Status Report - 29 August 2017

[Baty Alquawen 3688]

This week, the Status Report fully focuses on recapping our Gamescom experience. We've been presenting the 0.63 playable DEMO in Cologne, Germany the entire past week, and met literally hundreds of players who tried the DEMO live at our booth as we watched them play. We've gathered a lot of important feedback, which both Eugen and Peter cover in their texts. There are also VoDs of Gamescom live streams, some exciting Gamescom gameplay from our community, and more! Let's get to it.

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Contents This Week

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Martin
• Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

Gamescom DEMO has been an amazing experience for all of us. Being able to finally get direct feedback on 0.63 and talk to our old school players, or see the new ones playing it for the first time has made me more than a little happy. After getting this DayZ potential ready tech wise, we had a game to share, and talk about. It was exciting and exhausting. We are looking forward to sharing more.

At the same time, I have some less exciting news for you. As the build we brought to Gamescom would still take weeks to get ready for public testing, we will not be releasing the DEMO for Steam. We really wanted to, but it just no longer makes sense to spend time polishing a very small part of the whole BETA experience. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive on the floor, and I do believe we are hitting the right notes on what BETA should feel like. Rather than releasing a DEMO, our goal is to get the BETA/0.63 update out as soon as possible in its entirety on Experimental branch when ready. That does not mean it's going to be rushed. We do believe that the only way out of this hellhole is a really good game that all of us want to play.

We are going to focus on the combat a little while longer to incorporate some of the good feedback that we got, as well as features missing from the DEMO that were cut before it was used on the show floor. There is still a lot of details to implement, or content to convert in that regard. Since we have only returned from Gamescom floor on Sunday late night, we plan to have an internal post-mortem first and get the team together to plan out the next month in detail.

However, as you may know, the scope of BETA is huge, and even though we have developed a lot of these features during the same time as technology, now it is time to put it all together. It’s a painful process, but the game is finally there. We are going to need a lot of balancing runs, polishing and bug fixing before we are happy to put it out. We will be reading the feedback on the details available and try and share with you more as we recover from the trip.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 

Dev Update/Peter

Gamescom 2017 has ended, so let my write down my impressions. At first, knowing all that stuff which was completely missing from the DEMO, or just in early prototype state, and all the remaining limitations we still needs to figure out, I was feeling a bit insecure about the quality of the DEMO build that we brought for showcase at the Gamescom booth. I'm a person who likes to have things in order, and as polished as possible, which leads to situations where I’m just not pleased enough with the current state of the game. So naturally, I was very curious how it's all going to turn out in the end.

To quickly recap what was presented in demo:

• New rocks, roads and their decals with parallax mapping.
• New characters with better body proportions and heads with lifespan, containing growing shaveable beards, washable bloody hands from skinning bodies
• New character controller and animation system with very responsive and fluent character movement, coupled with new physics for better collisions, allowing for smooth traversing through environment (yes even running down/up the hill!)
• New movement sets for turning, injured, falling character as well as carrying heavy items around in hands
• New gestures with the ability to move while using them
• New stamina system, differentiating character movement speed depending on their load
• New melee combat system with attack and hit impacts animations
• New ranged combat with extended weapon handling and aiming with new sway and recoil
• New intuitive way to perform actions with items in hands even while moving, crafting new ones even directly from world and interactions with environment without pixel hunting
• New HUD and inventory with clear layout and resized cargo and item sizes
• New voice communication including personal radio, megaphone and public address system
• New advanced placing which will be used for precise placement of specific items
• New electricity system with cable reels to reach far places
• And much more...

There were thousands of gamers and content creators looking forward to get their hands on the first iteration of what DayZ will become in BETA. It was an interesting mixture of people that never played DayZ before, ones who put it down waiting patiently for BETA, and those who still play DayZ regularly and spent from hundreds to thousands of hours in-game. I've spent a great amount of time observing how people play the game, and discussed with them about what they like on the new DayZ, what would they still like to see improved, and why.

With this approach, I gained a ton of feedback. It was very positive to see and hear that we are actually on the right track, and people do like what they see, and especially how it plays. Bear in mind nothing is set in stone yet, and everything could be changed, especially after valuable feedback we received. It will allow us to refine the design a bit more, so in it’s final form, DayZ could unleash its full potential, and allow people to enjoy what DayZ is so well known for - an emergent gameplay full of interactions, which creates stories filled with unique experience and leaving strong memories in atmospheric world.

After meeting you at Gamescom 2017... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 

Dev Update/Martin

As both Eugen and Peter mentioned, Gamescom was a really positive experience for us. The very stressful couple of weeks before we left the office and travelled to Cologne were definitely worth it in the end, as we've been met with a very warm welcome at Gamescom, and also fulfilled our mission: to gather preliminary feedback on an early 0.63 build.

As Baty will share in her part of the Status Report, we did our best to provide some meaningful coverage for those of you not visiting Gamescom. The couple of live streams we organized with Twitch and GameStar.de were quite full of interesting news, so do check them out below, along with content from M1ndr, Barely Infected or Merlin from DayZ Underground.

It's a bit unfortunate that we were not able to capture a better gameplay clip for both live streams in time (due to both time constraints and last minute fixes to the playable DEMO build), so the presented footage was a bit bare bones and glitchy at times, but as promised, we will deliver a good amount of quality 1080p/60FPS footage in the following days. The footage will take the form of a Dev Log video similar to those made for 0.62, and you can expect around 10 minutes of new content with Eugen's developer narration. 

Also, since we decided not to make the DEMO available on Steam, we'll see if we can at least organise a live stream where you can see live gameplay, and ask us questions. Our pre-gamescom live stream was a bit of a technical failure, so we need to spend some more time planning the live stream, but we have a decent combat plan to make it all happen. 

That's it from me this week. Thanks everyone who visited us at Gamescom, you were awesome! Now, let's see some of the community content from our booth. 

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager

 

Community Spotlight

Gamescom is over, we are back in Prague, and work on BETA continues. 

It was something new to us and some people in the team have never been to a big event like Gamescom before. It was exhausting, but it was worth it, because your feedback is what we really needed. And we are really happy we got a lot of very positive feedback from you!  

It was a total of 6 of us from the DayZ team, and for five days, you were able to meet us in the booth and play DayZ on 18 PCs.  You could play a short PvP demo, try some features from the upcoming 0.63 build and grab some nice little presents along the way. You've surely seen videos that appeared mostly on Twitter and Reddit from people who have already tried the demo. Unfortunately, as Martin explained, we do not have an official video ready yet, but we will catch up this week and if everything goes according to our plan, the video commented by our Lead Producer Eugen Harton will be released by the end of the week. Before it's out, you can look at the impressions of M1ndr and Rene (Barely Infected) who also visited us to try the DEMO: 

 

 

There were two live streams during Gamescom where our Lead Producer Eugen was talking about the Gamescom DEMO and BETA. First one on the line was the GameStar.de live stream, and the second one was a Twitch official Gamescom live stream (watch the VOD here, you need to move to time 8:10:55). 

 

We also hosted a community meetup at Gamescom, where we met ten of you and barely fit into our small meeting room. For almost two hours, we talked about DayZ and what you can expect from the BETA. And you got some special gifts we prepared for this event. I would like to thank you very much for coming to see us and I hope you enjoyed the meeting as much as we did! 

 

Before Gamescom, we organized an event on Skalisty Island where players became knights and fought in teams to capture the Skalisty castle. Except for a bit of a waiting waiting, everything went well and all players were quite happy.

There were some content creators who were streaming or recording their gameplay which they then placed on YouTube, so those of you who were not there can see it too. Blue team won the battle of the castle, but the greys fought bravely too. I want to thank everyone for their patience and the fact that they have arrived. You can look forward to another event soon! 

Just for clarification, the recording of the developer stream that accompanied the event was removed due to technical issues during the stream. Unfortunately, we did not correctly estimate the demands of the stream on the hardware and therefore the stream was flawed by unpleasant lags. We learned our lesson and it will be better next time. 

 

I've created a list of YouTube recordings for you, so you can see what was happening through the eyes of several players. If I forgot to include someone just tweet me at @batyalquawen and I'm going to add you to the playlist. 

 

And in the end, I want to show you a funny bug we found yesterday. Adam Franců sent it to me with this description: 

Quote

While working on the tourist trails north of Svetloyarsk, we have discovered this massive structure that reesembles the shape of a lunch table. The exact origin and purpose of it is yet to be known. We have sent scout to investigate, reports suggest that this structure pose serious threat to the survivors and we have managed to take it down in a quick map editing action.

 

 

Thanks again to everyone who came to play the Gamescom demo and to everyone who gave us any feedback. We really appreciate it. See you in two weeks guys and have a nice start of a new school year! 

Header image by MAMAD_NZR.

 

- Baty / Community Manager

 

 

[Gobbokirk 546]

Yay, been waiting for this one :D

[OliverPlotTwist 458]

If the giant table isn't in the final game, I'll be very disappointed.

[Gobbokirk 546]

2 minutes ago, OliverPlotTwist said:

If the giant table isn't in the final game, I'll be very disappointed.

Now imagine the size of the meal we could find there... yum :)

[Five_Seven_Clown 88]

Svetloyarsk, home of the world's largest picnic table.

[Sqeezorz 839]

Great SR, and good feedback from GC17.

Thx

 

(REM: The last picture ... a first screenshot of Adam ... he secretly made the first base building, no one knew it,  the team was in Cologne ^ ^)

[koffeekage 322]

It would be cool if your arms could get dirty from horticulture and digging and greasy from car maintenance and gun cleaning. Not just blood from slaughter.

[Blafirelli 39]

3 hours ago, Baty Alquawen said:

...

 

Umm, am i correct assuming the topic title should say the 28th of August instead of the 8th? :)

Im mentioning it as i almost skipped this topic because i thought its the old Status Report

Edited August 29, 2017 by Blafirelli

[IMT 3190]

58 minutes ago, Blafirelli said:

Umm, am i correct assuming the topic title should say the 28th of August instead of the 8th? :)

Im mentioning it as i almost skipped this topic because i thought its the old Status Report

Very observant, well done. I think it needs to be the 29th of august though since it was posted at that date.

[OneStep 13]

Looks great.

But the passive and active stance should stay toggleable. The view of the player should also not follow the weapon sway as it makes it really hard to scan for movement.

[BeefBacon 1185]

4 hours ago, Blafirelli said:

Umm, am i correct assuming the topic title should say the 28th of August instead of the 8th? :)

Im mentioning it as i almost skipped this topic because i thought its the old Status Report

Yeah I actually didn't bother reading it a few hours ago because I thought it was the old one.

[Baty Alquawen 3688]

12 hours ago, Blafirelli said:

Umm, am i correct assuming the topic title should say the 28th of August instead of the 8th? :)

Im mentioning it as i almost skipped this topic because i thought its the old Status Report

Sorry for my potatoiness. And thank you :).

[philbur 476]

Alrighty then...

Just as you don't want to rush the BETA onto Experimental, you should also not rush the weekly SRs.

I appreciate the recap from the past week but it pretty much goes without saying that there is no progress on the game while the primary team members are away.

I am disappointed about the BETA delay, but hardly surprised. And when Eugen mentioned Base Building I pretty much laughed out loud to my computer monitor....

Please remember the past few years of Status Updates that unfortunately left us Subscribers with very little confidence in the team because the promises and dates were just too optimistic.

The loyal fans of this title really DO "understand" and I, as one of them, am eagerly awaiting BETA.... So I hope you catch up on your sleep!

But again...be generous in your estimated release dates. A lot of Subscribers that stepped away from the game are now taking another look at it, and many new people are also curious about it...

If you feel confident about a November 1st release date (FOR EXAMPLE) Then why not say November 15th? There will ALWAYS be reasons for delays...that's cool...that's life, in software/creative development....

But the game will stand on its' merits...and all of the major reasons people feel negative towards the SA are basically about mis-informed disappointment towards the release schedule and lack of core functionality that gets promised each time a new build hits Steam.

Now that you have reached a point where you can work primarily on game-only development, and worry less about old tech getting in the way, it might be tempting to be overly optimistic about timelines and features but I trust you all have much better perspective on these things than I can imagine, seeing as you have had to deal with all the crap thrown at the team since the early builds. That being said...I look forwards to the next SR, when hopefully we will hear better details on what to expect from the BETA and when we can realistically see it hit EXP!

Thanks again, Team...

[OliverPlotTwist 458]

12 minutes ago, philbur said:

Alrighty then...

Just as you don't want to rush the BETA onto Experimental, you should also not rush the weekly SRs.

I appreciate the recap from the past week but it pretty much goes without saying that there is no progress on the game while the primary team members are away.

I am disappointed about the BETA delay, but hardly surprised. And when Eugen mentioned Base Building I pretty much laughed out loud to my computer monitor....

Please remember the past few years of Status Updates that unfortunately left us Subscribers with very little confidence in the team because the promises and dates were just too optimistic.

The loyal fans of this title really DO "understand" and I, as one of them, am eagerly awaiting BETA.... So I hope you catch up on your sleep!

But again...be generous in your estimated release dates. A lot of Subscribers that stepped away from the game are now taking another look at it, and many new people are also curious about it...

If you feel confident about a November 1st release date (FOR EXAMPLE) Then why not say November 15th? There will ALWAYS be reasons for delays...that's cool...that's life, in software/creative development....

But the game will stand on its' merits...and all of the major reasons people feel negative towards the SA are basically about mis-informed disappointment towards the release schedule and lack of core functionality that gets promised each time a new build hits Steam.

Now that you have reached a point where you can work primarily on game-only development, and worry less about old tech getting in the way, it might be tempting to be overly optimistic about timelines and features but I trust you all have much better perspective on these things than I can imagine, seeing as you have had to deal with all the crap thrown at the team since the early builds. That being said...I look forwards to the next SR, when hopefully we will hear better details on what to expect from the BETA and when we can realistically see it hit EXP!

Thanks again, Team...

Alrighty then...

First, the SR are bi-weekly, not weekly.

I don't see why there would be no progress if a small number of the team was at gamescom. In fact you can see that there was progress if you look at the Steamdb: https://steamdb.info/app/221100/history/

I'm not quite sure why Eugen mentioning Base Building for beta would make you laugh...

It does not do well to dwell on the past.

The devs don't give out dates anymore. "A loyal fan" would know this.

[philbur 476]

3 minutes ago, OliverPlotTwist said:

Alrighty then...

First, the SR are bi-weekly, not weekly.

I don't see why there would be no progress if a small number of the team was at gamescom. In fact you can see that there was progress if you look at the Steamdb: https://steamdb.info/app/221100/history/

I'm not quite sure why Eugen mentioning Base Building for beta would make you laugh...

It does not do well to dwell on the past.

The devs don't give out dates anymore. "A loyal fan" would know this.

Easy there,my man...

The Core members were there....so as small as that number might be...it is still significant.

I laughed because...well....just because....and you know EXACTLY why...if you have followed this game development.

You must be a young person to use the "do not dwell on the past' expression, as while I agree that "DWELLING" on it is not productive... "LEARNING" from it is.

You know...."Learning from the mistakes of the past...lest we repeat them"

Don't preach to the converted. I'm still here...still optimistic...and still a fan...The team can handle what I just posted....they don't need you to defend them...besides...I was addressing the post from Baty...and was not looking for comments from fellow survivors.

[OliverPlotTwist 458]

14 minutes ago, philbur said:

Easy there,my man...

The Core members were there....so as small as that number might be...it is still significant.

I laughed because...well....just because....and you know EXACTLY why...if you have followed this game development.

You must be a young person to use the "do not dwell on the past' expression, as while I agree that "DWELLING" on it is not productive... "LEARNING" from it is.

You know...."Learning from the mistakes of the past...lest we repeat them"

Don't preach to the converted. I'm still here...still optimistic...and still a fan...The team can handle what I just posted....they don't need you to defend them...besides...I was addressing the post from Baty...and was not looking for comments from fellow survivors.

I was just correcting some of your, mistakes. Maybe you will learn from them.

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

Thanks devs, all!

I'm happy you had positive feedback from the people at the convention and I'm very excited to get my hands on beta.

The current mantra of, "the only way out, is up", is the best way to look at the progress of the SA. 

Making good on features and bringing polish and user feedback into the project is going to restore a lot of faith from the community and create another wave of interest in "the little alpha that could" (DayZ).

Those of us who are dedicated and passionate about this project share a sense of pride with all new milestones and my faith is only bolstered by the improvements seen in the demo.

I feel like I'm standing in front of a dam with an ever growing crack and when beta hits, I'll be washed away.

Cheers and zombie tears!

*Empty bottles and cans, just raise your hands!

Molotov needs cocktails like a zombie horde thirsts for the cleansing lick of flame!

[Espa 711]

Oh man. . Think of the traps that can be set by leaving items like these out in the open. . xD 

[exacomvm 101]

Sad that the Demo isn't added to Steam, they could have made 3rd option in the Betas for the Demo and reserve atleast one server for that build.

[Sqeezorz 839]

1 hour ago, Espa said:

Oh man. . Think of the traps that can be set by leaving items like these out in the open. . xD 

At 0:18-0:27...

Is that what I think? The trailer, he looks as he fits a V3S. If that really is, then I believe basebuliding will think a bigger challenge than many.

[emuthreat 2837]

This looks good and cool

I can't wait for point six three

Oh wait, yes I can

[Gobbokirk 546]

24 minutes ago, emuthreat said:

This looks good and cool

I can't wait for point six three

Oh wait, yes I can

Wait we must,
for 6-3 we lust.
Patience is key,
Now give it to me!
 

Oki that was horrible, but felt in a poetic mood for about 15 sec so had to :p

[GaryWalnuts 1680]

There once was a boar who couldnt walk straight-a
while the devs they regularly collected his data
He was quite the celebrity back in .59
but now he just gripes about development time
and makes random posts demanding the beta

[IMT 3190]

Roses are red, violets are blue.
We've got a patient emu.
So can you.

[green_mtn_grandbob 594]

63 a game does not make

it needs time to bake

in time we will have cake

take an old cold tater and wait