Pending Changelog: Experimental Branch: 0.42.116002

[Ministelis 118]

anyone found anything new that is not in the changelog?

[taikonaut 85]

This thread is hilarious.

 

Gives me giggles every morning.

[Ellen Ripley 71]

I wonder how many people complaining about the supposed slowness of development (Maximum) have ever had any experience developing a game at this stage? Slow vs fast is a subjective judgment. What's your frame of reference? In fact I'd love to take a count. Who on this forum has actually developed a game before? Raise your hand........

*raises his hand*

Though those were two very small projects for school about 8 and 10 years ago...

 

€: Now that I think about it, I tried to make my own 3D game once using the irrlicht engine.

I only got so far to create a small world with a character being able to move around and a 3rd person camera movement. I gave up once I started to create animations and tried to implement those. It was getting to tedious doing everything on your own. Without proper knowledge and help. And last but not least, I was way too lazy and untalented for all the work :D

 

€€: Even before that I was toying around with the RPG Maker and other Gamedevelopment programs or Modkits etc...

 

@RabidTweak below: Animations&Textures - I feel ya bro 

Edited March 13, 2014 by Ellen Ripley

[RabidTweak 14]

I wonder how many people complaining about the supposed slowness of development (Maximum) have ever had any experience developing a game at this stage? Slow vs fast is a subjective judgment. What's your frame of reference? In fact I'd love to take a count. Who on this forum has actually developed a game before? Raise your hand........

I have tried doing some game development, but like all other beginners the animations and textures just take up too much time. I do however have experience in high availability systems and I have also created a mod for minecraft which allows designing blueprints via a web based aplication and then it syncs directly to the client allowing you to build the structure provided you have the appropriate resources to build it in a designated chest. I never released it publically due to the costs involved in hosting a JAVA based web applications. IMHO I do not believe Dayz devs have backround in high transaction systems, load balancing, clustering and caching strategies, not to mention the communication protocol/mechanism. Getting comms down to under a millisecond and optimizing their workflow should have been the first step during prototyping. The most optimized code base ive seen is the one used by Minecraft, each block consists of a single byte and that single byte is used to represent every state a block can have depending on it's type.

[finnpalm 312]

I wonder how many people complaining about the supposed slowness of development (Maximum) have ever had any experience developing a game at this stage? Slow vs fast is a subjective judgment. What's your frame of reference? In fact I'd love to take a count. Who on this forum has actually developed a game before? Raise your hand........

 

I have friends in the video game industry (triple A titles), and from them I've gotten a basic understanding of it.

 

I have tried doing some game development, but like all other beginners the animations and textures just take up too much time. I do however have experience in high availability systems and I have also created a mod for minecraft which allows designing blueprints via a web based aplication and then it syncs directly to the client allowing you to build the structure provided you have the appropriate resources to build it in a designated chest. I never released it publically due to the costs involved in hosting a JAVA based web applications. IMHO I do not believe Dayz devs have backround in high transaction systems, load balancing, clustering and caching strategies, not to mention the communication protocol/mechanism. Getting comms down to under a millisecond and optimizing their workflow should have been the first step during prototyping. The most optimized code base ive seen is the one used by Minecraft, each block consists of a single byte and that single byte is used to represent every state a block can have depending on it's type.

 

And still it suffers from bad memory leaks. ;)

[Sum Ting Wong 45]

Experimental Branch:

 

Edited March 13, 2014 by Sum Ting Wong

[General Zod 1114]

So why is experimental already at 0.42 and stable is stuck at 0.35 ? 

[chrithu 59]

So why is experimental already at 0.42 and stable is stuck at 0.35 ? 

 

Because allthough they got new fixes and additions into experimental (which had them raise the version number) it isn't running stable enough by the dev's standarts yet? Thus they would not transfer the changes to stable branch?

 

That is my guess at least.

[dieq 3]

Is the Experimental acutally playable, or are there (too) many bugs? - 90 sites are way too much to read, sry :/

thx a lot 

[RabidTweak 14]

I have friends in the video game industry (triple A titles), and from them I've gotten a basic understanding of it.

 

 

And still it suffers from bad memory leaks. ;)

I haven't played it in a while, but yeah there were a couple of memory leaks back in the day. Also discovered another MMO using JAVA some time ago called Salem which was very stable and quite intuitive. Personally I have a big problem with textbook style games these days, can't stand another small reward system to keep the interest. One of the recent major culprits was Thief 4. Indy and or Sandbox games are rising rapidly in popularity due to the repetitive nature of the larger titles (this is what ive noticed personally on steam, but may be completely wrong about this). I have lost interest in the pretty pictures and really miss the oldschool titles like Arcanum, Jagged Alliance 2, Deus Ex 1 etc. The remakes all look pretty but only offer half the gameplay :(. Tom Clancies the Division dev team is also currently focussing on platform independance which surely will comprimise the gameplay, but lets see what happens I geusse...

[crazzekiff 93]

Is the Experimental acutally playable, or are there (too) many bugs? - 90 sites are way too much to read, sry :/

thx a lot 

Try it. For me personally there's way too much desync and rubberbanding so I'm on stable and wait for the next update. And yeah, there are a lot of more bugs on experimental, but that's why it's called experimental ;)

 

[sniperdoc 251]

I'm not surprised that they don't hang out here and sing Koum-bah-yah. If I was them I'd avoid this forum like the plague.

 

Sing Kou-Bah-Yah...? For sure, not a good place to hang out with all the negativity being thrown at them, a lot of it unnecessary too...

HOWEVER, it is their official forum and some people don't do reddit or twitter (such as me). One would also figure that the most recent and most valid information would be located here, on their "official" forums. A place where they can write up an update, sticky it, and LOCK IT, so that it doesn't get buried.

 

Personally, I didn't know Dean's first and last name, nor Brians... nor should I have to worry about it. I understand they are the brains behind the operation and I understand that some people feel the need to have a "personalized touch"... but I'm sorry, it's a job. (I'm trying to make a point, bear with me) I don't really care who built my car, or my TV. If it is for entertainment, and the game/movie/book is fun and enjoyable enough, I"ll check out the creds to see who made it and will look forward to future work by said individuals.

 

So, for me, these twitter and reddit updates have no value to me. I don't care who they are conversing with and are throwing snarky comments at... it is... a job. This is a business. They make games and I buy them. So, in that sense, I guess I expect actual development notes and updates on the forum, not just links thrown up by other users/players of DayZ. See what I'm getting at? (not mean snarky or in a mean way, just asking if I was clear)

 

There's a point when someone is being professional and a point where they are not. And they're going borderline non-professional. I work as an IT Director for an environmental consulting firm... so for me, I don't care to have to check 3 different sites (two of which I find annoying - twitter and reddit) for some official information from the developers. For me, the fact that their own OFFICIAL site has the least recent information... a little of a let-down and really shows how un-professional they are.

 

 

I haven't played it in a while, but yeah there were a couple of memory leaks back in the day. Also discovered another MMO using JAVA some time ago called Salem which was very stable and quite intuitive. Personally I have a big problem with textbook style games these days, can't stand another small reward system to keep the interest. One of the recent major culprits was Thief 4. Indy and or Sandbox games are rising rapidly in popularity due to the repetitive nature of the larger titles (this is what ive noticed personally on steam, but may be completely wrong about this). I have lost interest in the pretty pictures and really miss the oldschool titles like Arcanum, Jagged Alliance 2, Deus Ex 1 etc. The remakes all look pretty but only offer half the gameplay  :(. Tom Clancies the Division dev team is also currently focussing on platform independance which surely will comprimise the gameplay, but lets see what happens I geusse...

 

You are so dead on... I think game development has suffered. It's all about the bling nowadays, little to no story or character development or you get indy knockoff's off of games that were highly successful. It's a travesty honestly and shows that a lot of creativity has gone down the dump in the bigger publishing houses.

There are a few indy titles out there that have done a great job. But lately its big companies riding coat tails of previous products, or companies sucking the life-blood out of franchises. EA at one point was really doing a  good job with new creative content... Mirror's Edge... Deadspace... Mass Effect... But even those games are getting the life-blood sucked out of them and Deadspace 3 and Mass Effect 3 are a great example of a good title gone bad. Then EA went down the route of doing browser based gaming and killing off top notch titles like Ultima. So, creativity has really taken a step to the side, at least with big publishers. I really tired of BIoshock Infinite, Dishonored was a Bioshock/Thief clone and really drug on... hell a lot of the bigger titles like that... I got bored. It seemed like it was the same content, just prettier and wrapped up in a different wrapping. Metro 2033... re-wrapped S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I mean the list goes on and on...

There are definitely some indies out there doing a great job. The guy that created FEZ, great idea for a game. Rimworld, another great idea and upcoming title. Then there's Brothers, Bastion, and few others that really are masterpieces in creativity. FTL... Minecraft (even though this whole beta for life thing is getting to me)... Terraria, Gunpoint, Braid, 

even a game like Audiosurf... Amnesia: The Dark Descent!!! Excellent game... Antichamber...

DayZ is the one game that I feel brought something different. It's not single player, but then that's the whole fun of it. The competition with other players... the adrenaline rush because you don't want to lose your decked out M4 or Mosin... or in the future, your helicopter... :) So, DayZ has been one of my mainstays for sure late.

Edited March 13, 2014 by sniperdoc

[dgeesio 1034]

This thread is hilarious.

 

Gives me giggles every morning.

this thread and many patch threads make me sad each time i come in to see nothing is going or as fast as it should.

 

i come in every day with just a hope that something of real worth happening is here, i look and all i see is just uneventful.

 

 

as said so details on how core features are going not small items.

 

fps is about same and we have even got things working or in game like vehicles and or items which will worsen performance.

 

 

are we waiting for a something which just wont materialize ?

 

 

out of last few patches i cant think of anything much thats made me or people want to play standalone. different hats (yes i know the team all dont just sit making hats)

 

but in last two months how has this game really moved on ? core features still arnt in zombies arnt much better no vehicles or evn a little preview of a skin or item.

Edited March 13, 2014 by dgeesio

[Guest]

He's just saying the "the moment they have" a fix, they will notify us, not that they have one at the moment. They're still working on it as far as what I can tell from Twitter, Reddit, etc.

 

Oops, you'r right. I misunderstood that, sorry - wasn't my intention to spread rumours.

[General Zod 1114]

Because allthough they got new fixes and additions into experimental (which had them raise the version number) it isn't running stable enough by the dev's standarts yet? Thus they would not transfer the changes to stable branch?

 

That is my guess at least.

For more than a month they can't get anything to be stable enough ? We used to have new path every week or so and now suddenly nothing can be done in this much time ?

[finnpalm 312]

Jagged Alliance 2

 

Oooo, Jagged Alliance 2 is one of my favourites. I have a rerelease by Medallion for later Win OS's, which include the only official expansion as well. Always keep coming back to that game. So good.

 

A place where they can write up an update, sticky it, and LOCK IT, so that it doesn't get buried.

 

Good point. Maybe if they had an update thread that was locked, where they post the updates, and a separate thread where we could discuss the updates? I think that might be better.

 

 

For more than a month they can't get anything to be stable enough ? We used to have new path every week or so and now suddenly nothing can be done in this much time ?

 

Exactly. And they outlined why they had trouble getting it to stable on reddit, which has been linked above. They encountered severe problems that they've been working hard to solve, so that they can get the patch to stable. Would you say it's a good way of showing appreciation of their hard work by claiming they're not working hard enough?

 

Just because we get used to something doesn't mean we're entitled to it, or can demand it. Sometimes stuff just don't work out. Be a little flexible and understanding, people.

Edited March 13, 2014 by Strawman

[General Zod 1114]

Exactly. And they outlined why they had trouble getting it to stable on reddit, which has been linked above. They encountered severe problems that they've been working hard to solve, so that they can get the patch to stable. Would you say it's a good way of showing appreciation of their hard work by claiming they're not working hard enough?

 

Just because we get used to something doesn't mean we're entitled to it, or can demand it. Sometimes stuff just don't work out. Be a little flexible and understanding, people.

Calm your tits, I'm asking, not just that I'm asking politely. Not everyone has twitter or checks reddit daily, there is no information here on the official forum, and frankly it would be nice if they posted here too. Because it might look a little worrying if not one of 7 new version, is making it to stable. 

What the f... is wrong with you people ? Every time someone is less than brown nosing the devs you throw a shit storm at them. 

[finnpalm 312]

Calm your tits, I'm asking, not just that I'm asking politely. Not everyone has twitter or checks reddit daily, there is no information here on the official forum, and frankly it would be nice if they posted here too. Because it might look a little worrying if not one of 7 new version, is making it to stable. 

What the f... is wrong with you people ? Every time someone is less than brown nosing the devs you throw a shit storm at them. 

 

Did my reply sound impolite? If so, I'm sorry. I answered your question. Didn't mean to sound snarky.

 

You don't have to "have twitter" to read tweets online. You don't have to check reddit daily, since the relevant post was linked above as I said. Yes, it would be nice if they posted here too.

 

I think you're overreacting calling my reply a shitstorm. Although I do apologize if it came of as snarky.

 

EDIT: Maybe the last part (that wasn't directed at you personally) was the problem. I can see how that was poorly formulated by me.

Edited March 13, 2014 by Strawman

[Sanitöter 59]

i dont like waiting

[theirongiant 200]

HOWEVER, it is their official forum and some people don't do reddit or twitter *snip*

very much this, there is going to be 2 questions on everybody's lips all the time, when's the next patch and what's going to be in it. Even if the answer is "dunno":"dunno" there should be a consistent place I can bookmark and check rather than an optimum new media coverage strategy that I need to employ. imo of course.

[sniperdoc 251]

For more than a month they can't get anything to be stable enough ? We used to have new path every week or so and now suddenly nothing can be done in this much time ?

 

 

Calm your tits, I'm asking, not just that I'm asking politely.

Uuuh... read your above statement first buddy... that is called an expectation and your question read very much like you're coming from a place of entitlement and was NOT polite at all. If YOU spent the time to actually read the forum, instead of just popping on here with expectations you'd have found out that they're still squashing 2 major bugs and that it wasn't until recently that they found the "blocking" bug. So, your expectations are not the devs, nor any of our responsibilities to take care of.

So, Straw's comments were well within reason and I don't think he was being snarky at all, imo.

 

I agree with you wholeheartedly that DayZ staff are neglecting to update the forum as much as they are on Twitter and Reddit. I don't do either of the two latter options and to me it is very unprofessional that they are not updating their own official forum with the most recent information. :(

One of the issues is that they do not have a daily FORUM update thread to let us know what it is that is causing the hangup. People do have expectations, and I can understand that... so their failure to update the forum with the latest updates, and relying on other users to link in information on a 90 page thread... yeah... that's a BAAAD idea and really they're creating as much of a problem as we are.

Single forum area, for devs and mods only to respond to, readable by all, sticky threads, give us daily info if necessary to let us know what is going on and why there's a hangup. They're doing it on twitter having to respond to so many arsehat questions, so why not in a dedicated patch update thread where they wouldn't even have to deal with responding to people. Just pop in a who/what/when/where/why and you're done. People read it and can see it without having to dig through 90 pages of nonsense.

Edited March 13, 2014 by sniperdoc

[warriortyr 17]

Is the Experimental acutally playable, or are there (too) many bugs? - 90 sites are way too much to read, sry :/

thx a lot 

It is playable but desync and rubber banding sucks and joining servers does not work properly (living in Germany, so i get pings around 50ms on German servers but I can't join one because of "wait for host" freeze --> playing on finnish or swedish servers works..)

 

 The "biggest" change is the new melee system, which is kind of ... better ... or just... different:

 

[IronCross 78]

--from Rocket's twitter, I'm sure it was posted but if you're bitching read this.

 

Anyone who wonders why the patch has not been moved to stable only needs to play on the experimental and you can see the reasons there. If you are disappointed the update is not on stable, simply go play on experimental and you can see these changes. You also quickly see issues as to why it is not out on stable.

Believe me: we want this patch out much more than the community. Because continuing like this is a majorheadache for development as branching and merging becomes an absolute nightmare. This is occurring at the same time as us finishing our planning/roadmap process and starting up our new feature scrums. However, this desire doesn't change the fact that for the patch to be pushed onto stable we must not introduce new serious, game-breaking bugs.

Currently we are tracking two new major issues that we see as being blockers:

Invisible Characters/Zombies

We believe this is caused by them becoming stuck in geometry on client(s) and therefore rejecting new updates. In order to fix this our QA has been going back through different build revisions and checking to see if this occurs so we could isolate the exact point in development it started occurring. That was an extremely labor intensive process and through this we managed to narrow it down to an exact revision that caused the issue.

Now that we have found out exactly when that occurred, we start to look into why that happened. Once we fully understand the problem we can design a solution. The problem is that these are not simple issues or bugs, they are complex bugs that can result from a variety of factors. They can be caused by multiple issues, or simply just a symptom of a much wider problem. They are also often very hard to reproduce, and are exceptionally difficult to produce estimates for on fixing.

Network pauses roughly every 30 seconds

This recently appeared on experimental, and has been noticed by many. What happens is regularly the server stops sending updates for a second or so, which is caused by the server hard-locking for some reason. It lasts only a second before the server starts sending updates again. It looks like desync or rubber-banding for the client.

The current most popular theory for this is that the Experimental Server Architecture itself is causing the issue. I.e. the Experimental "Hive" central database simply cannot handle the load, and therefore when a players is killed or dies, the updates are delayed and the server is forced to stop and wait for the central server to respond. I'm vastly oversimplifying the issue but I am sure you get the point. We're again testing this in detail with our 30 fulltime, onsite, QA staff. It's a huge job and it's been a major effort.

Edit: Network Pauses... bug has been confirmed as being related simply to the Experimental database not handling the load. The experimental database is not configured for load balancing and is run on simple hardware so it simply cannot respond to servers fast enough. This leaves us with one blocking issue, the first issue. We have a full reproduction and we know the commit that caused it. It's related to network messaging changes. Simply reverting it will probably not work, because the change is complex.

Edited March 13, 2014 by theroad64

[Karakoz 141]

I have a lot of desync on stable since monday too. On some servers I can't even take my weapon, and same for one of my friends.

[sniperdoc 251]

Imagine that... guy trying to get full swings in enclosed spaces and he's having problems... hmmmmmm... doesn't take much of a brain to figure out there's going to be problems... lol