Neuer Wochenbericht - 08.11.2016

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

It has been a pretty exciting (and potentially stressful at times) two weeks for development on DayZ, both in the .61 development and the discussion on moving forward beyond that. This Status Report I'll go over what we're currently focusing addressing on 0.61 experimental, and then I'm going to summarize the main points from the 0.62 and Beyond talk at PAX Australia.

As many of you may know, we've gone through several iterations on Experimental/Unstable branch for 0.61. With our principle focus being on server stability, and performance. The gameplay programming team has been experimenting with several possible options in improving our server side performance, which you as survivors will directly see as improved infected responsivity and speed, faster user actions, and general overall improved responsivity to your interactions with the world. While we've made some strong improvements in regards to stability, we're not quite where we'd like to be with server performance. As I've mentioned many times before - server performance is and will continue to be an ongoing area of focus for us throughout development and into the beta phase. That said, it is especially important to the 0.61 experience, given that at a gameplay level the dynamic spawning of infected is such a corner stone. I won't spend too much time talking about this, as Mirek is going to elaborate a bit on some of the different changes his team has been working on in this area further in to the SR.

Enough rambling, lets take a look at what critical issues we have on 0.61 Exp/Unstable.

VOIP Icon missing when using VOIP
Server Performance can dip below acceptable line
Character deformation when entering structure under high ping
Character model twitching when standing on bodies
Client side crashes (Several)
VOIP Volume balancing
Character sounds balancing
Characters hands stuck raised in some situations
Server side crashes tied to specific item
Character roll backs during some server crashes
Reconnecting / Manipulating weapon magazine can prevent magazine use

Keep in mind this is just a list of critical fixes for 0.61 Stable - and is fluid based on the feedback and data we get back from 0.62 Experimental/Unstable builds. If you've encountered other critical issues, please let us know about it via our feedback tracker or on our official forums.

As mentioned earlier, I was at PAX Australia in Melbourne this last weekend and had the opportunity to talk about where we are headed after 0.61 hits stable with the Australian and New Zealand community. For those that would rather not read my rambling wall of texts, I will be re-recording the audio along with the presentation slides. However, for those that don't mind reading - I'm going to summarize the presentation in this Status Report. (We'll jump past the start of the presentation that talks about .61, as if you are reading a Status Report this is probably redundant information)

Now that .61 is on Experimental/Unstable - lets take a look at what our plans internally are for development beyond .61 hitting Stable branch on Steam. Once this occurs, the primary bulk of the DayZ development team will be switching their focus to the "Beta" milestone for DayZ. Beta for us is a major point in our development, and it goes without saying that it has its own challenge and hurdles. This milestone is focused on the following areas:

New Animation System
New Player Controller
New User Actions
Improved Vehicle Physical Simulation
And that big ol' feature/content backlog (that is dependant on these technologies)
Now what do I mean when I say "Backlog"? Well, as many of you may be aware - there are a good deal of gameplay systems, mechanics, items, and more that we have talked about in previous Status Reports, presentations, and are sitting in the "In Progress" column on our Trello. Nearly every single one of them are dependant upon the technologies listed above, either through technical limitation, or having just been written from the ground up on Enforce script and designed with the new tech specifically in mind. At the presentation in Australia I gave the following examples:

Base Building Improvements
Electrical System items
Character Lifespan
New Vehicles
New Items & Weapons
Now, one of the key points I tried to point out during this presentation was how critical this milestone is to the progress towards the final version of DayZ. Work on not only the technologies that power this milestone, but all the content and mechanics that we hope to hit with it, has been an ongoing task throughout DayZ's development. Artists, Designers, Animators, and Programmers have been working for quite some time on changes to DayZ that can't hit the Early Access userbase until these changes to DayZ's engine are ready to be merged into the main trunk of our development. This won't be a simple task, either. The work described is very similar to the change to DayZ's rendering technology in its risk and complexity. I've likened these milestone goals to a changing of the spine of DayZ, at least at a gameplay level. So, as mentioned before - once we get 0.61 to Stable branch - the primary bulk of DayZ's development team shifts all its focus on this goal. Exactly how much of that feature backlog we will be able to get into this milestone will be discussed in more detail in future Status Reports, once we can properly gauge any potential risk - but make no mistake, this is both an exciting time for us on the development team, but also a major task.

While the primary bulk of the team is focused on this, our beta milestone - a small 5 man team (Comprised mostly of artists, environment designers, and support from one programmer) will be branching off to work on a 0.62 update to DayZ Early Access focused on a much needed overhaul of Chernarus's visual fidelity. What exactly do we mean by that? Well - lets take a look.

Road Surfaces

Damaged Roadways

Dirt Roads

Forest Density & Fidelity

Forest Undergrowth and Clutter

Now, in addition to to the obvious goal of bringing the visual of appearance of Chernarus + to a more modern level, the massive improvement in making our forests not only look more *real*, but to allow users to more believably create hidden camps and stashes in forests that more closely resemble the forests you might find in the Czech Republic is obvious. It merits mentioning that these images we are sharing with you here are initial tests. There is still a good deal of work, and analysis required to see how dense and believable we can make these forests, fields, and so on without compromising client side performance. However, we're all excited by what we've achieved so far - and as we get closer to this interim 0.62 milestone that the small team dedicated to it is working on, we'll be sharing more - both visually, and input on where we are with these goals.

So lets recap what we've covered in this:

0.61 hits Stable branch
Principle DayZ team starts work on our Beta milestone
This is a massive overhaul of our core gameplay
Focus on New Animation Sys, Player Controller, Enforce Script transition, New User Actions
We start hitting that content/feature backlog we have
This is a massive task for us, both technically and gameplay wise
While this is ongoing, a splinter team of 5 developers approx will start work on an interim 0.62 Visual Overhaul of Chernarus

Thanks for making it through that wall of text, and for those that would prefer the audio/visual narration, I'll have that on our Youtube as soon as possible! I hope you're all excited as I am for the dayz/days ahead (heh heh heh) and now that we've got this Status Report out and I'm back in the office - I'm going to get some time in on the latest 0.61 Experimental Update.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Dev Update/Mirek

I will split this status report on two parts - work related to 0.61 and work related to later versions.

Starting with 0.61. The last two weeks we were dealing mostly with issues blocking experimental release and after that with stability of servers. We found and fixed that ugly crash, which was related to shooting and damaging world entities, disabled infected's loot was a side effect of commit related to networking optimizations - we have a fix for this, so infected's loot will be back today or tomorrow. Also, the new server browser has gotten some fixes (there was a client crash related to server browser) and improvements (you can see slot counts and also server browser will show you how many player's are waiting in login queue).

Now we have to deal with other client/server crashes (there are still too much of them), some synchronization issues (we have reports that client side correction doesn't work well sometimes) and we also prepared some server side performance optimizations, which are not merged to experimental branch yet.

A lot of people were also complaining about low FPS/movement jittering. This issue is not connected to renderer, it's a game side issue and it's related to new player's synchronization logic. Player is now simulated by fixed time step, before it was every render frame. That means player is simulated by the same number of steps on every computer, no one has an advantage with better hardware and every computer is sending the same amount of input messages to the server. The issue there is that interpolation between these simulation steps isn't done, currently we're working on fixing this.

Another big issue, character saving when server performance is low. This fix is ready for release.

And another improvement is ready for release, as we disabled AI freezing when the nearest player is farther than 500 meters. But first, we have to test this on experimental servers to see if it negatively affects server performance.

The rest of the gameplay programmers are still working on new features for the damage system, infected's AI, vehicle physics and central loot economy. We're not still sure if we will merge something into 0.61 or if it will be available in later version, but here is a short list of what has been done so far.

infected AI - improved target selection
vehicled physics - improved wheels friction
vehicles physics - collisions with small items (bow arrows too )
infected spawning together with dynamic events (like helicrash)

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer

Dev Update/Dustin

Greetings all,

I don't do too many updates (that would be zero until today), but we have some stuff going on here at the BI offices I wanted to share. First, if you've not gotten an opportunity to check out our latest DayZ Q&A with Enfusion Engine architect Filip Doksanský, check out Part I and Part II by clicking the red links. It's a great interview and solid insight into just how hard this development team has worked over the last year to fully realize the vision of DayZ. We have also opened up the latest round of question submissions for our next Q&A with Lead Gameplay Programmer Miroslav Maněna. We're accepting questions on Twitter (hashtag them with #GameProgZ so we can easily find 'em) and the official DayZ forums until the 14th of November.

And on that, you might have noticed a significant uptick in quality in our in-house DayZ-related videos. We're stoked to have a solid videographer and editor named Filip working with us now to produce high quality video content at a much swifter pace than we were able to accomplish before he came to us. With his help, you should get a much clearer picture of what development of DayZ is really like, and what it takes to build every aspect of DayZ's world. I'm quite excited about what's coming down the pipe related to video content, and I think you will be too.

And remember, the best way to learn even more about what we do is to participate in the official forums. It's a direct conduit from you to us to engage in conversation about your questions, concerns and general inquiries. We hope to see more of you make accounts and join in the discussion.

Finally, we've been getting asked for new BI Store apparel for a long while, and I'm happy to announce we've added faction t-shirts that are available now. You can represent the 27th MEU, ChDKZ and CDF factions, with a slight delay on the NAPA faction t-shirt. We'll drop a mention on Twitter as soon as it's in the store as well. And if you haven't visited in a while, our faction patches are available in the store too. Click here to give the store a visit.

There is a lot coming up in the coming months I'm excited to share with you all as DayZ gets closer and closer to beta and beyond.

Until then, stay hydrated, and try not to get chewed on by an Infected. They have super gross oral hygiene.

Cheers,

-Dustin, PR & Brand Manager