Status Report - 24 May 2016

[SMoss 2101]

 

Afternoon Survivors,

It's that time of the month where Brian, Peter, and Viktor give us some info on the current state of 0.60 on Experimental branch as well as a bit of extra info on upcoming work of course.

 

Contents This Week

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Community Spotlight

 

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

As many of you may already know, the team has been hard at work on several major blocking bugs with the 0.60 experimental build - specifically with the login process of players to a server. We're all just as equally frustrated by this as the rest of you - but let's focus on what is new since our last Status Report:

- Error Messages when picking up any item with attachments that has been placed on the ground, and then moved to inventory: Fixed
- Player Item Loss when logging off while holding backpack: Fixed
- Several server crashes causing VERY short server uptime: Current known server crashes are fixed
- Client crashes when navigating certain coastal cities: Reproducible client crashes related to rendering are fixed
- Weapon Attachments twitching randomly out of sync with weapon and player hands: In progress
- Client stuck on black screen after launching PC in some configurations: 50% of known causes are fixed, the remaining are in progress
- Players seeing other players stuck in climbing animation in some situations: Reproducible known causes have been fixed
- Client crash after exiting to Main Menu in some configurations: Fixed
- Character unable to see their clothing after initial spawn and login: Fixed
- Client Crash when connecting to a new server: Current known causes of this issue are fixed
- Roads visible through some objects: Fixed
- Characters prevented from logging in once connected: Fix pending testing

Now, be careful not to get too excited. We still need to push the latest test build to experimental to see what issues are still present, and discover any new issues. However, in addition to the bug fixes listed above we have also made changes in the areas of:

- Configured new buildings for loot spawning
- Tweaks to percentage chance for random items in civilian inventory has been modified
- Dynamic Event weapons have been temporarily moved to spawn in all applicable military structures
- Randomized loot on infected (likely to end up in .61)
- Modifications to jamming functionality (we've dialed this down dramatically pending functional changes for future builds to allow us to attain desired behavior)

Beyond this, the Engine programming team have been working on some outstanding new things for post .60 in way of:

- Shadows from dynamic lights
- Replacement of legacy particle system (Smoke, Debris, Blood, Freezing Breath, Fires, etc)

Lastly for this Status Report, we should be ready to push a new experimental build soon and I'd like to take the time to thank the over 196,000 unique players who have contributed to the testing of experimental branch build 0.60. Without all of your help this would undoubtedly be a much longer, and less enjoyable experience. Hats off!

0.60 Build Milestone Goals:

- New Renderer implementation: Implemented and Bugfixing underway
- Randomized Attachments & ItemsRandom: Implemented
- New Reload Mechanics: Implemented and modification underway
- 60 Player-per-instance: Implemented and pending final call on server performance

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

 

Dev Update/Peter

There was a buzz in the community about dead bodies and how long they should stay on a server. Coincidentally we were dealing with the design on dead bodies a few days ago, so I would take the opportunity to write down a short summary of what we settled on and what will hopefully be implemented to enrich player experiences, as death is an inseparable part of DayZ.

First off I want to emphasize that the current 10 minutes timer for survivors, after which their dead bodies are removed from the server, is temporary and it's set like that because of two reasons - avoiding unnecessary burden of server performance and making metagaming of getting your loot back a bit more inconvenient. In an ideal world where dead bodies don't drain server performance, they should remain at their positions until server restart. To achieve this, a dead body can't simply be switched to a static object since it was positioned by ragdoll, so it will look very unnatural, not to mention that survivors can have countless combinations of gear and equipment attached to them, so it's nearly impossible to prepare corresponding objects beforehand or bake them on demand. Server performance will be stressed to a minimum once we'll be able to turn off all unnecessary components like physics, AI, and others after death, so it will allow us to stretch the lifetime of dead bodies to the maximum reasonable value. Later, the central loot economy will help us fight the metagaming I mentioned at the beginning by removing items when they reach the end of their lifetime, which can be changed on demand.

However, having dead bodies scattered around the environment wouldn't be very meaningful unless there is an important part allowing you to create stories or make decisions based upon them. It's our intention to make everything as graphical as possible and we also want this to be the case for dead bodies of animals and especially other survivors. Visual observation of dead bodies can give you answers for questions such as, what happened at a specific location, or to evaluate the level of potential risk in any given area. All this should be indicated from easily readable facts like how that being died, how long ago it died, and what actions were performed on its dead body. After death, a body can be found in different states which are visualized by small or complete changes of appearance. Obviously actions like skinning a body should leave a pile of unusable remnants to be removed later, such as burying it with the proper tools on the right surface thus creating a built up heap of soil. More interesting is how a dead body changes its stages to reflect how long it's been laying around and how it affects interactions and other mechanics. Flies, and later on decaying flesh, helps you to estimate the timeframe and warn you that meat collected after skinning will be rotten, and it will be better if you disinfect looted items from a corpse before using them. Decals, which are generated from bullet and/or melee hits, stay on dead bodies, and coupled with blood puddles from severe bleeding, these unveil the probable cause of death. Note that all changes to character appearance acquired while alive, like beards, bloody hands, and others are visualized in the dead state too.

It's much needed to keep dead bodies present as long as possible, same as the added functionality of them. I'm eager to see how their behavior over time changes gameplay and player experiences by building a more believable world and making DayZ's atmosphere even more tense at the end.

Bodies fill the fields I see... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 

Dev Update/Viktor

In the past week we have started to process recently captured data. New animations will include missing parts of wounded character set, animations for attaching vehicle parts and more infected attack variations. New reloads and animations for weapons include some Trumpet, SVD and MKII anims.

Regarding the new player controller we are discussing how to improve the camera itself for first and third person view as well. Character movement now has new settings options which give us better control over transitions when changing speeds and directions. This all brings us closer to more responsive and better player character which hopefully everyone can enjoy in near future.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

 

Community Spotlight

A couple of weeks have passed by now with 0.60 on Experimental branch, and on the DayZ forums I found the following piece of 0.60 footage made by Boydy:

The video is part of an interaction series that Boydy has been working on for quite some time now, and there are some real gems squared away in his channel library. I had the good luck of getting to play with Boydy for a while a couple of months ago, and if you ever get the chance to do so as well, I guarantee you will enjoy it; Boydy is a legit dude!

If you wish to get in contact with Boydy or if you would like to follow him as he uploads new content, you can do so via the following channels: Twitch, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook.

Since the release of 0.60 on Experimental branch we've already had loads of good bugs reported on the DayZ forums, and as Brian mentions, it is an immense help from you all! In this regard we're happy to announce that we have a new bug tracker up and running at the following location: http://feedback.bistudio.com/. It is quite a bit different from the old feedback tracker and if you need a bit of help navigating, there's a short tutorial available for those of you that have the time to help out with testing: http://forums.dayz.com/topic/232903-new-feedback-tracker/. All the help you all have provided really means the world to us!

Header image credit: ⎛⎝ProTos1080p⎠⎞

- SMoss / Community Manager

[igor-vk 909]

Ideas for corpses are great. In dayz sub-mods it was possible to study corpse a find out how he died (bullet or zombie ). Can't wait for new infected animations, that was kinda neglected 

[odin_lowe 3686]

Really looking forward to see the new dynamic shadows and lighting system. Does this mean we'll finally be able to light more than 4 light sources in an area? That would be great! For independence day last year, Tatanko, Bleedout Bill and I tried to light up the town hall in Novo, but at the very beginning we knew we couldn't do it right, as only 4 light sources were visible at any time, even though we had lit up about 20 of them in specific locations to get the red, white and blue desired.

Can't wait for next exp build to go online!

Keep it up Devs! And thanks for the great work!!

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

2 hours ago, SMoss said:

-snip-

Bodies fill the fields I see... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

-snip-

Thanks for all the hard work devs/all!!

Maybe we need the queue system earlier than .61 to solve the login problem for .60?

Edited May 24, 2016 by ☣BioHaze☣

[blackberrygoo 1416]

Can't wait to see that dead body stuff mentioned , it's going to be so story Iike and intense !

[tenmbits 2]

Can't wait to see the renderer to be improved even further! Just a question Brian, willl there be transition to high resolution(same as gamefiles) textures within Beta?

[BeefBacon 1185]

I'd love to see more about decals and shadows from dynamic lights. Will these shadows be impossible to disable? I certainly hope so, since keeping them off would only confer an advantage.

Are we talking actual, proper decals or the Arma 2 method of simply changing the player's skin so it has blood on it? Will there be a decal limit? I assume there'll be bullet decals, will we have blood decals? How long will they last? I'd love to visit a military base that has evidence of a recent - or not so recent - fight.

[Blafirelli 39]

Yay, shadows! (after like 15 years it became standard but still)

[nl 986]

I wonder if it would be a good idea (and technically possible) to make your own body invisible for just yourself? It could prevent meta gaming and is actually more realistic because how could you ever visit your own body (religious folk may have a different opinion). Of course if you play with a buddy/group they could still secure items for you but that is the same now anyway.

[EdStaffordZombie 63]

This SR is wonderfull! so informative and interesting. I also love the "resolved" tickets for some issues. The only thing that I miss a little bit is a more detailed info regarding the player controller, but from my understanding it is in development right now (according to the viktor words).

Nice work guys, keep with SRs like this one!
Bestz!
 

[veshcula 13]

this makes me wonder.. '- Replacement of legacy particle system (Smoke, Debris, Blood, Freezing Breath, Fires, etc)' 

how will this look in the future? red stains on clothing.. (that can only be removed by 'washing' your clothes with improv. soap (human lard?) in a pond? or near a waterpump?
since dayz has nu running water in the game... like a river or waterfall somewhere up north.. 

having your clothes ruined is one thing.. but if you can get a splash of blood on your clothes.. that would make for great RP..

you kill someone.. that belongs to your group.. because reasons.. and the other group members spot blood splatters on your clothing or a significant red stain of blood, how did that happen? (first obvious question) and where is person X? (whoops now you're screwed...)

now all we need... is the mother of all doomsday explosives.. 'pipe bomb' 

gunpowder from bullets cylindrical shaped tube (from construction sites?) buckshot pallets, piece of cord for the fuse, and duct tape

Edited May 25, 2016 by veshcula

[ColdAtrophy 1850]

18 hours ago, SMoss said:

Dev Update/Viktor  New reloads and animations for weapons include some Trumpet, SVD and MKII anims.

What's a MKII?

[igor-vk 909]

Maybe new upcoming "Scout" sniper rifle

 

[Buakaw 274]

Quote

- Tweaks to percentage chance for random items in civilian inventory has been modified

What does this mean? Civilian inventory as in.. civilian spawnpoints? The inventory of civilian clothes? Or civilian wardrobes?

Edited May 25, 2016 by Buakaw

[bingo_fuel 205]

On 24.5.2016 at 7:14 PM, SMoss said:

Later, the central loot economy will help us fight the metagaming I mentioned at the beginning by removing items when they reach the end of their lifetime, which can be changed on demand.

I don't really understand how the CLE can help against picking up your stuff again? Any ideas?

[philippj 103]

2 hours ago, bingo_fuel said:

I don't really understand how the CLE can help against picking up your stuff again? Any ideas?

maybe removing the items in the dead players inventory instead of removing the body itself?

[bingo_fuel 205]

15 hours ago, .freaK said:

maybe removing the items in the dead players inventory instead of removing the body itself?

Yeah that could be it! It would be great to have a SR with more a detailed explanation what the CLE does in this case.

[St. Jimmy 1631]

18 hours ago, bingo_fuel said:

I don't really understand how the CLE can help against picking up your stuff again? Any ideas?

Yeah. Quick solution would be a ban from the server you die for the amount of time it takes gear from the body to get cleaned. It helps so you could maybe even see your body later but naturally stuff is wiped out. So no need to wait for a complete body wipe.

[philippj 103]

17 hours ago, St. Jimmy said:

Yeah. Quick solution would be a ban from the server you die for the amount of time it takes gear from the body to get cleaned. It helps so you could maybe even see your body later but naturally stuff is wiped out. So no need to wait for a complete body wipe.

So everytime you die you would have to change servers?

How should that work with private hives, moded servers or basically the server you are on with your friends? Being forced to change a server would be horrible

[ValentinBk (DayZ) 60]

Quote

Decals, which are generated from bullet and/or melee hits, stay on dead bodies, and coupled with blood puddles from severe bleeding, these unveil the probable cause of death. Note that all changes to character appearance acquired while alive, like beards, bloody hands, and others are visualized in the dead state too.

I haven't played the game in a long while, did it get response mechanics (such as the blood puddles and decals) mentioned in the report or is it supposed to be added sometime in the future?

[St. Jimmy 1631]

6 hours ago, .freaK said:

So everytime you die you would have to change servers?

How should that work with private hives, moded servers or basically the server you are on with your friends? Being forced to change a server would be horrible

That's called hardcore ;)

You can still play the game because there are so many servers, so the punishment is pretty minimal. Of course that shouldn't be applied in experimental and shouldn't be enabled too early in the development because of bugs and vulnerability.

[Arthur Dubrovka 376]

Pls  make bodies drag and dropable!

This would be sooooo awesome!

Edited May 29, 2016 by imunone