Status Report - Week of 01 Dec 14

[igor-vk 909]

Status report late again.... :'(

[HardKill 0]

 

Now that 0.51 has reached stable branch we've had the pleasure of watching how the survivors of Chernarus interact and experiment with its content and mechanics. Be it player to player interaction through the extension of the meat harvesting systems, or traveling together across the map in search of a V3S. For now the team is focused on critical bugfixes and server side performance optimization for 0.52 midway through December (due to the upcoming holiday season).

 

For me, the first two quarters of 2015 hold a great deal of excitement.

 

The last year has had a large amount of work ongoing behind the scenes that effect gameplay, and playability for a significant part of the active Early Access userbase. As someone that has spent over three thousand hours in Chernarus this year I am genuinely excited for the possibilities.

 

Speaking of my time in Chernarus, as you all know the military tent (packable) was recently added into stable branch. This as I envision it is one among many possible "persistent objects" that survivors can find, and use to create their own base camp in Chernarus. Ranging from tents, to barriers, horticulture, containers, varied levels of fireplaces, and so much more - I see this feature expanding upon the initial pup tents of the mod into something that resembles a true improvised and -scalable- survivor camps.

 

Speaking of survivor communities, our Private Shard contest has concluded and while I am happy to announce the winners - I have to say there were far more entries than I had expected, and the decisions were not at all easy.

There are a lot of fantastic DayZ communities out there, and at the very least I now have a whole list of servers I need to take time to visit.

The winners, in no specific order are:

- FriendlyFlashMob

- The Midnight Crew

- TAW.net

Congratulations to the winners, make sure to reach out to support@dayzgame.com to start the process of claiming your private shard server. For those who entered and did not win, don't be sad - Of all the tons of submissions, there was not one that was not outstanding. We'll be rolling out new support and options for private shards in January, so keep your eyes open for those.

Still not a bandit.

- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

Chris / Lead Artist

"Long time, no talk! Sorry about that - but it was for good reason. Lots of things are going on with the art team!

 

Character Art:

Current character work is focused around the upcoming changes to the zombie AI and animation systems. We are re skinning the old zombies and exporting the skeletons into a new proprietary format. This has not, however, this has not held us back from creating a new batch of zombie model templates with which we can quickly create loads of new zombie types of various shapes/sizes/and ages. This is particularly important since the latest news regarding testing of the new zombies suggests we may soon be able to significantly increase the number of zombies spawning. Work in this area will be ongoing and my still take some time to finish but it should pay dividends in the long run. 

Regarding survivor clothing, we finished a bomber jacket and will be also adding a new quilted jacket, which should have fewer model clipping issues than the current bubble jacket, which it is intended to eventually replace. 

 

Weapons:

We added the AUG in a somewhat unfinished state as it currently does not work with any attachments. However, we do hope to transform it into a highly modifiable platform and adding a RIS is the first step in that direction. The model is ready and soon, perhaps, I'll release a picture as a teaser.  

We're also working on a Winchester Model 70 Alaskan which means I need to get off my butt and figure out a design for scope situation (i.e. one scope for many rifles). Also, its possible that I was told to make sure the suppressors are looking pretty so that they can be triumphantly re-added. 

Vehicles:

Now that design is settling on some technical requirements as it relates to art for vehicles, we're formulating a vehicles roadmap to plan for the number and types of vehicles that design has requested. It will be exciting to see the vehicles feature expand in the coming weeks.  We also recently added a new helicopter crash site which looks quite a bit better than the old UH60s."

Mirek / Lead Gameplay Programmer

"This week we have pushed the current work on new Infected/Animals AI into internal testing. The core AI system was developed by the Bratislava team and is also using the new animation system, which will help us to have better navigation for AI units and more complex combat systems.

For the initial implementation, there is not many new things about the infected, but it should improve better server performance and navigation. It will also allow us to have more infected on the map and to implement stealth mechanics into the game.

Current testing is aimed for performance and if everything will go fine, we're planning to push it on to experimental servers (once we’re happy with how it performs). After that we're planning to tweak stealth and combat and we would like to push it on experimental servers with 0.53 version.

We're also continuing on tweaking vehicles, improving loot distribution and loot respawning systems and other long term tasks, such as new game control mechanics and a new inventory system. Stay tuned for more details to come."

Peter / Lead Designer

 

"Long time no seen my dear survivors. I hope that surviving in Chernarus is a little bit more satisfying now with your new best friend - Praga V3S (by the way V3S is an abbreviation for the 3-ton military special). Indeed that rolled out version has rather stripped down functionality however you should enjoy the free ride while it lasts. We started to work on more complex mechanics for maintenance and repair. The battery will be most probably the next part that will be needed to get your vehicle functional so without it you can try to start the engine as many times as you want but it won’t get you anywhere, which also means that we are adding in the actual action for turning the engine over and off. If everything goes fine we will add animations for entering and exiting the vehicle as they were removed in last minute before release due some issues with action conditions that leads to undesirable results such as entering/exiting vehicle through closed doors. We are also working on setting up the inventory container for the V3S as with the current state of inventory implementation it is not trivial as it seems. New color variants of V3S are ready to go so you will be soon have the chance to drive also gray, orange and blue one. 

 

You may ask what else is being worked on not regarding the vehicles? I'm glad that I can tell you there is a bunch of upcoming stuff that was hinted a long time ago, specifically silencers, chainsaw and suicide. Recently a feature to use more shooting sounds per firearm was added thus we can now made the silencers useful and bring them back to loot spawns. It also opens possibility for crafted ones so you will be able to decide if you keep that PET bottle as a water container or made a silencer from it. The chainsaw was put on hold for few reasons that were connected to animation and melee systems but now we feel it is quite a good time to push it in the wild finally at least in some crude form. We decided to redo the way how suicide was supposed to work completely. We ended up with a fluent part of the gameplay which doesn't break up the immersion. Suicide starts with a gesture and while you are in this verbose pose you can still decide if you really want to pull the trigger and end your misery at once or leave it be and try harder to survive even with bad cards on your hand. Added value of this solution is that you can do such pose even with empty hand. 

 

Apart from all that we are still improving the horticulture with the possibility of making fertilizer while cooking is being refactored with some advanced functionality in mind for example you will be able to put your ammunition to fireplace and examine what it will do with them over time. We are also supporting the hermit way of play. In the near future you won't need to scavenge surroundings for loot and become self-sufficient if you wish and choose such a way to play. For now we will be adding new items and crafting possibilities including primitive stone blade and guts, next step will be to add bones, torch and alternative way to ignite the fire without matches.  

 

Don't forget to save some fuel for chainsaw... see you in Chernarus folks! "

 

Standup Notes for the week of 01 Dec 14

(Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)

 

Art:

• Full length ghillie

• Quilted Jacket

• Bomber Jacket

• High fidelity V3S instrument panel 

• Winchester Model 70

• Cleaver

• Hatchet

Animation:

• Support to new Zombies

• Optics

• Vehicle animations

• Chainsaw Animations

• Sword animations

 

Design:

• V3S Praga Bugfixing

• Config and scripts for suicide

• Silencer configs

• Chainsaw configs

• Loot defines for new centralized loot spawning

 

Programming:

• Critical inventory fixes

• Walkie/Talkie support/fixes

• Sound System support

• Loot distribution redesign/improvements

• Audio/Global Messaging bugfixing

• Vehicle simulation diagnostics / bugfix

• Character connection issues (protecting players from attack while logging in/before being able to move)

Hello friedns. in our game very very very. just very many cheaters