Status Report 12/6/2016

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

*Here's the status report for others like myself who DO NOT check dayz.com and have for years simply followed the forum version of the SR.

Baty is under the weather so I hope this thread will suffice!

 

Status Report 12/6/2016

 

Greetings, survivors!

We have Brian and Mirek on this week, mostly covering the recent improvements in server performance and our final push to have 0.61 out on Stable before Christmas. Additionally, Brian provides a bit of an insight on the intended DayZ survival experience, we have some exciting news regarding vehicles on Experimental branch and share several forums threads that we think you'll find interesting!

Contents This Week

Dev Update/Hicks

Dev Update/Mirek

Handpicked: DayZ Forums News

Community Spotlight

 

Dev Update/Hicks

As many of you may know, we're in an Exp/Unstable branch iteration phase - on the road to moving 0.61 to Stable branch. So, this Status Report I'm going to break my part into two. First part covering where we are with 0.61, and what our current critical issues for moving to Stable branch are. For the second part, I'll talk briefly about my opinion on 0.61 as a build and our goals with it as an experience.

Now that all of our milestone goals for 0.61 have been implemented, we're currently in a rapid iteration phase. For those testing on Exp/Unstable branch this means a lot of things can change quickly, not to mention break. 

Over the last few builds, we've been focused on both improving server performance and trying to tackle issues that were caused as a byproduct of work on optimizing client network traffic. While that may be frustrating for those of you excited to try out 0.61, it is absolutely critical for the development process that we are able to iterate, and test these changes under a larger load than internal QA resources allow. 

Additionally, a good deal of the critical issues we've been seeing on the Exp/Unstable branch servers simply do not reproduce internally. Thus, us being able to test through the Unstable branch, and provide the team with the critical crashdumps, debug logs, and profiler data is is absolutely required for 0.61 to get to Stable branch on Steam as soon as possible. 

So, the next time you run across a server crash, frustrating bug, or gamebreaking issue while testing on Exp/Unstable - do your best not to get frustrated, head over to the feedback tracker and give as much data as you are able to. Every ticket and comment on the feedback tracker helps, even if you might not feel like it does!

For Stable blocking issues, we're currently tracking:

Characters twitching/stuttering when crossing rubble/bodies

Client Crash(es)

Some structures not having proper shadows

Items stuck in hands

Server crash(es)

VOIP Too Loud

Infected Vocalizations too loud

Naked Characters / Silent Gunshots

Mirek has some fascinating insight into some of the issues we've discussed above, as well as where we are with improving the vehicle simulation - I encourage you to scroll down and read what he has to say, the information is critical to understanding what is going on with the gameplay programming team (which has a large impact on how DayZ plays!)

For the second part of my text this week, I'd like to comment on the swing towards survival with 0.61.

It is no secret that DayZ set out to be a punishing survival title from the start of the project. Much of the mechanics that would drive this type of experience have been in prototyped phase, with the full functionality of them dependant upon technology from the engine, optimization to make them a threat, and so on - because of that, for the majority of our development period they have had little impact on gameplay unless you intentionally sought them out (or a bug related to them caused larger issues, such as the hyperthermia issue on 0.60). 

With this side of the game being present in such a state, most of DayZ's gameplay throughout the Early Access phase has centered around social interaction, and gunplay. With little incentive, or push for anything else to occur. As bugfixing, feature implementation, and optimization has allowed us to bring some of these mechanics more to the forefront of gameplay, I fully expect the large portion of the Early Access playerbase that might not keep up to date on development to be surprised, and even push back on these changes once they hit stable branch. 

I'm fully aware many of you love DayZ for the action you experience when you get into a gunfight, or the interesting (and often hillarious) social situations that player interaction creates. I do not want you to feel ignored. Everything in DayZ should come with a cost, be it struggling to survive, choosing to make a beeline for the closest military base looking to pick a fight, or creating a farming commune on the coast. 

The closer we move to Beta, and Early Access release this will become more apparent, and we will of course ensure that all styles of gameplay are as viable as possible, assuming you make the correct decisions to overcome the environment that seeks to kill you. Be it through starvation, infection, murder, the cold, or being eaten alive by wolves.

Excited as we are by the slow but inevitable progression to that unforgiving survival experience we set out to create back in 2013, we're all very aware (as you all should be) - that this is a development build. Many critical pieces to the final puzzle are still missing, and there will be bugs, but we hope that you find these changes compelling, and enjoy your experience inside Chernarus even more.

I've rambled on enough for this Status Report. I'm sure you all wanted to see more fancy screenshots or gifs - but these things slow down as the team wraps up what is in 0.61, and starts to focus on bugfixing in order to get to stable branch. Once we get past 0.61 and can start talking about 0.62, I'm sure we'll have more eye candy for you.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Back to Contents

 

Dev Update/Mirek

Last week, we were mostly focused on server performance improvements. We rewrote the updating strategy of network objects and the results are pretty good. This part is now about five times faster. On the other hand, it reintroduced the "naked characters" bug.

Things like these can happen quite often, because this mechanism is very complex. As server performance is one of the major blockers of stable release, we had to release it into Experimental branch as soon as possible, so there wasn't much time to test it internally. I hope you won't get angry when things like these happen on Experimental branch.

Another bug we found is that Central Economy (CE) limits for infected count didn't work properly, so too many infected were spawned over the entire map. This slows down server performance too much and it's the source of incorrectly updated character modifiers, or the "persistent unconsciousness".

We also decreased the simulation rate of distant AI units, so this should help the server performance a lot, and it should also lead to a general decrease in network traffic. All of these fixes are scheduled for merge into Experimental branch this week (it's possible that some of them are already merged by the time you're reading this).

Now about vehicles. In the last status report, I wrote about two blocking issues. The broken simulation of more players in a vehicle is now resolved, but because the server is now authoritative over player's position and movement, new small issue appeared. You won't be able to see some animations (like head movement) of remote players sitting in the vehicle. We're not planning to fix this this in 0.61 - we will be taking another look at this issue when the new player controller is merged in, because we want to avoid doing things twice.

Client side correction still doesn't work well and I'm not sure how long it will take to fix this.

Also, because we would like to release Stable build before Christmas, we will release it without vehicles. We will, however, continue releasing Experimental builds with vehicles included, when they get ready.

We've also made other vehicle simulation improvements, which will hit Experimental. Here's the short list of changes:

dashboards now reacts to switching vehicle lights

player can use zoom when sitting in the passenger seat

engine animation now correctly reacts to all user actions, damage etc.

cars can be drown in any water, not only in the sea

working particles from wheels

updated suspension physics and collisions

cars can now drive over small obstacles based on wheel's radius

suspension along with wheels now correctly reacts to land surface

The second part of my status report will be dedicated to infected. We are working closely with designers to tweak them a little bit for 0.61, mainly improving their movement and attacking. Pushing won't be solved, as there is still the issue with AI units having a new physical controller built on bullet physics, while players use the legacy Arma collision detection.

In this case, what happens is that infected penetrates into the player (because it's unable to find a collision), but player detects that he's in collision with something and moves away from the collision. We won't be able to resolve this without the new player controller, so we're trying to at least improve it by tweaking some movement parameters.

This is all for now from me.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer

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Handpicked: DayZ Forums News

Our official DayZ community forums provide the easiest way to discuss all things DayZ. The discussion there is free of the usual constraints of other channels, like the 140 character limit on Twitter or the occasionally questionable voting mechanism on Reddit. The forums have a solid user base and are also the place where developers have been staying in touch with survivors basically ever since the early DayZ Mod days.

For these reasons, we'd love to drive most of the discussions there - both those where members of the dev team engage with you, the DayZ community, and those where you simply talk to fellow survivors.

Supporting the effort to keep the forums a busy place, we'll do our best to handpick some of the new content from the forums for each new Status Report, and highlight interesting posts or threads created in the past two weeks as a recommended reading material. Occasionally, we will also open a discussion on a topic we want to hear you opinions on.

Mind you, there will likely be exceptions to the schedule: Status Reports often turn into truly massive behemoths already, and development updates should always be the main focus here. Then, sometimes, people simply get too passionate about one or two particular threads and just won't let go of them - and so we usually don't need to drive additional traffic to such threads.

But now, let's get to it, here's what's been happening on the official DayZ community forums lately.

Friday Experimental Build Thread

As you probably know, the 0.61 build we deployed on Friday suffered from some serious server crashing, and the discussion that unfolds on the first 5 or 6 pages in the related thread is a nice practical example of the nature of the Experimental/Unstable branch of DayZ. Often, even if you can't really play the game properly, you may have actually helped the development team (and we appreciate that a lot!):

 

Read the thread »
 

While in this particular case, we've already gathered enough data about the crashes and our Deployment Engineer David sacrificed a bit of his weekend to revert the Experimental branch to previous build, it should be expected that Experimental builds may stay all over the place like that for some time. If that happens, we'd like to kindly ask for your patience, ask you to read this post over here to understand the nature of the Experimental branch, and ultimately ask you to switch over to Stable if you just want to play DayZ.

 

0.61 Stable Loot Thread

Loot has always been a massive discussion topic in the community, and even internally. cs_wolf has started a thread where he's expressing his own hopes for the vanilla loot distribution of 0.61 on Stable, and while our design team is getting a clearer idea of where the vanilla experience is going themselves, feel free to fantasize about your own ideal setup with your fellow survivors:

Read the thread »

Best DayZ Weapon Combo Thread

When you've managed to get the basics to survive, it's the best time to get properly armed. kataro posted what he believes is the most efficient weapon combo in DayZ, and is asking you to share your own deadly combos. Even our Community Manager Baty, a truly experienced survivor, is sharing her personal favorite, so hit the image to read the thread and see what her best weapon combo consists of:

Read the thread »

 

BETA Content: CR 550 Rifle Thread

The last entry in our handpicked section of the Status Report is actually a start of what will hopefully become a series of sneak peeks on some of the BETA milestone content and features. This week, Brian is keeping it simple, teasing the already announced CR 550 and asking what your personal expectations and hopes are for this new piece of weaponry:

Read the thread »

Back to Contents

 

Community Spotlight

The news for update 0.61, which is on Experimental branch right now, are new dynamic shadows.  Shadows look great, and the way you all are using them to take screenshots is really amazing.

Besides facing the Infected, you also have to deal with an additional level of paranoia because dynamic shadows create a new dynamic, all happening in real time.  

Player XRW64 utilizes the  new shadows and backlighting to create an interesting visual experience with a friend. 

It's like open world DayZ shadow puppet theater!  

 

Say hello to yourself! Test the new dynamic shadows and send us more rad images. Like JoeBandit.

Wanna get really creeped out? Imagine a silent infected hiding somewhere in this room.

 

Bibix is a very successful streamer from France, and he has a great talent for capturing unique moment. We love his screenshots. For more pics click HERE. All of these screenshots are great examples of how creatively Bibix uses the flares. It really sets a frightening mood.  

I don't know about you, but I definitely don't want to find someone (or something) dangerous inside, much less an evil clown. This is what can happen in the world of Chernarus.

If you play on Experimental/Unstable servers, don't forget to use our Feedback Tracker to submit bugs, and for the newest info or a place to share your screenshots, follow the official DayZ Development Team Twitter account.

Header image by: BIBIXHD

- Baty / Community Manager

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Edited December 7, 2016 by ☣BioHaze☣

[BCBasher 2465]

Thanks,

Why does the DayZ PR team think it's in anyway helpful to share bits here and there on different platforms like a social media princess.

Putting it all in one place like the "official forum" would be so helpful for people who dot want twenty "food pic sharing" apps on their phone and limited time some mornings to check the news.

[Espa 711]

Thanks, guys! I was a bit perplexed yesterday when I didn't find a SR on the forums and had to resort to looking at their twitter for their announcement. 

So basically, we're on the last stretch of bug fixing for .61 - Veryyyy unlikely we'll see Cars until deep into January and even February. That's kind of sad, but whatever increases the production and gets us to where we need to be! 

I'm ready for .61 Stable already! 

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

12 minutes ago, BCBasher said:

share bits here and there on different platforms like a social media princess.

In general I consider official DayZ info stream to be in a constant state of flux.

When the SR's dropped on the forum alongside the website, there was no need to follow the SR anywhere else considering I frequent here regardless.

I also do not want to have to follow Twitter or any other 3rd party website to stay current.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Commenting on the actual content of the report, I thought it was silly that Brian seemed to feel the need to comfort the PvP and streamer community openly.

He held their hands saying, "It's ok honey, this was always going to be a survival game.".

I really liked Miroslav Maněna's contribution to this report as well.

His straight forward info filled presentation gave me confidence that he is on top of all the problems and wanted features around how infected should perform.

 

[Gobbokirk 546]

Also FYI to the people reading this, Baty is out sick according to her own Twitter, so that's probably why it hasn't been posted here yet.

[Espa 711]

I think the fact that they used that kind of language, in general, that they were going to still pitch to the PvP and Streamer communities, that they won't be left in the dark MUST mean that more and more of those crazy survival dangers are ramping up to be in the game soon. I'm not sure why that should scare the common shooter if they didn't have any illusions as to what DayZ is in the first place. 

I don't know about you guys, but the atmosphere I feel from the Devs and this SR is that Beta begins essentially as soon as .61 hits Stable, which I assume will be about the 20th or the 13th of December. (They may leave the control station and give their guys a week for Christmas, so it may happen this next week :) )

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

20 minutes ago, Gobbokirk said:

Also FYI to the people reading this, Baty is out sick according to her own Twitter, so that's probably why it hasn't been posted here yet.

Thank you!

Get well soon, Baty!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Oh yeah, so no cars was true to a degree, sorry Walter. @koffeekage

[Gobbokirk 546]

18 minutes ago, Espa said:

I think the fact that they used that kind of language, in general, that they were going to still pitch to the PvP and Streamer communities, that they won't be left in the dark MUST mean that more and more of those crazy survival dangers are ramping up to be in the game soon. I'm not sure why that should scare the common shooter if they didn't have any illusions as to what DayZ is in the first place. 

I don't know about you guys, but the atmosphere I feel from the Devs and this SR is that Beta begins essentially as soon as .61 hits Stable, which I assume will be about the 20th or the 13th of December. (They may leave the control station and give their guys a week for Christmas, so it may happen this next week :) )

Don't forget the player controller and <insert what ever I can't think of right now>.
So it will probably be several months after 0.61 stable before they flip the beta switch.

[Espa 711]

11 minutes ago, Gobbokirk said:

Don't forget the player controller and <insert what ever I can't think of right now>.
So it will probably be several months after 0.61 stable before they flip the beta switch.

Ahh, this is true! I have a feeling that Post-Christmas is going to feel very exciting for them in their development, with teams splitting off to work on updating environments and the player controller!~ I wonder how much more work will need to be devoted to it before it's running smoothly!

Definitely hoping we'll be entering a time of One Update every month as the final pieces come together! I may be a fanboy for DayZ, but I gotz the hope! 

[Gobbokirk 546]

4 minutes ago, Espa said:

Ahh, this is true! I have a feeling that Post-Christmas is going to feel very exciting for them in their development, with teams splitting off to work on updating environments and the player controller!~ I wonder how much more work will need to be devoted to it before it's running smoothly!

Definitely hoping we'll be entering a time of One Update every month as the final pieces come together! I may be a fanboy for DayZ, but I gotz the hope! 

It has been a long year for sure, but what we've seen so far has certainly been worth the wait :D

[Espa 711]

After their big edits are in, things like inserting bears, more items, more vehicles, even more land mass to Chernarus are going to be coming in like hot cakes! :D 

Curious, however, about the new player controller! Will it also affect AI in that it will give new postures/status appearances based on damage or weather - Much like I assume injured poses will be included in this update for players. 

Gods, what is there left anyway? - Player controller, Base Building, Soft skills? - The rest are just variations of already included hardware :D 

[BCBasher 2465]

5 minutes ago, Espa said:

*snip*

Gods, what is there left anyway? - Player controller, Base Building, Soft skills? - The rest are just variations of already included hardware :D 

The damn helicopter.

[Espa 711]

4 minutes ago, BCBasher said:

The damn helicopter.

Hahaha true that. If they end up just throwing ONE Helicopter in that Tisy area to begin with, I hope the respawn rate is pretty damn high xD

The learning curve of flying in this game may be a little different than Arma 3 so I expect to see a LOT of crashing hahaha. 

P.S.: Totally think they'll be increasing the map size once Helis become more tangible ^_^ Here's hoping a more Southern Island is attached to Cherno, and more contaminated areas! 

[Gobbokirk 546]

12 minutes ago, BCBasher said:

The damn helicopter.

And it looks so good.... :D
Hopefully the solo host ability comes around same time so we can practice without live server consequences, cause I will be crashing a lot... :p

[BCBasher 2465]

9 minutes ago, Espa said:

Hahaha true that. If they end up just throwing ONE Helicopter in that Tisy area to begin with, I hope the respawn rate is pretty damn high xD

The learning curve of flying in this game may be a little different than Arma 3 so I expect to see a LOT of crashing hahaha. 

P.S.: Totally think they'll be increasing the map size once Helis become more tangible ^_^ Here's hoping a more Southern Island is attached to Cherno, and more contaminated areas! 

It'll be fun to even watch if they start with fifteen or whatever like they did when trucks first came out.

I wish them the best of luck with vehicle desync and all that.

[BCBasher 2465]

5 minutes ago, Gobbokirk said:

And it looks so good.... :D
Hopefully the solo host ability comes around same time so we can practice without live server consequences, cause I will be crashing a lot... :p

I believe local servers and lan are on the list, if not I'm gonna be pissed because that was my main reason for buying the game, 

[Gobbokirk 546]

4 minutes ago, BCBasher said:

I believe local servers and lan are on the list, if not I'm gonna be pissed because that was my main reason for buying the game, 

Still planned as far as I know.
Also a great place to test out weapons.

[Espa 711]

Hahaha I think there'll be a natural disparity between the types of players then - Those that really want to fly, and the vultures who fawn over the crashes of their fallen neighbors xD 

Besides the Little Bird, I am hoping for at least one military transport helicopter - Maybe a Medivac :D 

Hm - Do you guys imagine that .62 will appear as more than just a Enviornmental Visual Update? I may be reaching, but I assume it'll also be updating forest/town audio, AND placing in the vehicles/guns. If that includes helis, that would be a surprise, but I definitely think sedans, trucks, and bikes will be inserted also. 

[Gobbokirk 546]

0.62 seems to be mostly the visual stuff for now. But I guess we'll see when they start talking about it, at first .61 seemed like "only" audio, but we got network stuff on top, so time will tell.

[Tatanko 5591]

58 minutes ago, Espa said:

I don't know about you guys, but the atmosphere I feel from the Devs and this SR is that Beta begins essentially as soon as .61 hits Stable

More likely 0.62. Beta requires, for lack of a better way of putting it, that all of the major pieces of the puzzle be in place. That hasn't happened yet because we're still missing the new player controller / animation system that will be implemented next in 0.62. Brian has stated that replacing that component of the game engine will make it possible to implement many features which have been withheld because of technology constraints.

[Espa 711]

4 minutes ago, Tatanko said:

More likely 0.62. Beta requires, for lack of a better way of putting it, that all of the major pieces of the puzzle be in place. That hasn't happened yet because we're still missing the new player controller / animation system that will be implemented next in 0.62. Brian has stated that replacing that component of the game engine will make it possible to implement many features which have been withheld because of technology constraints.

Definitely a more accurate supposition - It's just definitely feeling like the rosey tinted glasses are coming off and the real elements are dangerously close to implementation. So much that Hicks had to address PvPers in that kind of odd customer service manner xD Maybe .62, and the rest of impending delights, are going to be far more efficient of time that we'll begin seeing them in smatterings of updates. (Or so I can hope xD)

Based on the video we saw last of their animation system, the camera, and etc - Does it look like those are very far from being complete? Obviously we can only give opinions, but I'm cautiously filling myself with hope that we're in the DANGER ZONE!

[emuthreat 2837]

On 12/7/2016 at 9:21 AM, Tatanko said:

More likely 0.62. Beta requires, for lack of a better way of putting it, that all of the major pieces of the puzzle be in place. That hasn't happened yet because we're still missing the new player controller / animation system that will be implemented next in 0.62. Brian has stated that replacing that component of the game engine will make it possible to implement many features which have been withheld because of technology constraints.

I was talking to some friend in TS last night, and we started talking about what the last leg of the road to beta might look like, considering things like the addition of new features (x64 client) into later iterations of experimental.

It seems feasible that the stable branch may just see the basics of each new patch, while we see a parallel experimental experimental branch running ahead with new features.  This time around, the patches seem much more aggressive and there seems to be a "go-go-go" tone to the process, that seemed more muted in previous builds.
I would even be fine with the developers completely ignoring the stable branch until all new content is included, opting instead for an accelerated development and load testing of new features.

For instance, .62 might initially run on experimental until the map additions are all working fluidly enough, yet once it goes to stable, the experimental branch may be further used to try and piece in new bits of the player controller and animation system.  They seem to be changing the way they do things in a not-so-subtle way lately.

[Nebulae3 420]

Yes, I`m positive that they will try to push new content on the experimental branch when it`s ready concerning the beta 0.62 patch. But I`m not sure if we`ve any eta yet about graphic improvements sky (clouds), dense forest - I guess it all depends when 0.61 hit stable, but I won`t speculate a date for beta release.