Neuer Wochenbericht - 24.05.2016

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)

[img width=700 height=683]http://i.imgur.com/SWoG5vb.jpg[/img]

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