http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-week-of-08-sept-14
Focus for the development team over the last week has primarily been on resolving server and client crashes discovered during internal testing of 0.49. Rather than address the crashes with a potential hotfix after the update (given the impact of the associated central hive reset and the steps taken to address the more prevalent duplication and abuse methods) the choice was made to unlock the update from our regularly scheduled maintenance window of Wednesday and rapidly iterate upon experimental.
What does this mean for the average chernarusian survivor? We will be pushing rapid updates to experimental and iterating 0.49 until the build is in a state ready for stable branch. We believe this will only be a matter of a few days. When the build is ready for stable branch we will work with our game server partners to bring stable branch offline, and update steam.
Additionally, the programming and design teams have been working together to investigate and resolve several key cheating and bug abuse methods including but not limited to:
Server/Character force re-initialization
Rapid micro player location updates (slide/glide teleporting)
Community interest in exactly how the northern regions of Chernarus will be developed has been ongoing, and after discussion with Senchi our Lead World Designer we've put together a rough guide for the development of these regions.
As you can see looking at the map above, the environment team has a clear plan for developing the north and inland regions. When work on the northern corridor has completed the environment team will begin revitalizing existing legacy villages and towns throughout the map. This means that once the villages and towns of the north listed in the above image are completed, the team will begin renovating the original Chernarus towns and villages to bring their look, feel, and layout more in tune with the reality of a post-apocalyptic world.
Lastly, this Friday will be the first of our now weekly dev streams on Twitch.tv. Head over to twitch.tv/dayz at 18:00 GMT +2 this Friday and members of the development team will be playing DayZ and answering questions from the chat. -- Brian Hicks / Producer
[img width=700 height=700]http://i.imgur.com/hGfImUF.jpg[/img]
Peter / Lead Designer
"This week there has been ongoing work on advanced weather impact, which is being expanded, partially rewritten and tweaked to provide better utilization and feeling. Also newly added mercury thermometer comes in hand if you are unsure about your body temperature. The prototype of the dynamic events system - the UH-60 gets company from the eastern camp, the well known Mi-8 helicopter. A few new items were added recently from the PAX showcase, such as the stun baton and balaclavas and they will be available for public in next experimental version. As well hunting will be expanded with the useful snare trap shortly.
We are currently focused on cleaning and redoing configurations for all doors as their handling was fundamentally changed in the game engine. Improvements which will be noticeable at first is the easier interaction with them - forget about nightmare which door to choose from action menu to open those you want to while you are standing near to more of them as now it takes into account what your cursor is aiming at and it's not proximity based. The second welcomed change is related to the audio side - sounds of doors opening and closing are possible now and are already plugged in and you can really tell difference. (Although the variation in sound effects are not quite there yet)
More sounds will come later for example for locked doors because with recent door improvements we can finally start working on barricading. We have already done some design outline and analysis toward barricading mechanics - to allow you to take existing structures and occupy them for your needs. First thing to come will be (un)locking the door's lock with a lockpick which will be expanded with different padlocks and even combination ones. Later the wooden planks, nails and other material come to use in combination with tools which gain other purpose aside from melee only.
Keep your ears open while looting... see you in Chernarus folks!"
Chris / Lead Artist
"Character Art
Since the last update, the biggest change with character art has come with the creation of a new base body type with is ~10% more slender than the previous. It is more fitting for somebody surviving in a harsh environment and will help reduce the number of clipping errors between clothing/player bodies. Because of this and recent changes to how characters are assembled and to their animations, we have been doing a lot of bug fixing. Unfortunately that means pausing the creation of new items by some of our artists to fix the worst of these issues immediately, however, we're mostly past this and will begin again on some new clothing “sets”. Work on reshaping other items to reduce the severity of clipping will be ongoing.
Weapons (or the AKS-74-and-U)
Many of you were happy to learn about the AKS-74U and many asked me on twitter and on the DayZ forum which caliber it will be chambered for. Surely, we would not add a 5.56mm AKS-74U, right? I mean, they never *really* made a direct AK100-series equivalent for the AKS-74U after all.
[img width=700 height=393]http://i.imgur.com/TG3yE1H.jpg[/img]
Well, you'll be happy to learn we are, in parallel, working on art for 5.45x39mm ammo. In other news, The MP133s animations have been finished and are now pending sounds and the lever-action repeater is ready to deploy, following implementation by design.
Vehicles
Friends, I am happy to report that we have officially begun working on the art for our first vehicle. Until this point, our working prototype has been an old vehicle from ArmA2 but now, we are working on a brand-new V3S with many of its components (i.e. wheels, doors, etc...) separated into different meshes to work in a similar manner as weapon attachments."
Standup Notes for the week of 08 Sept 14
Art:
V3S Transport Truck
New civilian zombie
NEAF civilian hangar
New 55-gal drum
Derringer
AKS74U
5.45mm ammo
Radio Cassette player
RGD2 smoke (white, black)
Waterproof packable bag
Waterproof backpack
Animation:
Bugfixing
Grenade, chemlight, flare related animations finished
Repeater reload animations done
Throwing animations in progress
MP133 reload animation in progress
Arming/Disarming animations polishing in progress
Design:
bugfixing
configs and scripts for new items
added mi8 for random spawning
advanced weather impact on player
reconfiguring doors and adding sfx
barricading mechanic outline
finalizing new controls
Programming:
Character and inventory items duplication fixing
Melee combat tweaking
Shotgun shooting over network fix
Door reimplementation (now in internal testing and bugfixing)
New gamecontrols
Forced reinitialized players
Desync issues
Better sound over network
Central economy (type related cleanup and respawn, dynamic tweaking)
New basic zombie behavior
Partial reworking of respawn / cleanup system according to required type-related implementation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rYchHHHYd4#ws
