DayZ recap 2019, please?

[Derleth 1352]

Hello, I read this Bohemia blog about 2019 and the future, and it was a very interesting read. I would very much like to see something similar from the DayZ devs about DayZ in particular. Any information over the last year has been sketchy at best, more often simply non existent. I don't think the old Status Reports would be the right format (having a "status report" for post release development sounds wrong) but some kind of blog summarising the past year, the status of the most pressing issues and some kind of indication of what the plans for 2020 are would be very welcome. Just to name a few questions or issues I'd like to know the status of:

1. Vehicles - what is happening here? Cars will still wobble, jump around or even fly when server performance is poor or players have unstable connection. This has been going on since 1.0 and is - if I understood @ImpulZ right when he was asked about it during a live stream - related to the physics simulation going haywire by desync. Are you any closer to solving this issue?
2. Despawning cars. A very disruptive issue that has been going on since 1.03 in May. On server restart cars are occasionally thrown around and damaged and if ruined then they are promptly cleaned away by the server. To combat this issue I changed the config of my own server so ruined cars are not despawned, after a few weeks the map was littered with at least a dozen smoking wrecks of cars that had never even been assembled... Apparently there is also an issue where cars cannot be placed at their saved coordinate at server restart - and are subsequently teleported to the 0,0 coordinate at the bottom left corner of the map. Which is the bottom of the sea...
3. Speaking of vehicles - where is the V3S truck? It was supposed to come with 1.0 - its parts were spawning at release even - yet still no truck. Held back because of the wobbling/flying car issue?
4. Night lighting. We're getting mixed signals here. On one hand, to "keep the darkness" you do not want to boost moonlight to get the much nicer lighting visuals from pre 1.0 iterations, on the other hand you implemented the personal night light that makes the dense darkness irrelevant anyway - and makes the lighting look awful. This does not make any sense whatsoever! I'd like to suggest you boost the moon and remove the night light, it would make nights much more pleasing visually. Add a dynamic interaction between moon phase & position, cloud cover and light levels and you can still have the very dark nights much of the time. Variation is natural. 
5. Nighttime clouds. Related to 4, clouds are unnaturally lit or glowing at nights, making the sky look like an oil slick. This has been so ever since SimulWeather was removed with 1.02 but has become worse over the course of the year, I'm assuming due to changes to lighting. Clouds obscure light at night, they do not glow (except for when reflecting light pollution, not a factor in DayZ, and around the moon when the cloud cover is thin).
6. Server performance. Always an issue and seemingly the biggest factor holding DayZ back at the moment. The removal of SimulWeather, vehicles misbehaving, too few infected etc. Is this something we're going to have to live with or is there hope for improvement?

 

Below a bunch of other issues/backlog features I would like to know the plans for:

 

1. Cold weather survival. Still some balancing to be done here - and heated food needs to lose heat. A) because using steaks as eternal heat packs makes cold survival trivial and B) overheating and dying because of a few steaks in your jacket is stupid. There needs to be more waterproof and water resistant clothing available.
2. Raw meat needs to get spoiled if you do not cook it within a day. Same goes for opened cans of food, veggies etc that also needs to deteriorate over time.
3. Spray painting?
4. Dyeing, leathercrafting?
5. Stabbing animations - it feels and looks incredibly dumb to swing a spear like a club. Since we stab with bayonets, why not with the pointy stick and spear? Then you can add the pitchfork back too.
6. A number of other melee weapons are still missing. Sword, club, farming hoe, sickle, fire extinguisher - and the chainsaw - just to name a few. Are they scratched permanently or in the works?
7. Improvised bow? What is the status?
8. Broken bones? There is already a mod faking it better than the old 0.62 implementation - this should be done in the vanilla game until the dreamed skeleton simulation/ragdoll/animations is implemented. If ever.
9. Since I mentioned it - ragdoll. Will we ever see it? Sick of bodies of players and zombies falling into walls. Not only does it look amateurish but it makes them unlootable. Bodies need to interact with the terrain.
10. Two wheeled vehicles?
11. Flying vehicles/boats?
12. Written notes? Books?
13. Ambient animals - foxes, rabbits, birds etc - are these scratched for good or still in the works?
14. Infected and wolves fighting. Apparently disabled intentionally but no explanation given. This is not a good change, I was recently chased by a bear, a flock of wolves and a dozen infected who were all out for my scrawny behind. It actually felt more than a little unfair...

Edited December 19, 2019 by Derleth

[William Sternritter 441]

You didn't read the blog properly mate, DayZ is better than ever as it was greatly improved in 2019 😉 It just may be a dev branch they forgot to release or something.

Edited December 19, 2019 by William Sternritter

[Derleth 1352]

35 minutes ago, William Sternritter said:

You didn't read the blog properly mate, DayZ is better than ever as it was greatly improved in 2019 😉 It just may be a dev branch they forgot to release or something.

Well to be fair I fully agree it is better than ever, but that is not the same as to say there are no issues or room for improvement... I love the game as is, but the things I summarised above are things that need to be dealt with, all I'm asking for is a little bit of transparency. That they give us some info.

DayZ players are a resilient breed, but the poor communication is pissing off more than a few of the most die hard fans. This should be a warning signal to the team that they need to step it up a bit.

Edited December 19, 2019 by Derleth

[IMT 3190]

48 minutes ago, William Sternritter said:

You didn't read the blog properly mate, DayZ is better than ever as it was greatly improved in 2019 😉 It just may be a dev branch they forgot to release or something.

Yes, it's so much better that I have more hours in 0.62 and previous versions than now. To be fair, it's perhaps not the game itself which has sucked all the fun out of me but rather the developers. Ever since they went to beta and release, I haven't had as much fun in the game as I did before. The stuff Derleth mentions is valid and should be answered. But we all know Bohemia and they will probably only touch on the points which they can react positive to. All the negative stuff gets filtered out and kept away from us. That's just how it goes and it won't change. Lies & deceptions, that's the DayZ development process for ya.

[amadieus 313]

Great list, but quite shocking to see what still  needs to be implemented and fixed. It is mind baffling to think that game is actually released for already a year.

Also, I would like to add the poorly implemented base building that we have since 1.0 and the infected that still act rather poorly. 

 

[William Sternritter 441]

1 hour ago, Derleth said:

Well to be fair I fully agree it is better than ever, but that is not the same as to say there are no issues or room for improvement... I love the game as is, but the things I summarised above are things that need to be dealt with, all I'm asking for is a little bit of transparency. That they give us some info.

DayZ players are a resilient breed, but the poor communication is pissing off more than a few of the most die hard fans. This should be a warning signal to the team that they need to step it up a bit.

Sarcasm aside, I would argue that only real improvement is smoothness of actions. Otherwise we are facing the same if not worse issues as in 0.62. Last two patches are a huge dissapointment for me. Lack of communication from the devs is just cherry on top. 

[Derleth 1352]

32 minutes ago, amadieus said:

Great list, but quite shocking to see what still  needs to be implemented and fixed. It is mind baffling to think that game is actually released for already a year.

Also, I would like to add the poorly implemented base building that we have since 1.0 and the infected that still act rather poorly. 

 

To be fair base building works okay, it is mostly the building time / raiding balancing that is completely off. As it happens it is also one of the few things devs have actually talked about recently, they said it is on top of their priority list so I think you'll see changes there in 1.07. I personally don't bother building bases since they offer little or no protection for a massive investment in time and effort, they are just not worth the hassle. I should have mentioned that, but base building has simply been so pointless for so long that I didn't even think about it.

Infected have been greatly improved over the year though, but I would still like to see many more in the vanilla settings (I have them tripled on my own server without issues). The only issues I see with infected currently is how they lock on cars even after the driver has left, how they tend to fall into walls and objects when they die (so they can't be looted) and how they still spawn on the roofs of buildings a bit too often. Also I really did not like the recent change so they do not fight wolves. Awful change that should be reverted asap.

Edited December 19, 2019 by Derleth

[amadieus 313]

I agree that building a base works fine, but as you said, it is so poorly balanced that it is just a worthless feature. And that is a pity since it could be a great time sink and offer so much fun possibilities. 

My problem with the infected is that they act so cheap. You still move right threw them sometimes when fighting, the poor pathfinding in buildings and sometimes in combat, the missing turn animation (without animation they just turn around) and the lack of aggressive stance animations. Sit in a house and look out the window when surrounded, they way they are animated and behave looks so poorly and cheap. 

I just want them to fix the current things first before implementing stuff like helicopters and two wheeled vehicles. I rather play a game that has a stable core gameplay. Now even one year later I still don't see a reason to message my buddy and say: let's fix up a car and build a base somewhere! No it still remains walking around and doing pvp. At least the survival elements were improved...

[Derleth 1352]

1 hour ago, amadieus said:

My problem with the infected is that they act so cheap. You still move right threw them sometimes when fighting, the poor pathfinding in buildings and sometimes in combat, the missing turn animation (without animation they just turn around) and the lack of aggressive stance animations. Sit in a house and look out the window when surrounded, they way they are animated and behave looks so poorly and cheap. 

I just want them to fix the current things first before implementing stuff like helicopters and two wheeled vehicles. I rather play a game that has a stable core gameplay. Now even one year later I still don't see a reason to message my buddy and say: let's fix up a car and build a base somewhere! No it still remains walking around and doing pvp. At least the survival elements were improved...

I agree, but they're getting there ever so slowly. Didn't the zeds in Survivor Games have some new animations? I played on some server where they had modded in the legacy zombie sound effects from pre 0.63, I had forgotten how creepy they could be. Hoping for more zombie variety both in models, animations and sound effects in the future.

[IMT 3190]

4 hours ago, amadieus said:

I agree that building a base works fine, but as you said, it is so poorly balanced that it is just a worthless feature. And that is a pity since it could be a great time sink and offer so much fun possibilities. 

My problem with the infected is that they act so cheap. You still move right threw them sometimes when fighting, the poor pathfinding in buildings and sometimes in combat, the missing turn animation (without animation they just turn around) and the lack of aggressive stance animations. Sit in a house and look out the window when surrounded, they way they are animated and behave looks so poorly and cheap. 

I just want them to fix the current things first before implementing stuff like helicopters and two wheeled vehicles. I rather play a game that has a stable core gameplay. Now even one year later I still don't see a reason to message my buddy and say: let's fix up a car and build a base somewhere! No it still remains walking around and doing pvp. At least the survival elements were improved...

Remember the reason why they released DayZ? I do. A stable core gameplay loop. Do we have that? No.

[Buakaw 274]

On 12/19/2019 at 9:20 PM, IMT said:

Remember the reason why they released DayZ? I do. A stable core gameplay loop. Do we have that? No.

Do we even know how it's supposed to look?

[scriptfactory 620]

It's insane how the same topics are being discussed since 2013/2014.

[McWendy 675]

3 hours ago, scriptfactory said:

It's insane how the same topics are being discussed since 2013/2014.

That's because new people get on this forum. They dont read the older threads they dont read stickies. So they start spewing and discussing things they experienced ingame. Which is logical. Annoying but logical 

At least we have a forum loop @IMT 🙂

 

[Tarkules 153]

13 hours ago, scriptfactory said:

It's insane how the same topics are being discussed since 2013/2014.

A short while ago, I spent some time in the "Graveyard" and have read many posts on different threads.

Found many interesting ideas that I wanted to ask about and discuss, but they were from 2015 mostly, and forgotten. Those guys thought and talked about almost everything already.

Unfortunately, nothing new to discuss here, except for expressing more rants and feelings 🙂

It's 2020, and still, a sniper cannot use a walkie-talkie as a bait. You can't do anything in the car except for sitting/driving. 

We need more content.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Tarkules
Typo

[Buakaw 274]

On 1/5/2020 at 3:37 PM, Tarkules said:

🙂t's 2020, and still, a sniper cannot use a walkie-talkie as a bait. You can't do anything in the car except for sitting/driving. 

We need more content.

I remember somewhere around 2016/17 they talked about adding "freedom" to cars so you can do all sorts of stuff, even drivebys maybe. Queue 2019 and you still can't even drive properly without lags and flying to the moon.

As for walkie talkies, I never used them, but shouldnt they work?

 

Also, still curious about that "core gameplay loop". When Hicks was still in Dayz and when he talked about the core gameplay loop, he did an interview once where he expressed a metric fuckton of uncertainty as to how exactly it is supposed to look like. He was making hints and how Rust has nailed it and making comparisons, he said he wasn't sure about spawn points and whether a respawn mechanic could be added. Just a bunch of uncertainty that I have never seen fully resolved. And then he left. This project is just a mess. Many years into the game they couldn't even accurately define how exactly they want the loot economy to work, how exactly the core gameplay loop is supposed to look like.

Is this why you are not answering me @IMT ?

Edited January 8, 2020 by Buakaw

[McWendy 675]

 

5 minutes ago, Buakaw said:

I remember somewhere around 2016/17 they talked about adding "freedom" to cars so you can do all sorts of stuff, even drivebys maybe. Queue 2019 and you still can't even drive properly without lags and flying to the moon.

As for walkie talkies, I never used them, but shouldnt they work?

Appearently they only work if they are:

-with battery (obv)

-carried on a person

Ive tried numerous Times. They Just wont make a sound if say on the ground with battery. 

Maybe its a bug? @Greensek

[Survivor514 3]

This was well put. You should get a reasonable answer for the effort.. I hope you do. Good luck with your games sir.

[Funkmaster Rick 373]

Bohemia never should have pushed Rocket out. He had a vision, knew what he wanted. When he left, the DayZ many of us bought into died. When they announced a paid DLC new map to split the community, and decided that modding would solve the problems they didn't want to, it was a pretty clear admission that nobody at Bohemia was both equipped and willing to finish the job. I drop by here every six months or so as a sort of fact-finding mission, to see where the project went, and I was flabbergasted to see the Steam charts for this game rising over the last year.

In a few words, I too am interested to know what's happened in 2019.

[IMT 3190]

6 hours ago, Buakaw said:

I remember somewhere around 2016/17 they talked about adding "freedom" to cars so you can do all sorts of stuff, even drivebys maybe. Queue 2019 and you still can't even drive properly without lags and flying to the moon.

As for walkie talkies, I never used them, but shouldnt they work?

 

Also, still curious about that "core gameplay loop". When Hicks was still in Dayz and when he talked about the core gameplay loop, he did an interview once where he expressed a metric fuckton of uncertainty as to how exactly it is supposed to look like. He was making hints and how Rust has nailed it and making comparisons, he said he wasn't sure about spawn points and whether a respawn mechanic could be added. Just a bunch of uncertainty that I have never seen fully resolved. And then he left. This project is just a mess. Many years into the game they couldn't even accurately define how exactly they want the loot economy to work, how exactly the core gameplay loop is supposed to look like.

Is this why you are not answering me @IMT ?

The reason I'm not answering you is because all of this can be found in official posts. As a long time forum member, you should know what they mean with the core gameplay loop.

[Buakaw 274]

On 1/8/2020 at 10:15 PM, IMT said:

The reason I'm not answering you is because all of this can be found in official posts. As a long time forum member, you should know what they mean with the core gameplay loop.

What official posts? How should I know? I don't frequent this board as much as you, let alone read every statement ever made by the devs. Used to, but stopped 2017-ish.

Googling "dayz gameplay loop" yields no results except the interview from Hicks. So it's neither normal for everyone to have read said "official posts" nor are they easily accessible.

  I would be very curious to read them or hear it in your words.

 

Edited January 12, 2020 by Buakaw

[IMT 3190]

On 1/12/2020 at 4:48 AM, Buakaw said:

What official posts? How should I know? I don't frequent this board as much as you, let alone read every statement ever made by the devs. Used to, but stopped 2017-ish.

Googling "dayz gameplay loop" yields no results except the interview from Hicks. So it's neither normal for everyone to have read said "official posts" nor are they easily accessible.

  I would be very curious to read them or hear it in your words.

 

With the beta and 1.0 release the developers intended to have a stable platform and the stable core gameplay loop. They had to go into beta because apparently the code was so messy that it got hard to work with. So instead of focussing on features they focussed on cleaning their code and fixing bugs, making sure the game is stable and the core gameplay loop is stable. What they meant with core gameplay loop is that the features which were current in the game weren't bugged or didn't ruin your experience. With stable platform they meant a stable game on all platforms and including modding for PC.

All of this is ironic because the core gameplay loop is far from stable and you need to do tons of workarounds to make stuff work currently. So basically, we're back to square one. Also the core gameplay loop is subjective. For me the core gameplay loop is something way different than how it is right now. For me it would be more survival style rather than the mixed survival and PvP style that it now is.

Edit: I believe this is all explained in the post where they announced that they would go into beta and then full release. Should be in the announcements iirc.

Edited January 13, 2020 by IMT

[emuthreat 2837]

I think much of this was covered more in-depth in interviews, than in actual textual postings; as far as the gameplay loop and decision to go to beta before the feature backlog was fulfilled.