further the depth of audio simulation across the terrain and inside the buildings of Chernarus. From everything to new ambient SFX, infected audio, user actions audio, and so much more. Within 2016 the Audio Team were able to complete over 95% of all new player sound assets, introduce new gun SFX tied with the new audio system, internally complete new ambient sounds, prepare for additional improvements on melee SFX, and focus on new vehicle sounds in preperation for completion of new audio technology support for vehicles. Beyond that the team has plans for improvements to footstep sounds, and foley SFX based upon player gear as we move past Beta and into 1.0. Art Team: The art team is leading the charge into beta, and over 2016 has created a large amount of new content for the beta milestone. Including, but not limited to the CR 550, Mini Uzi, OTs-14, PKM, PP-19, Scout, PB 6P9, Saiga 12, Improvised Fence, Electrical Generator, Watchtower, Crop Duster, ALICE Pack, Recurve Bow, Biohazard Showers, Metro Police Station, Civilian Sedan, over 20 new characters for the new player/animation system and so much more! 2016 also saw significant improvements to the layout and structure of Chernarus as a whole, with extensive map changes and redesigns throughout the year such as the cities of Cherogorsk, and Elektrozavodsk, as well as villages like Tulga and Staroye, and railways throughout the country. In addition, they wrap up the new year working on finalizing the revamped "Chernarus HD" wilderness with the environment team for 0.62. Engine & Gameplay Programming Team: DayZ's Programming teams have had a massive amount of work on their plates for 2016. With a massive amount of the technical responsibility of preparing for Beta and 1.0 milestones, they've tackled the implementation of the new renderer, iterative improvements including dynamic shadows, improving client side performance, supporting increased view distance for light sources, and much more. Beyond that they've taken on introducing the new sound technology from the Arma team, addressing legacy peer to peer issues from Real Virtuality, Transfering ownership of every entity within the gamespace to the server, transfering to fixed time step simulation (which helps address synchronization of player position enabling much more reliable server responsivity to player input), Removing legacy mechanisms in player simulation and entity updates (allowing the simulation of more entities in the same frame), Introducing the first 64 bit client builds to Steam, Improving physics and vehicle simulation, implementing dynamic AI spawning, introducing the server queue system, and focusing a significant amount of work on the new player controller, animation system, and damage system. With even more plans for impovement, and optimization in these areas moving into the new year. In closing, 2016 has been a difficult but fruitful year for DayZ and the development team. We've overcome many obstacles, and the successes we have achieved have been a huge step in the direction we'd like to go with DayZ. The support of the community, and engagement through our official forums and feedback tracker have been a massive assistance in the march towards Beta and 1.0, and we couldn't be more excited to share that journey with you all.

Have a look: And here is the latest Status Report: https://dayz.com/blog/status-report-7-february-2017

Hello Survivors, We have a new Status Report for you. Brian is talking about known issues and fixes what are we working now and Victor is sharing some news from animation department. We want to show you an interesting thread from our official Forum and you can find awesome song in Community Spotlight. Contents This Week Dev Update/Hicks Dev Update/Viktor Handpicked: DayZ Forums News Community Spotlight Dev Update/Hicks Greetings Survivors, This Status Report we're going to cover what the .61 Live Team are focusing on for Stable branch issues, I'll touch briefly on .62 - and then I'd like to give a little perspective on the work currently under way for the bulk of the team (Beta milestone). Rest assured, the development team is well aware of a good deal of critical issues that have popped up on various builds coming through Exp/Unstable and onto Stable branch. Some of them we're working to address in .61 updates, and some will more than likely have to wait for Beta milestone (as we're on the edge of addressing some issues in technology and systems that won't be around in Beta). The team has been able to make good strides on addressing server crash issues, but we're also tracking a good number of additional issues that have come in through the Official Feedback Tracker: Issues with the Central Economy group spawning items and clustering in some areas after extensive persistence uptime Client side FPS drops from several causes Issues tied to animation transitions at time of death Client side network freezing in some cases Remaining issues with vehicles from Exp/Unstable "Ghost Infected" Server Performance Issues We're all aware that these issues are critical to everyone playing on 0.61 Stable, and we appreciate everyone’s patience and participation in utilizing the Official Forums and Feedback Tracker to better allow us to track these issues down. Hang in there and be patient, as mentioned before .61 hit Stable - a majority of the team has switched to working on Beta, and some of the issues might not make sense to spend time resolving as we're working on the .62 and Beta milestones now - but we've not given up on addressing them for .61. If you find any new issues, or have new data - please continue to utilize the Official Feedback Tracker, it might not seem like it helps but trust me - it *does*. For .62 development, we don't have too much for you in this Status Report - however Adam (Sumrak) is working on putting together some tasty information on the .62 team's progress on their end for the next Status Report. Currently the .62 team is working on profiling the Chernarus with the new trees, and making adjustments to the forests based upon the data they gather from the profiling tools. There are some additional improvements on the visual fidelity side they are looking into - but I won't ruin any of that as Adam is looking forward to what he can tell you all in the next Status Report. It (almost) goes without saying - but the Beta milestone isn't just a matter of plugging a few new things into DayZ. The Animation System ties into effectively everything you guys do in DayZ, and the New Player as well. Tie into this the goal of total removal of SQF support (The scripting language that DayZ utilizes for most every gameplay mechanic) and the teams undertaking starts to closely resemble a skeletal and critical organ transplant. A great deal of work has gone into recreating all of these SQF scripts and mechanics into the new Enforce scripting language over the last year or so, but even so - the risk and work that is required to coordinate across the team, ensure things are functioning as expected, and discovering exactly what impact the total removal of SQF has against the game is a significant amount of work. We're all excited (and a bit winded) at all of this, and understand that it may be frustrating not getting the fixes you all want for .61 Stable as fast as you'd like - but rest assured, the work that we're doing on the Beta milestone will be worth the struggle of legacy bugs on .61. Lastly, In regards to the Official Feedback Tracker - the BI Webteam has recently added support for logging in utilizing credentials from Facebook/Google accounts for those who might not want to make an additional login just to report issues. We hope this lowers the barrier for some of you that might have data on bugs you're experiencing, but have held back on reporting them. I know you're all eagerly awaiting visuals and news from .62 and Beta, and no one would love to share awesome stuff with you more than those of us on the development team. We appreciate all your patience, passion, and participation in the DayZ Early Access - 2017 should be an awesome year for DayZ and the road ahead looks like a lot of fun. - Brian Hicks / Creative Director Dev Update/Viktor In my short update, I would like to share some news from the animation department. We have been playing around with the player character animations a lot recently. One of the latest additions include extra transitions for player. Now the character is able to move from stand or crouch run/walk/sprint to prone movement fluently. This does not limit the character in any way though, unlike in the past. If player decides during this transition he wants to stop - the character will stop nicely immediately. We have created combat animations for player and are now about to start testing them in game. We want to find nice balance between how player looks and how it plays. This is a difficult topic as our game is set in multiplayer environment, which means we are bound by some limitations that are not present in single player games. To mention other areas. Special interaction animations inside vehicles are being created now. Refining the animations is always in progress. We have revised the aimed movement for rifles, and we will focus on hand guns next. We also have received some new weapons from the Art team so we are adding animation sets to those as well. And finally, don't forget you still have some time left to ask animation related questions for our next Q&A video. Head over to the official forums please and ask anything you are curious about regarding DayZ animations - anything that you want me to answer. Cheers! - Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator Handpicked: DayZ Forums Topics We're getting back to our idea of highlighting interesting topics from the official DayZ forums this week - despite the regular, ongoing discussion we're maintaining on the topic of both Stable Branch and Experimental Branch updates, there have been additional interesting topics that you may have missed. Here's four of them, conveniently handpicked and awaiting your replies! Q&A with Animation Lead Viktor Kostik OK, you have probably noticed this one already, but we really want everyone to be aware of it: DayZ Animation Lead Viktor Kostik is up next in our series of Developer Q&A videos and he wants to answer the animation questions you're curious about. Make sure to ask your questions under this topic, as that's where we'll be collecting them! "Who was killed by zombies in 0.61?" by igor-vk Since 0.61 got out, we've been ensuring everyone that the infected are absolutely meant to be a serious threat in DayZ. While there is still a lot work to be done before the experience is final, the infected are already influencing the play-style of survivors in a way our design team expects - more often than not, frantically running through a city ultimately gets you killed, as witnessed by igor-vk and other survivors in a topic that beautifully describes how deadly the infected became in 0.61: "Items that don't spawn anymore" by Weyland Yutani For various reasons, we sometimes prevent certain items from spawning using our Central Economy settings. If you want to check whether an item you're looking for is indeed disabled or you're just being unlucky, make sure to read the following topic - other survivors might help you out, and we'll do our best to occasionally have our Community Manager Baty join the discussion: BETA Content: PKM discussion thread To finish off our handpicked section, we've got Brian teasing yet another weapon that's waiting to be implemented into the game during BETA: the unmistakable PKM general purpose machine gun, a truly effective weapon of Russian origin, present in nearly every major armed conflict of the past 30 years: Community Spotlight Hey Survivors! Recently, you have been letting us know on our social networks like Forums, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or Steam, that you are having issues with client crashes due to memory errors. Should this error happen to you, we would appreciate if you could send your crash dump files from the folder C:\Users\YourPCName\AppData\Local\DayZ to our feedback tracker. By submitting those files, you can help us to solve the issue. Now let's move to a community content. I found a new and amazing rap music video about life in Post-Apocalyptic Chernarus with an unexpected ending. CamCANRUN proved again that he can create quality content. You know that feeling when you need to try something else. Something special. Including some new Dayz experience. That is the reason why some servers organise themed events for their players. I myself attended few "Wild West" events with Magnum, Repeater and cowboy hat or competition with .22 weapons only. But my most favourite are medieval fights with bows, swords and knight helmets. Astros Legacy was also attending such event on Gents Of Novo server . You can find a recording of this entertaining event on his channel. If you have something you want to share with us just tweet it to our official Twitter channel. Header image by: iSkyfallz - Baty / Community Manager

Nice :)

Hello. You need to contact Battle Eye support: https://www.battleye.com/support/

We are working on new animations now (video here). We werw in our MoCap studio few weeks ago and it was amazing! What do you think we are preparing? What animation would YOU like to see in DayZ? :)

Hello! 1. Try to delete Battle Eye files here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\DayZ C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\DayZ\BattlEye 2. Verify integrity of game files on Steam. If these steps do not help you: Uninstall game and delete all content (files, folders) related to DayZ and install game again.

Evening Survivors, We've all experienced a lot of server crashes over the last two weeks, so Peter and Mirek are providing an update on how we want to handle them. Additionally, Brian is talking about known issues, Adam is sharing some of his recent passion for Chernarus railways and I have the pleasure of introducing you to DannyBoyy, a truly, truly friendly survivor! Contents This Week Dev Update/Hicks Dev Update/Peter Dev Update/Mirek Dev Update/Adam Community Spotlight Dev Update/Hicks Greetings Survivors, The last few weeks for us on the dev team have been busy. With the bulk of the team working on the Beta milestone, a smaller strike team working on 0.62, and of course ongoing efforts to address critical issues in 0.61 Stable and reintroduce vehicles to Stable branch. As soon as we have our 0.62 branch at a point we're comfortable with, we'll be sharing more example images and camera fly overs - so be on the look out for that. On the more immediate side we have a list of issues that we're fully aware of on 0.61 Stable that we're working hard to resolve. (Its important to make sure you guys know this is on our radar, so you don't think we're overlooking the issues critical to you all). Stable Issues: Known server crash methods Known duplication methods Investigation into current security exploits (Player Gear, etc) Server Performance degradation (This one impacts things such as player position sync, infected speed, and more) Server Side Economy cleanup (And potential impact on server performance) A lot of the issues listed above are directly related to issues we've noticed reported in the forums, feedback tracker, on youtube videos, and on Twitch streams and are a priority for us to address. Given that some of them are tied to legacy systems - many of which are slated to be replaced in beta - addressing the issues can be time consuming, but rest assured we are digging into them and they are not over looked. In addition to this, there has been a good amount of discussion (and feedback tracker usage on this issue again - awesome!) in regards to the distribution in the economy, and some behaviors that don't fit with the development teams intended design. Specifically, the distribution of firearms, and their attachments across Chernarus after a decent amount of uptime on a servers local storage. The Central Economy (CE) is certainly not where we as developers want it just yet, but iteration is key with this. The designers and programmers that touch on these areas have been working on potential improvements to the economy that should help address this issue specifically - but like anything with a complex system it will require iteration over several builds to see. This isn't live on Experimental just yet - but we'll make sure to let you all know on the forums when these new changes make it that way. For those curious - the current ticket on the feedback tracker related to the CE loot spawning system can be found at: https://feedback.bistudio.com/T115748 I know this Status Report isn't chock full of fancy new screenshots or videos - but we're currently at the point in the build process where branches, and high risk commits occur. As we get further into 0.62 and Beta development and things stabilize we'll be able to share more. :) - Brian Hicks / Creative Director Dev Update/Peter My message will be quite short today as I just want to announce some significant changes for current 0.61 version in upcoming updates. Over the last weeks, we witnessed how the abuse of an exploit often used for duping results in server crashes in some cases, which became very common lately and essentially ruined the user experience. Because of that, we were forced to make some actions to prevent it. First one is locking the hands slot while character is performing some action - thus, you are unable to remove an item or swap it with another until the action is finished. Second one prevents initiation of user actions on items directly from inventory slots. These changes can be unpleasant as the old user action system and its quirks are now deeply rooted. However, I would like to remind you that new user actions are built on usage of hands slot exclusively, so it's not a bad idea to get used to it in advance. If you would like to read more about the upcoming new user actions, you can check my previous Status Reports from October 30, 2015, March 1, 2016 and March 29, 2016. Crashing servers is bad... see you in Chernarus folks! - Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer Dev Update/Mirek Hello survivors, in my first Status Report this year, I would like to briefly cover current our goals for the 0.61 version and future 0.62 and 0.63 updates: 0.61 goals We (the gameplay programming team) are dealing with server performance and stability issues, and also with vehicle synchronization bugs. Hopefully most of the annoying issues will get fixed soon, so programmers working on them can join the rest of the team and they will contribute to the work on new things or 0.63 version goals. 0.62 goals As this update will be mostly visual, there won't be any major changes coming the our team. We will mostly try merging in some of the critical fixes or performance/networking improvements. 0.63 goals Currently, major part of the gameplay programming team is working on tasks related to this version. Internally, we have managed to deactivate the legacy damage system completely and now we're focused on fixing issues with our new damage system. We are also getting ready to hit the switch on all of the legacy SQF scripting, which is being replaced by Enforce Script, and we're removing some other parts of the legacy code, which is related to features we won't use anymore - such as the Arma AI, for example. About the new player controller - we are finishing network synchronization of our new animation system. The next step will be the ability to control vehicles using the new character. This will be another big change, because now you are controlling the vehicle directly and character inside vehicle is controlled by vehicle simulation. This change will simplify vehicle synchronization and can also introduce some more options for modding. - Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer Dev Update/Adam As I mentioned in earlier Status Reports, we plan to change the entire western border of Chernarus. This is a major task and it is very likely that you will not see this upgrade fully within just one game update. In fact, if you venture towards western border on .61, you can already see results of this task - two military roadblocks with traffic jams. We are really delighted to see survivors venturing in these far locations and having interactions with other survivors and/or environment threats in these brand new places. An important part of the whole western expansion task are changes and additions to the Chernarus railway network. Railway is a very important man-made feature that always helps survivors when they get lost. The rule is simple - follow either right or left and it will eventually guide you somewhere. Now let me invite you on a small trip around Chernarus railway! Please keep in mind that all content, visible on pictures below, is work-in-progress and does not represent final quality. The biggest change within the railway network is the addition of railway through the whole western border of Chernarus. That means you can follow railway track from Kamenka through Zelenogorsk, Myshkino, Vavilovo and finally to Novaya Petrovka. But that is definitely not all. To make sure railway network is not forming some sort of a circle (that sort of looks like a model railway), two new railway exits were added. One from Novaya Petrovka to the western border, leaving Chernarus close to where military roadblock with fuel station is located. Second railway exit starts in Svetloyarsk and goes through Turovo and Dobroe, leaving the lands of South Zagoria in northern rocky valleys. Then we have bits and pieces that were added on top of these railway network changes. The most significant are massive changes within Zelenogorsk. This town now hosts a big railway station that is split into three parts - civilian, military and industrial. Military base in Zelenogorsk went through a major face-lift and now offers more loot than ever before. Heading further north, you may find that the huge railway and bus station in the middle of nothing near Vavilovo are missing - this is our intention as we did not really find it to be useful at that spot (and we have something better planned there). Instead, we have added a completely new railway station to Novaya Petrovka. This town is currently quite thr hot spot and with newly added railway station just north of Bashnya, it offers quite the view on the entire Novaya Petrovka valley. If you head east of Novaya Petrovka, you may notice that railway here is much flatter than ever before. That is no coincidence, as we have found the old roller-coaster-like railway track here too immersion breaking, and so the whole northern railway track was redone from scratch, along with necessary terrain and object changes. And now that Novaya Petrovka has a railway station, the biggest northern town - Novodmitrovsk - could not be missed. The appropriate spot was found and a new railway station was built south of Novodmitrovsk (just near the road that heads to Cernaya Polana). This railway station offers a spectacular view on Novodmitrovsk - the industrial railway station that was located outside of the Novodimitrovsk industrial complex has been moved into a much better place inside the complex itself, and now has a direct railway connection to Svetloyarsk. And just when you continue along the tracks towards Svetloyarsk, you will, sooner or later, encounter the northern railway exit that crosses Svetloyarsk - Novodmitrovsk valley on a brand new stone railway bridge. Unfortunately, I cannot just yet share the pictures of it, as our graphics artists are still at hard work on it, but I promise I will share the results once everything is ready. There is a lot more to cover for the upcoming .62 update, so stay tuned! 2017 is going to be a great year for Chernarus, so see you there! - Adam Franců / Map Designer Community Spotlight In the December Status Report, we were contemplating whether players can be trusted and if you can safely turn your back to a person who seems friendly. Therefore, I want to introduce you to Dannboyy, who is well known in the DayZ community and some of you might have met him already - without even knowing it. Unfortunately, you will usually not survive meeting this nice lad. He has a pleasant voice and is very kind, which is what you will notice first. And you will trust him easily. You will become friends. But is DannyBoyy exactly the kind of friend you would expect? DannyBoyy’s videos are nicely made, very well cut and fun to watch. My personal favourite is "The Friendly French Man": His latest video is named "Sick" and here you can see how wicked this young man is: Danny has no heart. And that is a reason why I like him! Check his channel for more amazing videos. Don’t forget about our Official DayZ forum, too! If you want to have fresh information from latest updates, forums are the place for you. Check out an important update about Experimental/Unstable branch from yesterday: As always, If you have any DayZ creations of your own that you'd like to share, tweet them to us on our official Twitter channel. We love content from our community! Header image by: Joanna Łuczak - Baty / Community Manager

We are working on fix very hard.

Hey Survivors, We'll be dropping part two of the Filip Doksanský Enfusion Engine Q&A relatively soon, but in the meantime we're announcing our next Q&A with Lead Gameplay Programmer Miroslav Maněna! This is your opportunity to get answers to all of those pressing gameplay development questions you've been dying to ask, and from the brilliant source himself no less. Dude is super smart! True story. We'll be taking questions until November 14th, so get 'em in while you can.

Here is a second part of Mirek's Q&A video. Enjoy!

Temporarily disabled items : Landmine, Flare gun, Metal Wire, Radio. These items can cause some issues. ------------------------------------------------------ Crossbow bolts - you can find both ingame

Something new :). Good work!

I am sorry, my fault. He was sick this week.

Here is it, enjoy! :)

This should be fixed now.

Here is thread for suggestions: https://forums.dayz.com/forum/128-suggestions/

Nice adventure :).

Hello Survivors! Christmas is coming and we have a small gift for you - 0.61 on Stable branch, Brian is going to tell you more about it. Peter talks about character growth and Mirek has information about vehicles, and their presence on Exp/Unstable. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Contents This Week Dev Update/Hicks Dev Update/Peter Dev Update/Mirek Community Spotlight Dev Update/Hicks Greetings Survivors, For those that weren't aware - we pushed 0.61.136770 to Steam stable branch yesterday. While there are still some issues we want to address (VOIP Volume, Supersonic cracks, Container contents desync, Infected footsteps volume, status modifiers stuck, and more) we looked at the experience the tests over the weekend provided, compared to what was going to be available to those on Stable branch over the holiday break and decided to go ahead and make the move. This allows us to ensure that users on Steam stable over the holiday season will be able to enjoy a stable DayZ 0.61 experience, while we continue to address the issues the team is concerned about on Exp/Unstable branch, and pending build health potentially push these over to Stable on our regularly scheduled Wednesday maintenance. Lets take a look at the milestone goals for 0.61 Stable, and then we'll cover what is currently on Exp/Unstable branch - as well as what is pending a new Exp/Unstable update. 0.61 Milestone Goals: Server Login Queue Merge of New Audio Technology from Arma 3 Eden Update. Update of Weapon Sounds for New Audio Technology. Dynamic Spawning of Infected. Predators (Wolves) Dynamic Shadows Network Synchronization Improvements New Server Browser While we're happy to say that we've hit all of these milestone goals for 0.61, there are still issues that need to be addressed. Currently on Exp/Unstable we have build 0.61.136796 which is focused on the following changes: Fix for issues with container contents desync Fix to address supersonic cracks Adjustments of animal SFX levels Adjustments of infected footsteps levels Adjustment to Infected swing SFX In addition to the build currently in test on Exp/Unstable we are focused on more Exp/Unstable updates to address: Status Modifier Updates Adjustments to Dynamic Lights VOIP Volume too quiet Issues with Hand Slots on corpses Some clients experiencing FPS drops And lastly, as promised - future 0.61 Exp/Unstable builds will also be pushed (more than likely after the holiday break) with changes to test network sync on vehicles in DayZ. These builds likely will have vehicles set up to spawn ready to drive, but don't expect that change to follow through to Stable branch! We're all enjoying watching, reading, and hearing about your adventures in the latest change to Stable branch DayZ and we hope you all have a safe and enjoyable holiday break. This will be our last Status Report until January 10th, so see you all in the new year! - Brian Hicks / Creative Director Dev Update/Peter Don't get attached to your gear. This well known DayZ rule is there with us from very beginning. But then what is it, that you should be attached to? In short, it's your character, a survivor in post apocalyptic world full of infected and other threats, where every choice matters and has its consequences. It's easy to say that, but currently the only attachments your character has is his/her gear, his/her location within the world and his/her state. Losing all the gear, getting seriously sick or suddenly need fast travel often leads to sacrificing your character and starting from scratch as a fresh spawn. This behavior goes against the survival idea behind the DayZ in general. To build the value of your character we have planned three pillars which are connected to his life span and activities. Probably the most desired and awaited one is the visual representation of your character appearance like growing beards, scars, bloody hands and others which really reinforce connection between player and his character in world. Second pillar is pretty straightforward and it is connected directly to upcoming stamina system. With stamina in place, sprint wouldn't be intended for traversing long distances (that's what vehicles are for right?), however it will be an important factor for fleeing from immediate dangerous situations you may encounter on reasonable distances. Keeping the character alive longer will benefit from being able to carry more load until the penalty for overload in terms of shortening available stamina strikes in. Third pillar is obviously soft skills, which we have implemented in prototype state for quite some time. Same as with other stuff (for example stamina system mentioned above), this mechanic is waiting primarily for introducing his majesty, the new character himself, which as you may know will be formed from interconnected systems like new animation system, new controller and state machine, new physics, new damage system, new user actions and others. We had been speculating about soft skills for quite some time. Skills leveling system based on gained experience as we know it from traditional RPG games doesn't fit DayZ very well. First draft of soft skills was close to it, there was enclosed skill sets defined by actions which tried to mimic exact roles like medic, mechanic, hunter, builder, farmer and few others. Performing actions within skill sets add experience points to its pool and eventually raising its level. Such system leads to mindless grinding of actions without any meaningful gameplay context which, I believe can really easily ruin the gameplay experience for plenty of players just to witness such behavior. To minimize it, there needs to be some anti-grind solution like simple maximum cap for points per timeframe, or other more elaborate solution which demands more or less UI elements to be clear for players what are the rules and what's going on with experience and skills. In the end we decided to strip soft skills to bare minimum and dare to take different route once again so the vision of DayZ stays intact. Soft skills should not be mandatory, however they should reward long living, dedicated characters and reflect their past actions. Main idea behind it is simple - with little abstraction it's safe to say that if you can stitch up someone, you for sure are relatively able to gut animal or pick seeds from harvest, and on the other hand if you can build fences and watchtowers it should be relatively easy for you to cut tree down or dig garden plot. We introduced so called specialty, which is axis with two poles - precision and roughness, when a character is spawned the pointer is in the middle, neutral position. All actions in game can be divided between precise or rough ones. Even actions from traditional roles like medic can be categorized independently and sit somewhere else in specialty spectrum, for example transfusion as precise action while CPR as rough action. Performing actions in game is moving specialty dynamically towards one pole or other, every action can have different weight so it can move specialty in different amount, let's say while performing transfusion you gain more precision then with simple bandaging. Dedicated characters will be able to profit from current state of their specialty in terms of performing given specialty actions with shorter times, less materials used, wearing out tools less and more outcome gained as current specialty is multiplier for all of these. Not dedicated characters who don't care about specialty or those who feels like jack of all trades are not punished in this system as their specialty will be moving around the middle neutral position which means no penalty as both precise and rough actions will take default time, use default amount of material, worn out tools for default value and gain default outcome. Note, that we are not planning to punish dedicated characters yet (but there is a possibility to do so), if your specialty is more towards roughness you will be stitching yourself as you would do while your specialty is in middle position. I think it's kind of unique approach and it doesn't spoil DayZ with unnecessary tables, numbers, UI clutter and undesirable player behaviors. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year... see you in Chernarus folks! - Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer Dev Update/Mirek Today it will be quick again. We released stable version yesterday, but we're still working on fixing some major issues, like broken modifiers and statuses for some players. We might have a fix today on experimental branch. Looks like it's happening only when one player is connecting at the same time when another is disconnecting, which can happen very often for waiting players in the login queue. About vehicles, we made some progress with synchronization. It's still not perfect and you will experience some micro-teleportation during driving when it hits experimental branch, so please keep in mind that it won't be in its final state. Currently there is just one known blocking issue and it's related to passengers not being able to get out of vehicle sometimes. I don't want to give any promises, but it's still our target to release vehicles on experimental branch before Christmas and if we don't make it, it's priority No.1 at the beginning of next year. I wish you a Merry Christmas and happy New Year. - Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer Community Spotlight I'm sure this happens to you sometimes. You meet a fresh spawn on the coast, befriend him, travel and loot together. But when he finds a gun with ammo, you hear a shot and your screen goes black and you are dead. Your trust in other players is down, but is it like that every time or is there hope for friendly players? YouTuber Cyborg Lyzard had an idea about a social experiment which would prove whether or not players are as cruel and hostile for real. When he released his first social experiment video it was a real successful. Look at this social experiment on update 0.59. Cyborg Lyzard gave a weapon with ammo to a random player and waited to see what happens next. 31% of players killed him immediately. The remaining 69% were friendly. This is not so bad. He tried it again. But in the second experiment he gave the players a gun with ruined ammo. What a lecture on trust and morality! He repeated this experiment again a few weeks ago on update 0.60 and he found out that players are more friendly than before. And what about you? What would you do if somebody gave you a weapon with ammo? Would you put a bullet between his eyes or thank him and go your own way? Let me know on our official Twitter! Header image by: MrBlueAndQueenie Merry Christmas for all Survivals! - Baty / Community Manager

@emuthreat Thank you for your tickets, It helps a lot. :)

Merry Christmas to you all guys from all of DayZ team :).

I love your stories. :) Send us dumps of your client crashes, please.