Status Report - 02 Jun 2015

[SMoss 2101]

Greetings Survivors,

 

As the team continues iterating and testing on experimental while moving towards the upcoming stable update, We'll hear Lead Producer Brian Hicks discuss a bit of the methodology behind dynamic events and vehicle positions versus player spawn locations. As well, Lead Designer Peter Nespesny discusses ongoing testing work over on the experimental branch related to player data updates, and scheduling. 

 

As well, we've tossed in some links to the Development Board entry for Hermit Playstyle enhancements, and their accompanying discussion thread on the Developer forums. Check the end of the Status Report for some heart pounding Player Vs Vehicle action outside the Veresnik Military Base.

 

Contents This Week

• Development Board Spotlight
• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Peter
• Community Video: The battle of the V3S's

 

Development Board Spotlight

Back to Contents

 

Dev Update/Hicks

I'm frequently asked about player spawns, vehicle spawns, and the mentality behind where and why they are placed. I thought I would take the opportunity this week to discuss exactly that.


Player spawn points as of 0.57

For those aware of how DayZ Mod's gameplay flow operated - it was fairly simple. Players started along the coast - from Kamenka to as far as Berezino. Players progressed (for the most part) from the South - to the North. (For the most part, the North West) This gameplay required very little design side control to influence it. Natively the original Chernarus had very few buildings, and thus very few potential item spawn points (compared to say - Chernarus +). One of the initial goals of DayZ was to decentralize the flow of high value or required resources. Think medical centers, military installations, and so on.

 

When approaching player spawns - early on my approach was to try and replicate the familiarity of player spawns in the earlier versions of DayZ Mod. (DayZ Mod circa Summer 2012 was used as a touch stone) We quickly learned that this approach did not work with the massively altered layout of Chernarus. Not to mention some of the changes to key coastal areas. The next experiment we ran with player spawns was to flip the map of Chernarus, and look at the player progression as East > West. From a design perspective this approach seemed the most logical in how we wanted to layout the world, and seemed on paper like it should find strong success.

 

Never let it be said that nostalgia and familiarity has no merit.

 

Players were very vocal in their longing for the familiar DayZ spawn points, Chernogorsk and Elektrozavodsk especially. Internally we were very reluctant to change this up as the early loot spawning system did not allow us any region control, and the design of Chernarus was heavily leaning towards letting us use any building model we wanted, where it made sense. (Think Military Police buildings in Chernogorsk, Balota Barracks, etc) However, as early prototyping on a more robust control over where region-wise certain items spawned, the idea of spawning in some of those core DayZ Mod areas was revisited. Obviously some small changes would need to occur to the layout of the world, as the system would take a good deal of time to develop - so Balota and the Northeast Airfield both got a redesign - and spawns from Kamyshovo to West Chernogorsk were reintroduced.


Vehicle and Dynamic Event Spawns as of 0.57

As Dynamic Events, and Vehicles entered the equation their spawn placements were heavily influenced by where the existing player spawns lay, and how we wanted the flow of players across the map to operate. Obviously Dynamic Event types used to prototype the system were also used as a control point for "Very Rare" items - with the desired intent to ensure that in the final product, players could not farm one location across many servers to quickly gain an item the design team intended to be incredibly hard to find. (See: SVD) 


WIP Civilian Car Interior

Vehicles themselves followed a similar principle, as the prototype vehicle was a heavy vehicle designed to carry large amounts of both gear and players - the spawn positions for this were placed at the highest concentration in West / Northwest. As smaller, more civilian vehicles begin to be implemented we'll see more spawn types for them a bit closer to where player spawns are located.

I hope this brief look into the thought process behind these areas helps you to understand how they evolve a bit better. 

 

See you all in Chernarus!

 

- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

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Dev Update/Peter

Hey survivors! Long time no hear and as usual there are plenty of interesting things going on in the design department of our DayZ development team. Let's talk about some of them at least.

 

First off I would like to clarify what the cause was for the accelerated consumption of energy and water which raised many eyebrows during the last weekend. In our crusade to increase the server side performance, we implemented simple scheduler to ensure that backbone character's scripts ticks only for one character per frame. Previously there were situations in which more characters were handled during one frame which caused unnecessary drops in server performance. Apart from other things, these scripts also maintain the consumption rate of energy and water. With the very first iteration of scheduler implementation, our intention was to see the gain we can get in the live environment, as internally there was quite a difference in performance, even despite the known issue that ticks scheduling is not independent from server performance causing faster character updates in some cases compared to former tick rate to which all consumptions were balanced. So if you experienced higher consumption rates it was due to really good performance on the given server which translates into less desync issues and better responsiveness. Now the possibility of faster consumption is solved and you shouldn't worry about dying at unreasonable rates. Advanced scheduler is currently being worked on and at the end it will be completely independent from server performance.

 

Many of you noticed ongoing changes to the camera FOV (field of view) recently. Along with caping the FOV slider in settings to the new limits, the most important thing is that now the FOV values in iron sights and scopes are independent from FOV value in settings, so there will be no way to abuse the scope zooms by changing the FOV value in settings. We will elaborate more on FOV and 3PP camera later.

 

From the gameplay features perspective there are two new traps nearly ready to be tested. The tripwire trap has the possibility of having cans attached to it in order to turn it into a perimeter alarm, or grenades to stun or damage any intruders. Fishermen will be pleased to see a new fish trap made from the netting which allows players to catch fish bigger than sardines. There is also progress on cooking in the built-in fireplaces which I hope will breathe life into these sad and abandoned houses. Other long awaited features like vehicle parts or base building are shaping up nicely and I will talk about them next time.

Get used to watch your steps... see you in Chernarus folks!

 

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Back to Contents

 

Community Video: The battle of the V3S's

So, I got the opportunity to watch the latest Youtube video by superftlol. In the last 1/3 of the video, superftlol and BarelyInfected run into another pair of players at the Veresnik military compound where, low on supplies (and trucks as it turns out), the gents try to make the best out of the situation. All things considered, it's quite impressive that none of the guys seem to get significantly phased by the encounter which lasts for some 8 minutes.

 

 

If you have the time, go have a look at their Youtube accounts; they're chock-full of excellent DayZ content:

 

superftlol
BarelyInfected

 

Also, if you have a nice video containing DayZ footage you'd like to share, or if you have come across some DayZ footage from other content creators, just post it in the Gallery section of the DayZ forums and we'll happily have a look. Always looking for good stuff to share in our status reports.

 

Header image credit: SKiDROW

 

- Michael aka SMoss / Community Manager

[armaisalright 7]

Great job :D

[Noctoras 409]

Players were very vocal in their longing for the familiar DayZ spawn points, Chernogorsk and Elektrozavodsk especially.

 

 

==> I saw many games fail. Many of them for the very reason that they listened to the cries of the community. To be honest, going down this road usually never ends well. It only kills progress, so yeah, I will not applaud on this, as listening to too many voices too often is definitely equal to wasting opportunities for improvements. People are often vocal against change, and even computers or the internet have first been met with reluctance. Good that they did NOT listen. This is more a general comment, not related to this specific case.

That said, thanks for the report, glad to hear things are going well

Edited June 2, 2015 by Noctoras

[St. Jimmy 1631]

Oh yeah, house fireplaces!

 

Overall I liked this report very much.

[Rags! 1966]

I was really hoping that as the player counts rose higher and higher, we'd see spawns get far more spread out all over Chernarus instead of the clusterfucky system we have now that overcrowds new spawns into the coast. 

[xCAPx 349]

Really nice! Thx for your hard work! :)

 

From the gameplay features perspective there are two new traps nearly ready to be tested. The tripwire trap has the possibility of having cans attached to it in order to turn it into a perimeter alarm, or grenades to stun or damage any intruders. Fishermen will be pleased to see a new fish trap made from the netting which allows players to catch fish bigger than sardines. There is also progress on cooking in the built-in fireplaces which I hope will breathe life into these sad and abandoned houses.

 

I can't wait to test these amazing additions :beans:

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

Great report, thanks for info!

 

I have a lot of fun testing this Alpha and look forward to each patch with great excitement!

 

:D

[Ultimoses 110]

I was really hoping that as the player counts rose higher and higher, we'd see spawns get far more spread out all over Chernarus instead of the clusterfucky system we have now that overcrowds new spawns into the coast. 

 

By spreading the spawns all over Chernarus the devs would provoke a massive suicidefest. Everyone would be killing themselves until they got the best spawn.

[blacklabel79 949]

very nice...this shoould clarify some things :beans:

[Rags! 1966]

By spreading the spawns all over Chernarus the devs would provoke a massive suicidefest. Everyone would be killing themselves until they got the best spawn.

 

Small price to pay (and a fixable one) so that the coast isn't a clusterfuck of noobs and geared people wanting only to kill fresh spawns. 

[Tatanko 5591]

Hey SMoss, you're welcome to use the whole image for the header on the main site next time ;) Just a fence looks kinda funny, don'tcha think? :P

Edited June 2, 2015 by Tatanko

[blackberrygoo 1416]

Hey SMoss, you're welcome to use the whole image for the header on the main site next time ;) Just a fence looks kinda funny, don'tcha think? :P

Lol I think they zoomed in a bit much ! But Tatanko did you do any editing to that image or is your computer just from the year 2033?

[Tatanko 5591]

Lol I think they zoomed in a bit much ! But Tatanko did you do any editing to that image or is your computer just from the year 2033?

I don't even know how to edit. Honest. :)

[Private Evans 1303]

By spreading the spawns all over Chernarus the devs would provoke a massive suicidefest. Everyone would be killing themselves until they got the best spawn.

 

I am absolutely missing the Kamenka and Balota spawns.....In this case I would remove the barracks at Zelenogorsk and the base between Vybor and Kabanino as well as the tent camp near Myshkino...swimming fully geared should not be possible for longer distances...fishing and rubber boats should be implemented as soon as possible...

[blackberrygoo 1416]

I am absolutely missing the Kamenka and Balota spawns.....In this case I would remove the barracks at Zelenogorsk and the base between Vybor and Kabanino as well as the tent camp near Myshkino...swimming fully geared should not be possible for longer distances...fishing and rubber boats should be implemented as soon as possible...

Fishing .... Has been in for a long Time... Whatchu talking 'bout Willis? But I definitely agree we need inflatable boats (a rare find like a tent maybe) and also engine based boats and even canoes that you have to paddle (that would be my favorite).

[Ultimoses 110]

Fishing .... Has been in for a long Time... Whatchu talking 'bout Willis? But I definitely agree we need inflatable boats (a rare find like a tent maybe) and also engine based boats and even canoes that you have to paddle (that would be my favorite).

 

He probably meant fishing boats and rubber boats, not fishing as a mechanic ;)

[igor-vk 909]

When Peter writes status report allways lots of info! Cant wait for vehicle repairing!

[scriptfactory 620]

This is how you write a status report. Awesome and thank you!

[ebrim 998]

I really liked the spawn discussion. I almost feel as though the East-West movement should be brought back so that Cherno and Elektro become destinations rather than areas one just moves through after spawning. In my first couple months of play I never went to Cherno just because of its reputation. With it being a spawn area it kinda loses that mystique as my first thought when spawning anywhere is basically, "Well let's get out of here as fast as possible." Great status report and thanks!

Edited June 3, 2015 by Ebrim

[Private Evans 1303]

Fishing .... Has been in for a long Time... Whatchu talking 'bout Willis? But I definitely agree we need inflatable boats (a rare find like a tent maybe) and also engine based boats and even canoes that you have to paddle (that would be my favorite).

 

Sorry...of course fishing boats and rubber boats,,,Using boats should be the only way to transpot loot from the islands to the mainland. This and removing a few of the obsolete barracks and military camps would allow to reimplement also Balota and Kamenka player spawns....

[ebrim 998]

Actually on the subject of spawns... I noticed no mention of "naked and afraid in Vybor" in the discussion. Nor is there a Vybor spawn dot on the map. I want Dev comment on this oh so fun quirk. :D

Edited June 3, 2015 by Ebrim

[Hicks_206 (DayZ) 4297]

Actually on the subject of spawns... I noticed no mention of "naked and afraid in Vybor" in the discussion. Nor is there a Vybor spawn dot on the map. I want Dev comment on this oh so fun quirk. :D

 

I've actually spoken on this before - it is not a spawn point. If you end up there, it means there was some issue loading you into the server. 

(Vybor is the "debug" area where your character is initially loaded)

[ebrim 998]

I've actually spoken on this before - it is not a spawn point. If you end up there, it means there was some issue loading you into the server. 

(Vybor is the "debug" area where your character is initially loaded)

 

That makes a whole heap of sense. I can't help but hope that this "issue" never gets entirely resolved. Thanks for the response sir.

 

EDIT: Oh and thanks for the Skalisty Island spawn as that's a uniquely fun spot when you have a "only live off the land" policy. Though this whole new feature with fishing with nets may change the whole thing...

Edited June 3, 2015 by Ebrim

[Coheed_IV 381]

I would really like all the spawns to be on the beach. Maybe laying next to a floatation device. Would give a little context to hungry and dehydrated. Even start with soaked clothes.

 

Many players seem angry about starting out that way. Maybe giving them a reason for it would help.

 

 

 

EDIT* Also, not understanding that your energy is so low (at start), leads people to believe you need to constantly eat in dayz, which is not the case.

 

I really like starting out this way, keeps you from running long distances, and creates a first hurdle to overcome.

Edited June 3, 2015 by Coheed_IV

[ebrim 998]

I would really like all the spawns to be on the beach. Maybe laying next to a floatation device. Would give a little context to hungry and dehydrated. Even start with soaked clothes.

 

Many players seem angry about starting out that way. Maybe giving them a reason for it would help.

 

I realize not everyone is a huge fan of getting a random player character (which I would love to be enforced) but I think at least randomizing clothes could be fun and interesting. Maybe you get a dress or tracksuit or canvas pants, just a wider variety of totally random civilian clothes in various states of repair but just a simple top and pants like now.

Edited June 3, 2015 by Ebrim