Derleth

My gripe with helicopters is that the map is too small, with helicopters it becomes too obvious that we are essentially trapped in a little cage - there is nowhere you can't get to in a couple of minutes. I don't doubt that assembling, maintaining and defending a helicopter would be the ultimate end-game challenge for a well established group or faction. For the lone wolf nomad they are quite pointless. I prefer a situation where everyone are landlocked, it brings a level playing field, where distance is a factor and hiding small bases is possible at least in theory. With aerial vehicles we'd need mechanics to better use cammo nets. We will see how it goes, I seriously doubt that helicopters has been fully abandoned by the devs, but giving stability and more or less all other features priority definitely makes sense. In the meantime we'll see what the Expansion crew can achieve. For vehicles, I am much more eager to see bikes/motorbikes as well as the V3S truck make it into the game. The truck was supposed to be in 1.0 - heck even the parts were spawning - but never actually made it. Since then it's been over a year and we've seen three other cars added but still no truck. Waiting for the physics to be stabilised?

Awful lively for something "dead".

During this exp 3PP servers are running with config 0 (slightly brighter nights, visible moonlight) and the personal night light OFF. 1PP servers are running config 1 (pitch black, moon gives no illumination) and personal night light ON. Although it has been nerfed so you no longer get the green glowing trees in the woods, the glow is limited to about arm's length. They haven't said anything about it, but I guess that's how they plan to have things. 1PP being called "hardcore" and all... Personally I prefer config 0 so far (even though it is too bright, especially indoors) since the moonlight has been gone for so long, it is very nice to have it back.

Can't say I'd be disappointed if that's how it turns out. Personally I feel the DayZ map is too small for helicopters, all they're good for is zipping across the entire map in a couple of minutes and attract a lot of attention. I can understand that some players regard helis as the ultimate end-game, but in an open sandbox without scripted events, AI and missions they are actually quite pointless. In a milsim or epoch-like world (like Expansion seems to be aiming for) they definitely have their place, in vanilla DayZ not so much.

I doubt they will share their internal roadmap, at most we'll get a rundown of the general goals of the year. Anyone who expects a detailed roadmap and content plan will be disappointed. Me, I want the things I list below back asap and I'm happy. More "content" filling is bountiful from modding so not very urgent. * Improvised bow * Broken bones * V3S truck * Magnum & repeater * Written notes * Spray painting * Proper stabbing animation (aka Return of the Pointy Stick!) This is not to mention the obvious stuff like stabilising vehicle physics, fixing desync/Inventory bugs and improving server performance.

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This bug persists, if anyone's interested. It is not overly serious since angry zombie ladies is better than no zombies at all, but the problem most likely applies to any list in the game where something is randomly picked from a list of "children". I've only noticed it on the infectedcity type since that list is by far the longest, so the way the function favours the topmost lines of children makes it unlikely or even impossible for male city zombies to spawn. The bug is very obvious if you ring the dinnerbell in Berezino/Elektro/Cherno on a server with increased infected. I've solved it for the time being by swapping the children around like Metalhead suggested, but I believe BI should look into the scripts picking random children at some point. The infectedcity list has 62 different zombies in it, but I don't think more than 15 are ever used, if not less.

Hello, I read this Bohemia blog about 2019 and the future, and it was a very interesting read. I would very much like to see something similar from the DayZ devs about DayZ in particular. Any information over the last year has been sketchy at best, more often simply non existent. I don't think the old Status Reports would be the right format (having a "status report" for post release development sounds wrong) but some kind of blog summarising the past year, the status of the most pressing issues and some kind of indication of what the plans for 2020 are would be very welcome. Just to name a few questions or issues I'd like to know the status of: Vehicles - what is happening here? Cars will still wobble, jump around or even fly when server performance is poor or players have unstable connection. This has been going on since 1.0 and is - if I understood @ImpulZ right when he was asked about it during a live stream - related to the physics simulation going haywire by desync. Are you any closer to solving this issue? Despawning cars. A very disruptive issue that has been going on since 1.03 in May. On server restart cars are occasionally thrown around and damaged and if ruined then they are promptly cleaned away by the server. To combat this issue I changed the config of my own server so ruined cars are not despawned, after a few weeks the map was littered with at least a dozen smoking wrecks of cars that had never even been assembled... Apparently there is also an issue where cars cannot be placed at their saved coordinate at server restart - and are subsequently teleported to the 0,0 coordinate at the bottom left corner of the map. Which is the bottom of the sea... Speaking of vehicles - where is the V3S truck? It was supposed to come with 1.0 - its parts were spawning at release even - yet still no truck. Held back because of the wobbling/flying car issue? Night lighting. We're getting mixed signals here. On one hand, to "keep the darkness" you do not want to boost moonlight to get the much nicer lighting visuals from pre 1.0 iterations, on the other hand you implemented the personal night light that makes the dense darkness irrelevant anyway - and makes the lighting look awful. This does not make any sense whatsoever! I'd like to suggest you boost the moon and remove the night light, it would make nights much more pleasing visually. Add a dynamic interaction between moon phase & position, cloud cover and light levels and you can still have the very dark nights much of the time. Variation is natural. Nighttime clouds. Related to 4, clouds are unnaturally lit or glowing at nights, making the sky look like an oil slick. This has been so ever since SimulWeather was removed with 1.02 but has become worse over the course of the year, I'm assuming due to changes to lighting. Clouds obscure light at night, they do not glow (except for when reflecting light pollution, not a factor in DayZ, and around the moon when the cloud cover is thin). Server performance. Always an issue and seemingly the biggest factor holding DayZ back at the moment. The removal of SimulWeather, vehicles misbehaving, too few infected etc. Is this something we're going to have to live with or is there hope for improvement? Below a bunch of other issues/backlog features I would like to know the plans for: Cold weather survival. Still some balancing to be done here - and heated food needs to lose heat. A) because using steaks as eternal heat packs makes cold survival trivial and B) overheating and dying because of a few steaks in your jacket is stupid. There needs to be more waterproof and water resistant clothing available. Raw meat needs to get spoiled if you do not cook it within a day. Same goes for opened cans of food, veggies etc that also needs to deteriorate over time. Spray painting? Dyeing, leathercrafting? Stabbing animations - it feels and looks incredibly dumb to swing a spear like a club. Since we stab with bayonets, why not with the pointy stick and spear? Then you can add the pitchfork back too. A number of other melee weapons are still missing. Sword, club, farming hoe, sickle, fire extinguisher - and the chainsaw - just to name a few. Are they scratched permanently or in the works? Improvised bow? What is the status? Broken bones? There is already a mod faking it better than the old 0.62 implementation - this should be done in the vanilla game until the dreamed skeleton simulation/ragdoll/animations is implemented. If ever. Since I mentioned it - ragdoll. Will we ever see it? Sick of bodies of players and zombies falling into walls. Not only does it look amateurish but it makes them unlootable. Bodies need to interact with the terrain. Two wheeled vehicles? Flying vehicles/boats? Written notes? Books? Ambient animals - foxes, rabbits, birds etc - are these scratched for good or still in the works? Infected and wolves fighting. Apparently disabled intentionally but no explanation given. This is not a good change, I was recently chased by a bear, a flock of wolves and a dozen infected who were all out for my scrawny behind. It actually felt more than a little unfair...

The spear can actually be crafted, but the stabbing animation is missing (although we can stab with bayonets now...) so you swing it around like a club. Looks stupid. Other than that, some more EA things missing from the list: spraypainting, leathercrafting and dyeing, rabbit snares & other traps, V3S truck and Transit Bus, weapon bipod, books & written notes, broken bones Iirc the planned features also had ambient animals such as various birds, hares, and hedgehogs, and also soft skills, vehicle modification, infected hordes, ragdoll, remade buildings, infected breaking down doors and a bunch of other weapons. Break it all down like this and it is clear they have a lot of work to do still. Everything this year is very unlikely. Personally I'm hoping for the bow, broken bones and properly stabilised vehicle physics, so we can finally have the damn V3S truck back. As long as those things are priority the other stuff on the backlog can take its time for all I care, it is not critical.

Is there any way to simply edit the contents of the topsArray and pantsArray that define starting clothes, or do you have to create custom loadouts to get newspawns to start with other clothes than the default hoodie/jeans? Basically, I want newspawns to have tracksuit pants and t-shirts or other low-end tops like sports shirt, telnyashka, sweater etc.

This is true as long as you take the infected on 1 on 1, and that is actually fine by me. When you have a minor horde after you it's a whole other ballpark, you need to use blocking and evading, as well as moving and pausing to regain stamina, or you'll be quickly overwhelmed. I prefer it that way to be honest, if fighting a lone zombie was a struggle it would become a chore. Last night I was swarmed and killed three times on my own server. I've done nothing to the zeds but increase their numbers. It is enough to make them dangerous if you mess up or run about without planning ahead. I like it that way. Infected can of course still be improved a lot, they need more variety of sound and animations, and their corpses must stop falling into walls. Plus the aforementioned door busting and window climbing. Oh yeah, hordes on vanilla too..

To be fair it is fairly easy to make zombies more than a minor nuisance by simply increasing their numbers. When making a little noise in a city brings 30-40 infected running for you, shooting your neighbour is no longer without consequence. Personally I'd rather have half the number of players and thrice the zombies, 60 players is too crowded for PvE anyway, there's always someone who can't resist shooting anything that moves rather than cooperate. In the best of worlds we could have both, let's hope they can get server performance there one day. In the meantime I'd love to see infected break down doors and climb through windows* - provided we get the option to board up windows and barricade doors as a complement to base building. Oh, and base buildings that actually keep AI out, it is a bit disheartening to spend a week building a base and then see wolves and infected running through the walls as if they aren't there... *) When the amount of zeds outside a building reaches some critical point this actually happens already. Of course not intended, but they kind of push each other up and through the bigger windows. Scares the crap out of me when it happens, just needs proper animations to be a cool feature 😁

Title. These would make this weapon a bit more useful. Since the limited range makes it a shoddy sniper, the stopping power of the round is so-so, the suppressing effect was nerfed to the ground and the 10-round mag makes it a poor choice for close combat, the VSS really is a mediocre weapon. With larger capacity mags (irl these are pretty much standard issue, and there are compatible 30-round mags too iirc) the VSS could serve as a decent jack-of-all-trades weapon. Right now it doesn't hold up to its companion heli-only guns, the LAR or VSD.

I agree, but they're getting there ever so slowly. Didn't the zeds in Survivor Games have some new animations? I played on some server where they had modded in the legacy zombie sound effects from pre 0.63, I had forgotten how creepy they could be. Hoping for more zombie variety both in models, animations and sound effects in the future.

Thank you for this post, looking forward to seeing that 2020 roadmap! 😉 Now have a very Merry Christmas all, see you next year.

To be fair base building works okay, it is mostly the building time / raiding balancing that is completely off. As it happens it is also one of the few things devs have actually talked about recently, they said it is on top of their priority list so I think you'll see changes there in 1.07. I personally don't bother building bases since they offer little or no protection for a massive investment in time and effort, they are just not worth the hassle. I should have mentioned that, but base building has simply been so pointless for so long that I didn't even think about it. Infected have been greatly improved over the year though, but I would still like to see many more in the vanilla settings (I have them tripled on my own server without issues). The only issues I see with infected currently is how they lock on cars even after the driver has left, how they tend to fall into walls and objects when they die (so they can't be looted) and how they still spawn on the roofs of buildings a bit too often. Also I really did not like the recent change so they do not fight wolves. Awful change that should be reverted asap.

Well to be fair I fully agree it is better than ever, but that is not the same as to say there are no issues or room for improvement... I love the game as is, but the things I summarised above are things that need to be dealt with, all I'm asking for is a little bit of transparency. That they give us some info. DayZ players are a resilient breed, but the poor communication is pissing off more than a few of the most die hard fans. This should be a warning signal to the team that they need to step it up a bit.

New servers, new hives. You will start fresh in the north, nothing will transfer.

Exactly, let there be a risk but not 100% guarantee of getting sick, both from bottles you find and water in nature. Running water is always safer than still water, so drinking from a pond or swamp should have a much higher risk than when drinking from a clear stream in the mountains.

On a private server - to the server admins if there is any way to contact them. If there is not, you're out of luck. On public servers there is not much you can do at all, they are not moderated. Maybe you can make a private report on the feedback tracker, give your steam id, server name and time of the incident. Don't know if anything will be done, but it might be worth a shot if the griefer is cheating/glitching in some way or if it is of abusive nature (name calling, racism, misogyny, homophobia, that kind of thing).

Agreed. Also, hotbar slots gained from clothes/vests should only be possible to bind to items stored in the pockets of that particular garment. And it should simply not be possible to hotbar stuff in your backpack, period. You might be able to shove a shotgun into your drybag, but yanking it out in a half second to shoot some unsuspecting sucker in the face - no.

This was actually better in early 0.63 builds, don't know when and why it changed, maybe because the CoD crowd were whinging about controls being "unresponsive"... Turning when sprinting should also increase stamina drain.

This was not an issue until there was too much griefing from people shooting tents inside people's bases to despawn them with all the loot stored in them. I believe it was changed so a ruined tent doesn't despawn until it has been dismantled, or they just don't take damage from weapons. @Greensek Suggested fix: Make tents possible to slash open from the outside (like breaking down a base wall basically) with sharp tools. Once slashed open, show the model with great gaps and holes in it (=badly damaged or ruined), and make it then possible to enter from any direction. Tents are made of canvas, in no way or shape should they be possible to use as impregnable fortifications.

Yeah. In 1.06 I think the stone oven gets proper persistence (a week iirc) which makes it more viable to craft as the permanent fireplace in a base. But if I was to construct one (only did once, when it was gone two hours later I never bothered again) I'd find myself a pickaxe and go mine the stones, instead of spending hours trying to find stones on the hiking trails..

I'd like to suggest devs consider removing small stones from dynamic loot (like fruit and mushrooms) and move back to the scavenge mechanic (minus the glitch ofc) for them. This for two reasons: You can never find them when you need them and When you already have 3-4 knives you'll see small stones littering tracks and trails all over the map - where nobody ever picks them up. They are just a waste of server fps in this state. Aren't berries supposed to be dynamic loot too? I have never found one. Those are also better handled with scavenging mechanic, they wouldn't be good for more than some emergency sustenance for newspawns anyway.