Hello Shootbob, make a ticket to our Feedback Tracker, we need some data from your DayZ files to check out what is going on. Our nice dev Geez will take care of you there. https://feedback.bistudio.com/

Hello Jackpal, please use our Feedback Tracker, devs should help you there. :) https://feedback.bistudio.com/

Hello Survivors, as this week we have some national holidays coming up in the Czech Republic and a big part of the team took this chance to take a few days of vacation, this Status Report will be shorter than usual. However, we are diving into exciting content regardless, as we will be talking about the upcoming first big update for 0.63. And we are happy to showcase another huge collection of your awesome community content - Let's get to it! Dev Update/Eugen Community Spotlight Dev Update/Eugen Dear Survivors, it's about time to talk about the content update that's coming to Stress Test branch very soon and will get rolled over to the Experimental servers after making sure everything works as intended. We will try and batch the content updates in this way so we can stabilize and make sure the content works properly. AI Sensors/Audibility/Visibility With this change you will see your stealth options getting expanded by quite a bit: Besides stances, the colours and weight of items will affect your ability to avoid zombies and confuse their perception. Hidden Stash With this feature, you'll be able to hide your loot underground and put containers to use. The shovel will be spawning alongside the new containers ready to use. Same goes for corpses. Character - Unconsciousness Shock stat and weapon hits that increase it can cause the character to fall unconscious to be possibly saved by friends in your group. With the unconsciousness state, you'll be seeing more options to disable players and interact with them in combat. CPR The ability to CPR people with high shock values. Gestures The new radial menu alongside the newly added gestures will now be available for even more interactions and videos you may create. Repairing Items like the Sewing kit, Weapon Cleaning kit, Duct tape and more are seeing a comeback as durability matters again. Weapons don't jam yet but that's something you'll definitely see in a future content update. New weapons Yes, there are new weapons coming to the game and it's two classics that everybody loves. M4A1 and Mosin. Yay! Scopes There is no definite list of scopes coming yet in the first content update, but, based on the weapons currently in the game, we will deliver a meaningful selection. Soft skills The Soft skills are getting in, so you'll see the basic specializations working and your crafts bringing better results faster. Environmental Exposure The temperature system will start working without any repercussions first to gather more information on how harsh we want to get. Jumping We have started working on a huge animation set for jumps and climbing this year. So with the upcoming update, the first part of this package is gonna get in and give you the ability to cross some basic obstacles improving your manoeuvrability throughout Chernarus. Diseases Diseases and associated effects (coughing, sneezing and more) are returning as well as items that resolve possible negatives, such as purification tablets. This includes the possibility of diseases transfer from player to player and items. Compass The first part of the navigation system in DayZ besides the new map is the compass. Hopefully, it will help you to learn more about Chernarus and its intricacies. Ambient Loot One of the core features that we want to use to solve a possible lack of loot is a set of items that spawn not centrally but based on the player position and interactions. This might need a lot more tweaks, so expect its values to change even during testing. Voice Communication The whole Voice Communication system along with radios, public radios, megaphone etc. is coming to the game to give you objectives on the map as well as new options to communicate and meet with other survivors in the game. So, how soon this is going to happen? The features listed here are undergoing testing as of now and the content has been branched away from the internal development version with many more fixes and improvements to stability, security and server performance. On a side note, since in the internal version of this patch, we resolved the GDPR issues blocking the ability to switch to the experimental version, with its introduction we will enable this option for server owners. I'm personally looking forward to all this content coming back alongside things that changed and have been improved upon heavily. See you in Chernarus! - Eugen Harton / Lead Producer Community Spotlight Hello Survivors, This weekend, Nine Inch Nails (a band that many of us in the dev team like) had a gig at the Aerodrome festival near Prague, and guess what - Alessandro Cortini, who's been a member of NIN for quite some time now, is a fellow DayZ survivor! We could not pass on the opportunity to meet with Alessandro, and so we did bother him for a bit before he went up on stage! It's been so awesome to chat and listen to some of his stories! Just a brief look at his DayZ t-shirt reassured us that he's serious about being a fan - the condition of the t-shirt has been way, way past pristine, and so we set him up with a new one :) Check out Alessandro on iTunes or SoundCloud, and look for him on Chernarus. Remember - talk to people! You never know who's on the other side, it could be someone from your favorite band! Let's check out some new video content: An emotional story of the life of Ricky Jameson by CamCANTRUN recorded in DayZ and the Arma 3 Eden Editor: Ant made a DayZ fan trailer and it is really nice! Rustycaddy made a video in honor of our beautiful Chernarus: This is a story about the great opening of Uncuepa's bar. It starts really nice, there were a plenty delicious food, drinks and music, but what happened in the end wasn't nice… And what about some of your pictures and drawings? Check it out: The first one is a nice edit of a screenshot by the famous DrDesync. Another edit is made by Reddit user TheWhishImBallHorson named "They Found Me". Good job! Zarrov sent us a sketch of his idea of barricading. It looks impressive! It is an end of a school year and Barrett5Bumpas is getting bored at his classes. So he made this DayZ inspired picture. It is really nice, but don't forget - education is more important than video games! Do you know you can change the skin of your Steam? I didn't know until today. Mdswish shared his DayZ themed customized skin with the community, you can download it here. Do you remember the photo series Humans of Chernarus? It continues and it is still really cool. If you don't know it, it is a portrait of some DayZ characters living on the DayZ Underground server, the project is inspired by Humans of New York. And the last community content for today are Joito's Twitch alerts made by the talented Cobalt_Smobalt. They are so awesome! Let's check the riddle. Who guessed the riddle from the last Status Report? Emu Threat basedBara_RL CanisDirus The correct answer was a Little Hill near Mogilevka. And the riddle for this Status Report is: If you know where is it, tweet it to our official Twitter account with #DayZriddleTime and you can be on the Wall of Fame next time. Thank you for every content you've sent me and see you next time! - Baty / Community Manager Header image by A1ANNUAKII.

Survivors, maintenance is prolonged today, we need to make some time heavy operations on the database machine. We are aiming at the character issues in 0.62 again, so keep reporting the character wipes/changes. No ETA.

We are looking into this issue and testing some solutions right now.

How long do we still need to wait before the 0.63 Update is released on the Experimental Branch? That's a question we get asked every day. While it's still hard to estimate exact release dates at this stage of development (we've learned our lesson about estimating dates), we at least wanted to provide an overview of the work that remains to be done before the release is a go. Before you start scrolling through the list, we strongly recommend that you take a peek at the detailed Status Report we posted on November 2018 last year - back then, we provided a list of 0.63 goals that served as a basis for this particular checklist. In general, that Status Report contains a pretty decent breakdown of our development plans all the way to the 1.0. release - go ahead and read it if you haven't done that yet! We'll do our best to go through this list twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays - even if it would mean that the state badges for each feature/system stay the same. With each update that has some new things marked as "Ready for Experimental", we'll also share that information on our social media channels! We hope this will make our development progress a bit more transparent, and hopefully, you'll also get at least some sort of estimate for the Experimental release. https://dayz.com/blog/0-63-experimental-release-checklist#/

Hey guys, Just a bit info about a little change today. You can't choose 64bit or 32bit versions of your clients anymore. It is now automatic and it depends on your system. Clients with 64bit operation system will now automatically start 64bit DayZ client executable and clients with 32bit operation system will automatically start 32bit DayZ client executable.

Hello everyone, we are sending the latest Stress test update to the Experimental branch right now and we hope we fixed a lot of annoying crashes and kicks. Let us know! further crash fixes fixes for issues with incorrect save and load of character fixes for memory leaks fixes for DB lockouts fixes for stability and kicking issues We are ready for all your crashes and kicks here: https://feedback.bistudio.com/ . Unfortunately, a character wipe is necessary. RIP. Have a nice Wednesday!

Dear Survivors, today, we are releasing the DayZ 0.63 Update to the Experimental branch! With this update, you’ll be able to experience some of the key engine changes brought to DayZ. Developing this new technology backbone for the game took the better part of the past 4 years in Early Access, and we’re very happy that we can finally let everyone play what we call “the new DayZ”. For more information, check out this article.

Hello, try to verify the integrity of game files in Steam, please.

Hello, Make a ticket to our feedback tracker, please. https://feedback.bistudio.com/ How to do it:

Following the 0.63 Experimental release last week we are back with our Status Report. Today, Eugen gives us an update on the state of development, while Viktor and Adam from the animation team show us what they've been up to for the past couple of weeks. Our Map Designer Adam demonstrates changes to the weather system and we get some insights into the audio progress by our Sound Designer Filip. And of course we close with our community highlights, let's dive into it! Dev Update/Eugen Dev Update/Viktor Dev Update/Adam Oresten Dev Update/Adam Franců Dev Update/Filip Community Spotlight Dev Update/Eugen Dear Survivors, the Experimental release is behind us, but the work does not stop here. So I would like to look at the issues present, troubling the community playing this version and also talk about the internal development that has happened and features you'll be seeing very soon on the Stress Test and Experimental branch. We kept both of the branches active to make sure we don't break Experimental too often and have features coming into it with more polish. While 0.63 is heavy on new technology, we know it's quite light on content. But you will be able to enjoy a lot of the new stuff in the upcoming weeks. The issues that take longest to iron out are related to the stability of client and server, and problems that would end up interrupting your play sessions for various reasons. From locked characters, to server kicks or just unexpected crashes to desktop. Things are getting better, but there is more to be done in this regard and we continue to monitor the situation and apply fixes to make sure we eliminate this as soon as possible. We know its not there yet and its our top priority. We should also talk about our plan to make the Experimental servers available to server owners currently running their communities. Sadly this had to be slightly postponed due to changes necessary for GDPR and memory leaks wreaking havoc on stability and performance. These seem to be fixed as of today, so very soon you will be able to switch over and enjoy the updated version with your fellow community members on your own terms. In terms of development, we are currently moving along quite nicely with only small delays in features planned out internally. The benefits of the new technology are already showing themselves in the pace of implementation. We are also looking into possible solutions to issues that currently cause these delays and make sure we deliver. Let's go over the current state of development and features themselves. We can consider finished for Experimental phase: Hidden stash CPR Gestures Repairing UI Main Menu Soft Skills Environmental Exposure Goat - Animal Last week we have moved/continue to the review/bug fixing of: Character Unconsciousness Chambering Loop Fireplace Jump UI Server Browser Cooking Weapon/Item Swap Action/Animation Compass Gathering Ambient Loot Gathering Actions Vehicles - Open/Close doors Vehicles - Attach/Detach vehicle parts Injured Animations This week is dedicated to the internal implementation of: Climbing Weapon dispersion Weapon zeroing Weapons - Double Barrel Diseases Scopes Enfusion Hierarchy New Input System Action Animations Collisions during melee So you might be asking yourself when these things hit Stress Test and Experimental branches. We plan to switch over a bunch of these very soon, and you can expect to have these available in batches over the coming weeks. However, we want to aim for at least unconscious state to be finished in different edge cases. As of now, there are still small issues with ladder/water unconscious state interactions that are not ready for the Stress Test, but this week we should see them fixed and as such moved to the Stress Test branch alongside many other new features and content. - Eugen Harton / Lead Producer Dev Update/Viktor Hello everyone, today I would like to share with you in this short update what the animation team has been working on for the past weeks and what is going on at the moment. Obviously, the player character is important to us, so we continue improving its behaviour and what it can do. At the moment, we are revisiting some of the animations and improving them, or replacing them with better ones. This includes melee combat and its attacks. There have been some animation changes to better represent which item is the player attacking with, like a new sprint-attack with the baseball bat. Also, a lot of work has been put into finger poses so that the character is holding various items the best way it can. Some of the recent animation additions include the new IZH43 animation set, and some gestures like nodding head, shrug, and "OK". One of the more significant improvements to player locomotion is the ability to jump over obstacles. The feature is still work-in-progress, as well as the animations, but the character is now able to overcome small objects that are in his way by jumping over them. We are now in the process of adding all the animation variations for different directions and items in hands. At the same time, our programmer is working on the climbing for players and soon, we will start implementing animations for it. As we also started tidying up some animations and features, there is an ongoing work on player actions. This includes polishing of existing animations, some graph tweaks, but also some new animations to better visualize what the character is doing. Our Technical Animator Adam will share more details on what was happening over the past weeks regarding various animation improvements related to these actions. Make sure to check out the gifs for the baseball bat attack and cutting down bushes. Cheers! - Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator Dev Update/Adam Oresten For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work revamping, tweaking, and creating animations for many various actions. User actions are the backbone of the game, and as such, they require thought out implementation; what items can they be done with? What stances are they realistic in? Should the character be able to move during the action? All of these play a huge role in their realization, concept, and execution. I’ve implemented animations for on back actions (mainly important ones; drinking, eating, etc), tweaked some action animations to be faster or slower and cutting out unnecessary parts, depending on which type of action. I’ve also created and implemented animations for placing heavy items (barrels, generators, etc) and smaller items (bear traps, mines, etc), and I’ve also revamped the horticulture action animations, such as cutting down a tree with a two-handed axe, or one-handed hatchet, cutting down bushes, and getting bark from trees with knives or machetes. As a part of these actions, I also implemented some smaller QoL (quality of life) representative action animations for viewing compass and viewing the map to properly convey what the player is currently doing. We’re in “full steam ahead” mode with the actions and their corresponding animations, and every week we’re working on new actions and polishing the animations for the ones we already have! - Adam Oresten / Technical Animator Dev Update/Adam Franců In our Status Report from 22 November 2016, we shared our plans to upgrade SimulWeather/TrueSky - a 3rd party library used to render volumetric clouds in DayZ. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, we had to ultimately cancel this plan and rather focus our attention on the current implementation that is present in DayZ since the beginning of Early Access. This has not only allowed us to make necessary performance adjustments but also to take a closer look at the visuals of clouds and what could be improved within the limits of the current implementation. Here is a short summary of what has been changed: Regarding performance improvements we have reached a point, where we have decided to remove the ability to disable volumetric clouds on the client side - this change will take an effect once revamp of graphical options is finalized. There have been major changes in the cloud configuration, which are mainly aimed to make the clouds more visible and distinct from the skybox background. We improved the interaction of fog (in distance and height) and volumetric clouds, so that clouds should blend better with the horizon when it is foggy. The silver lining effect of clouds has been greatly boosted during the early to late sunrises and sunsets. The movement speed of clouds during windy conditions has been reduced and we've brought additional improvements to the skybox background textures (overcast-dependent) along with some minor tweaks to the global lighting config to support the changes in the skybox and volumetric clouds. In addition to the changes of clouds, we have also taken a look again at the visuals of rain. These new changes include: Closeup raindrops are much more visible now. Re-added effect that tries to visualize light refraction on raindrops. Fogginess parameter has been tweaked so the rain blends better with the background. Closeup rain drops are more visible during the night-time around light sources. Rain speed has been increased. Both clouds and rain changes should be available to test once the next major Stress Test branch update happens. We are looking forward to your feedback on these improvements! - Adam Franců / Map Designer Dev Update/Filip Čenžák Hi all, The latest sound feature we started to work on are voice sounds for the character. So far we've implemented breathing when the character runs out of stamina, the sounds for holding breath while aiming in iron sight mode. and hit reactions when the character takes damage. We plan to add more sounds to create a more immersive character representation. Some of the sounds will be connected to animations, like grunts while jumping, or picking up heavy items, or sounds to emphasize melee combat. Others should be connected to character states, like the feeling of hunger or representation of disease. So far, all sounds are placeholders and in some cases, only male sounds are played. - Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer Community Spotlight Hello everyone, the last two weeks were both really exciting and busy for us. The release of Experimental was a big milestone all of us have been looking forward to for a long time. Even though we are aware of some issues on Experimental, we are happy, that you finally can play 0.63 almost whenever you want. If you haven't done it already, check our Highlight page featuring all the good stuff from this update! Another big event was our Community Live Stream. We knew that just a day after the release of 0.63 Experimental, there were going to be a lot of questions. Unfortunately, after announcing the stream, our beloved Eugen got sick and it was clear, that he wouldn’t be able to attend the stream. We still wanted to hold on to our promise and decided to take it as an opportunity to do our first Community Live Stream. We introduced new members of our Community team, opened Boydy's package (thanks again!) and tried to answer as many questions as possible even without the devs. As I said before, we had a Community Live Stream. I just want to explain what it means. In future, we want to stream in two formats – a developer and a community stream. On developer streams, you can expect information directly from devs and detailed answers for your questions. The second format is more community-related. Our community team wants to talk with the community about events, content from creators and all the stuff from you because you are really important to us. We tried the first community stream and we had a lot of technical difficulties (as always, it is not fun without it, is it?). Here is the VOD from the stream: You asked who made the music on the stream. It is a member of our community from the Netherlands called L_K_P1 who makes DayZ inspired music and we love it in the dev team! The song from the stream is named DayZ meme and here it is if you are interested: Do you need a new wallpaper? I have a cool one for you made by ChernoMerlo from the DrDesync’s screenshot. And here is another one. I have it on my desktop already! Shane O’Sullivan sent me a really interesting piece of a newspaper. It is named Bohemian Post and he made it by himself. There you can find news about the infection spreading across Chernarus. Now I want to show you a special project by DayZUnderground called #TwitterPlay. It is an interactive DayZ story within Twitter and it is updated daily. People are making a story through their votes in polls and they can decide what happened with a survivor, about whom the story is. It is a really nice idea and we love it! Join the story and make your own part! You can find the latest part HERE. Cage, who we met personally at Pax East, sent us his custom advertisement inspired by our Nota Cola and Pipsi drinks and they are pretty creative. And the last two pieces of content are videos. The first one is a cinematic trailer about surviving in Chernarus and it is sick. Everyone from the dev team loves it, this is amazing work by HookOak Productions! The last short clip is made by our loyal member NeuroticEUROtic and he is sharing his feelings when Experimental was near. Time for a riddle. The riddle from the latest Status Report wasn't so hard, the rock is situated on the North-West of Svetlojarsk above the train yard. Who guessed it right? Megamente Polski Tytan Beehive1982 Kerbo This time we prepared this picture with Adam: If you know where is it, tweet it to our official Twitter account with #DayZriddleTime and you can be on the wall of fame next time. Thank you guys for your content and I hope you will share your creation with us next time! - Baty / Community Manager Header image by WaffelsBR.

Hello everyone! We have a new Experimental update here. Servers will be down for 30-60 minutes. What is new: further crash fixes fixes for issues with incorrect save and load of character fixes for memory leaks fixes for DB lockouts further fixes for stability and kicking issues No character wipe this time. Thank you for playing on Experimental servers!

It should be like this.

We are releasing this Experimental update right now again.

I am sorry guys. Due to complications, that weren't detected on the Stress Test branch, we had to revert back to the previous Experimental version. Programmers are working on resolving the issues right now. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Experimental servers are online now.

Server files will be available during BETA! Maybe not right with the first BETA build, but definitely during BETA.

Hello, make a ticket here https://feedback.bistudio.com/, guys are going to talk about it with you. :)

Hello admins, we are releasing 0.63 on the Experimental branch for the public today. I know some of you can't wait to switch your servers to 0.63 Experimental too, because we promised you the opportunity to branch switch. We wanted to give you a chance to switch in the first Experimental release but we encountered some issues with memory leaks on the server maschines which need to be fixed as soon as possible. When it is fixed and everything is tested, we will inform you and the switch can happen. I hope you understand why we can't let you change the branch right now.

Not now sorry, but we want to release Experimental branch for private servers in the near future, so there will be more 1pp servers. I am sorry, I can't speak Spanish, but if you have a bad version try to restart your Steam. If you didn't change a DayZ branch to Experimental, you can find here how to do it:

We are still dealing with the GDPR changes. We will let you know. :)

Sever files will be released during BETA. Maybe not right with the first BETA build, but definitely during BETA.

Yes, it is still planned after BETA release.

To start off this Status Report, we are going to let Stress Test #18 run over night, so have a good time. Today, Eugen is going to talk about the upcoming weeks as our Stress Test versions gain more and more stability. Peter gives an introduction to the conditions of our new Central Economy system and Adam explains the ongoing changes to the Balota airfield. We close with some of the most memorable highlights of our community. Let's dive into it! Dev Update/Eugen Dev Update/Peter Dev Update/Adam Community Spotlight Dev Update/Eugen Dear Survivors, As we are pushing a large amount of fixes into the current Stress Test Branch, our aim is to stabilize the build enough to launch an Experimental Branch that will be available on official Experimental severs, as well as community servers, as server owners will be able to switch over. We expect the 0.62 Stable to be played less often and we will move server resources to Experimental depending on the player interest. We expect a couple more Stress Tests to be happening this week, aimed at least a couple fixes for crashes and locked character issues. We would like to confirm these fixes over the next couple of days and have the build available during the weekend for an extended Stress Test. This will be the version we will be launching for all the players interested in moving to experimental. In the meantime, we have planned out the features that will be reviewed and connected to the new engine. This is done on the Internal branch of development and will move over to the Experimental in bundles. Last week we have moved to review/bug fixing of: Hidden stashes Chambering loop (Enabling weapon classes such as the Mosin in-game) Character - Unconsciousness CPR Gestures Repairing UI - Main Menu Polished Sensors audibility/visibility (Infected) Sheep/animations, behavior This week is dedicated to the implementation of : Softskills Fireplace Environmental exposure Jump Weapons - double barrel UI - Server Browser Polished Goat/animations, behavior When these features will hit experimental, soon after the Experimental release we expect to switch over and keep doing Stress Tests for the newer builds before they move on to Experimental. The process itself is focused on connecting these features to the new character as a lot of them have been under development for a long time now. Each week we aim to deliver the implementation and dedicate the second week to bug fixing. Switching these over to Experimental will be done depending on the feature review and the community feedback that might affect priorities. - Eugen Harton / Lead Producer Dev Update/Peter The new Central Economy (CE) is in charge of the spawn and clean up of items, infected, animals, vehicles and dynamic events. It is easier to setup than the old CE and allows us to be more flexible with the categorization and areas of occurrence. A more precise placement can be achieved as well. After a series of internal tests during its implementation, we deployed it to DayZ 0.63. The CE is a complex system, as its behaviour develops over time and reacts to player interaction. Testing on our side was limited in scale and time. To check how the new Central Economy is behaving on a mass scale in the wild, we gathered data during the 11th Stress Test. From 18.5. to 20.5. we saved the storage files every hour across all servers which were constantly under full load. Loading this data back into the game allowed us to reconstruct how the CE behaved over time. From all the items spawned by the CE we picked the ones that are crucial for survival - food (beans, spaghetti, peaches, sardines, tuna), drinks (Cola, Pipsi, Spite, Kvass, water bottle) and firearms (Makarov, FNX45, Skorpion, IZH18, MP5, UMP45, AKM). The presented data is from the UK 0-8 server. The overview maps show where these items were spawned over time and similarly, the graphs show their overall quantity on the map over time (note that one dot means at least one item or more). To put things into context there is also a map of character spawn areas. Areas of character spawns along the coast. An animated occurrence of food across the map from Friday to Sunday. Amounts of food across the map from Friday to Sunday. Positions of food in the map at its lowest, Saturday 11:00. Amounts of drinks across the map from Friday to Sunday. Positions of drinks on the map at their lowest, Saturday 09:00. Amounts of firearms across the map from Friday to Sunday. Positions of firearms on their map at their lowest, Saturday 15:00. From available data granularity, it can be seen that in general, there have been enough food and drinks across the map to survive, as well as firearms to provide empowerment of survivors. Interestingly, the sum of all initially spawned food in 0.62 is lower than the sum of all spawned food at their minimal quantity in 0.63 (when an item hits its minimum threshold it will start to respawn back to its initial value). It would be nice to see players adapting to a new mindset of getting prepared before starting their next trip by checking more houses and structures at their location. However, there are things which will be addressed down the road to improve the CE behaviour and its balance. It’s clear that some parts of the map are rather empty, especially in the bottom right corner. In such cases, areas for character spawns will be tweaked and more structures will be added where it makes sense. That goes hand in hand with lowering the safe radius around characters which prevents items to pop up, as in high traffic areas this can cause the lockout of entire cities. Next, it’s the settings of the CE itself playing the decisive role. The randomisation of the lifetime of more common items has to be set in a greater range, as we noticed there were cleanups of large amounts at once causing noticeable dips. Moreover, the difference between nominal and minimal values of an item makes items spread across map even more unevenly. Most importantly, the short time frame we had to ‘boot up’ the new Central Economy and the truncated list of given items to spawn, led to a sub-optimal items categorization and defined tier zones. This is the area of the CE which will become crucial when more items start to flow back into the game and we really need to nail it. With the new Central Economy we definitely have a great toolset to tune loot and its distribution as good as possible, but given the nature and complexity of it, it will take some time. Let the looting begin... see you in Chernarus folks! - Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer Dev Update/Adam As mentioned in our Status Report from April 25, we are re-designing Chernogorsk and its surroundings. If you have played on the 0.63 Stress Test Branch and visited this area, you may have seen where we are heading with this re-design. I should remind you that map changes, unlike other parts of the game, are something that is not receiving updates on the Stress Test Branch that often, because of the difficulties with the branching of map data. Anyway, I am happy to say that quite a lot of progress has been made over the past few weeks and we are nearing the final stages of polishing and optimizing the overall area. If you have played the more recent versions of the 0.63 Stress Test Branch, you may have also noticed that we have decided to re-design the Balota airfield. This change was planned for a long time and originally set to be made at a later stage of development, but since the re-design of Chernogorsk is covering the area from Balota to Elektro, we have decided to include the Balota airfield re-design in it too. Balota is such an odd spot for any type of airfield to begin with, but we feel the need for a number of airfields across the Chernarus. Now with the NWAF re-design close to being done, we have got a proper military airbase on the map and we feel like there is no need to have other military air bases. And so the airfield was completely de-militarised, the concrete runway was removed and the whole airfield was rotated a bit more facing inland (so the corridor is pointing away from inhabited areas). Given the relatively small and odd place, we have decided to transform this airfield into a local airstrip, maintained by a local flying club and have re-used NEAF buildings to support this idea (and if you ask, yes, we do have further plans for NEAF too, but not for 0.63). To give this newly re-designed airfield a backstory, it has been captured by the military forces, with most of its entrances sealed off by mostly improvised structures. - Adam Franců / Map Designer Community Spotlight Hello guys, Let's check out what the community has for us after two weeks. I need to start with something really sad. Our community lost one of its members and a great streamer. Jen, known as Poisonantler, died under unfortunate circumstances on 8th March. We decided among the dev team to commemorate her by placing a small cross and a bench in the place where she disconnected for the last time. Our Brand Manager Martin Čulák accepted an invitation from our favourite Australian content creator Boydy and joined him in his podcast. Check it out, you can find interesting info in the video: I didn't expect much from a video with just walkie-talkie recording. But I was really surprised by how entertaining the video is. This is a recording of a few people's conversations from The Village server which has a very interesting ending. I really recommend to check it out. It is good to see that hand painting is not dead. This DayZ logo on a canvas made by danyuls0n's girlfriend makes us happy. We hope it is already hanging on the wall somewhere near a PC. I know we didn't have a location riddle for a long time. Our Twitter is now overwhelmed, because of Stress Tests, so we need to identify the riddle tweets. Just tweet the location with #DayZriddleTime hashtag and I will find it! Have a nice day(Z), Survivors! - Baty / Community Manager Header image by zombi.

Following the 0.63 Stress Test, weekend we are back with a new issue of our biweekly Status Report. Today, Eugen looks back at the first results from the weekend, Peter talks about missing visual indicators in the current Stress Test builds and Viktor gives a glimpse into the progress of the animation team. The Community Spotlight is defined by your first reactions to 0.63. Let's dive into it! Dev Update/Eugen Dev Update/Peter Dev Update/Viktor Community Spotlight Dev Update/Eugen Dear Survivors, at first, I would like to thank you for the amazing participation during the weekend Stress Test. It has helped us to identify a number of new issues that we are investigating as I write this. Let's take a closer look at some of those issues. Crashes and general game stability issues There have been about 200 crashes altogether over the period of two days with a couple of different causes. Some of them are new, but most are known. Hopefully, the amount of data generated will identify the pattern to replicating these issues internally and getting them fixed. Character locked in database Besides the stability issues, we are still tracking situations where a player character gets locked in a database. Although happening less often than previously, this is still a major problem that is most likely tied to a server/client crash/freeze not closing the connection gracefully, and not unlocking the character as intended. We have a possible fix for these outlier issues and crashes in our internal main Development Branch of the game and should roll these out in next few Stress Tests. Basic Central Economy balance There is an investigation ongoing into Central Economy loot distribution. Specifically, we're looking at cases where the intended gameplay loop is not properly supported by items presented/spawned to players exploring even the most remote corners of Chernarus. DayZ Central Economy The Central Economy is a complex system that controls the distribution of loot across Chernarus. It's supposed to sustain a barrage of ongoing player interaction on a given server (player picking up and dropping loot, taking it across different servers...), with the goal to keep the core gameplay loop during a gameplay session challenging, encouraging players to learn, and eventually master the survival in DayZ. At the same time though, it needs to be a fun gameplay mechanic. It's important to note that the Stress Tests are our first real opportunity to really see how the Central Economy behaves in 0.63, as we're just not able to internally reproduce the behavior of large amount of players in the game. That ultimately puts us at the very beginning of all the balancing. During Stress Tests, we are extracting economy states over periods of time to understand the players movement and their interactions. This in turn helps us understand where our priorities should be within the spawning system. The second part of our loot/basic survival mechanic problem is the character representation itself - meaning how healthy/hungry/thirsty your character is. That sets the pace to this core gameplay loop of keeping your character fed and alive. Any potential tweaking of character representation values depends on the findings of our loot distribution tests. We will have to cover a lot of possible border cases that happen to players. Additionally, we will (as previously suggested) also play around with the overall player numbers per server, and we will need to see how to scale the Central Economy with the player numbers going up, possibly all the way to a 100 players per server. How do we prepare the Stress Test release packages Since I've mentioned our internal Development Branch earlier, I also wanted to explain the process behind the scenes that goes into releasing a Stress Test itself. Internally, we have created a new branch of DayZ for data and changes that we specifically need to run public Stress Tests. Software Branching Branching, in revision control and software configuration management, is the duplication of an object under revision control (such as a source code file or a directory tree) so that modifications can happen in parallel along both branches. More in a related Wikipedia article. We've been merging various fixes and surgical tweaks to the game on that branch, while the regular development has been ongoing on our main Development Branch. With Stress Tests, we are trying to gather data on specific problems that require a high-stress environment with tons of players coming in and out of the server, pushing all gameplay systems to their limits. That is specifically the case with loot distribution and all player interactions tied to it. Stabilizing these interactions and making them somewhat consistent with a decent amount of variety is our primary goal. We want you to experience that feeling of discovery when you find what you need at a certain moment. Especially if it's a rare item. Looting is a big part of the DayZ gameplay, we know how much this can affect the enjoyment from fighting for your life in Chernarus, so with each Stress Test, we set a goal and a particular combination of data that we want to gather within a specific gameplay element or system. Then, we add extra logging to these interactions, helping us to decide on the next action we should be taking. It's only a small part of the development though. The Development Branch has seen a lot of additional optimizations already, even including fixes to several different issues that you have been experiencing, so our goal now is to leave the Stress Test branch to keep the development pace going forward. Our Development Branch is where the progress towards experimental goals happens, so it's about time we make sure this branch is viable for live playtests. To ensure we really are ready to do that switch, we will release a short Stress Test based on the code/data of that branch before we go on for another longer Stress Test. Once again, I want to say a BIG thank you for the feedback coming in, it's what makes this community special. All of us want a great game, no doubts about it! - Eugen Harton / Lead Producer Dev Update/Peter In the last Status Report I was commenting on the community feedback regarding firearms in our DayZ Stress Tests. Today I will continue with different elements which are related to them. Weapon switching animations As is pretty obvious, the animations for swapping items from the inventory to the hand slot are missing. Especially with weapons, this creates a gameplay problem, as a lack of visual communication turns a harmless disarmed character into a threat in a split second. Currently we are implementing these item switch animations and, along with them, we are changing one important thing - shoulder slots will be no longer be dedicated. That means you will be able to carry two long firearms or two melee weapons as needed. As we progress with 0.63, a slot for a belt will also be added, opening possibilities for an additional pistol holster, knife sheet, or quiver. A slot for the bow is considered as well, but there needs to be a bow implemented first to see how it will work with non-dedicated shoulders. Hit feedback Another part missing is animation feedback of a target being hit with a projectile, as we turned that specific feature off for the Stress Test. We ran into a problem where even additive impact affected the aim of a firearm. Such an authentic affair quickly becomes a very unpleasant mechanic, preventing a reaction by putting you in a disadvantage after being hit - the only chance was that the shooter will miss or have to reload so your aim can recover in the meantime. We will have to address this issue as we would like to have animated feedback following a projectile hit. Bleeding On a different issue, bleeding and its treatment are basic DayZ mechanics. Unfortunately, without the new parent-child hierarchy, which is being implemented as we speak, we cannot pin particle emitters to the character properly and animate them with it. We've decided to postpone the visual representation of bleeding particles as well. Admittedly, this is a bad timing, as in 0.63 you have to treat every bleeding source individually. With slightly unresponsive progress arrows of the blood stat icon (more about indicators later) and no way to tell if there are some bleeding wounds left, it’s hard to say how many times you should bandage. Overall balance Apart from that, please be aware that many elements you see in the game right now have not been not through a basic balance pass just yet. From digestion, regeneration speeds and stamina, through damages of melee and projectiles to the weight of items, their sizes, and cargo spaces... it’s safe to say that basically everything will be adjusted more or less and it is connected to some degree with the lack of features, mechanics, and content, which will be added down the road during the 0.63 Experimental phase. Oh, and it will be a ride... see you in Chernarus folks! - Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer Dev Update/Viktor The animation team is now focused on several parts of the player character. We are now in the phase of improving and finalizing the prone system. Animations for crawling in prone on the back, which have been missing until now, are being added. The cameras and some poses are not final yet as well. And of course, after the animations are finished, we will have to do a couple of rounds of bugfixing for prone on the back before we tick it off as done. Another important part that is in progress, is overcoming obstacles. We now have a working prototype for jumping, but we are still in the process of adding missing animations. Meanwhile, there has been some work done on climbing over higher obstacles. These are divided into multiple levels, and different animations will be played depending on the height of the obstacle. Close combat will see some changes as well. As we want to have more variation to the combat, we are adding new animations for the baseball bat. These should better reflect the item. In the future, we want to continue with this and add more item specific attack animations. Last but not least, there is ongoing work on firearms, vehicles, user actions, infected and also tons of general bugfixing. All of these areas are a longer term task, but you should see constant improvements in the game with everything related during Experimental. But for now, let's check out some gifs! Cheers! - Viktor Kostík / Lead Animator Community Spotlight Hey Survivors, I hope you had a weekend at least as amazing as I did! Why was it so amazing? Because of you! You were simply being a fantastic help during the Stress Test! 30 482 of you have already tried the first version of update 0.63. Wow, thank you! We've had so much feedback, that I wasn't able to read it all in just one day! We were watching streamers the entire weekend and we are really happy to see your love for DayZ. You had a lot of fun, we saw all the emotions, it was so awesome. For a while, DayZ was the second most watched game on Twitch this weekend, it reached more than 76 000 viewers and it has been played by some of the biggest streamers such as Summit1g, Anthony Kongphan or shroud and they were having a good time too. You did a great job with videos this week. I found this cinematic made by DaGuyd and it is pretty impressive. Check it out, it is only under 2 minutes long: Another cinematic short named Loot Lost is made by our favorite Status Report reader Septic Falcon. And we like it a lot. And here is a creepy story about a cannibal doctor who loves the flesh of his patients by MarcusGalic. Eating people is bad, isn't it? Who knows… Look at this true hero! His name is Reginald and he is a humanitarian in Chernarus. His mission is help to people and he is very good at it: The last video is from the well known double trouble creators - Vertiigo and MrMoon. It is a really funny story of friends lost in the wilderness - they are best friends until the hunger comes… I almost died laughing watching this video. I love your creativity and your passion for DayZ on both real and virtual paper. Art pieces like these make me happy and I thank you for them. This one is made by AStupidAnt from Reddit. It took him about 4 hours and he did a really good job. This photo is from a true DayZ fan, ScarecrowCOD. He even has a gas mask! And check the painting on the wood he made. Nice! That is all from me, have great two weeks and see you on the next Stress Test! - Baty / Community Manager Header image by BubsonHD.