Neuer Wochenbericht - 10.01.2017

Hello Survivors,

New year is here and with it the first Status Report. Brian would like to present major goals for 2017 and Peter talks about reasons why the game is more hardcore than before.

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors!

Its our first Status Report of the year - and as we've had team members trickling back in through the first week of the year it might be a bit of a dry one, but lets take a look at the major goals going forward as well as what has occured so far in 2017.

As work on 0.62 and the Beta milestones move forward, internal teams have contined in our goal to address the remaining issues in 0.61, and hopefully introduce vehicles to stable branch. Over the last few weeks the team has been cycling issues through exp, and onto stable directed at:

Known Server Crashes
Adjustments to Infected Behavior
Adjustments to Hypothermia damage
Fixes for Vehicle and Tent Lifetime
Fixes for Invisible Body Parts
Vehicles on Exp falling through terrain
Fireplaces not being able to be placed in Stoves

In addition to these adjustments cycling through the Exp/Unstable branch, the development team is tracking and working to address a number of additional issues:

VOIP Volume/Proximity Dropoff
Vehicle client side performance
Server side performance drops (Causing issues such as player position desync, delayed actions, etc)
Server side memory consumption
Additional known server crashes
Infected spawning behavior issues
Contined polish and work on addressing remaining issues with vehicles

As mentioned this is all in addition to ongoing work for both 0.62 and Beta milestones - Once we get internal builds in a state we are confident to start showing examples of both visuals, and client side performance for 0.62 we'll be sharing that. All of us here on the dev team are excited about this, as the small team of artists and support programmer begin to start preperation for branching for this milestone. I know this Status Report is chock full of cool and amazing things, but our first goals as we kick back into the groove for the new year are squarely focused on addressing the critical 0.61 issues you've all been experiencing, and pushing forward into 0.62 and Beta.

We all hope you had a great holiday season, and were able to spend time with your friends, families, and most important loved ones.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Dev Update/Peter

With the release of 0.61 version of DayZ, one major issue raised by the community, which is still discussed back and forth, was the noticeable increase in difficulty of the PvE challenge in the game. I wanted to comment on this.

Recently we took advantage of the new dynamic spawning system and because of that, concentration of infected is much higher then ever before (and I hope, there will be even more of them in future with the possibility of hordes when everything goes well). Now, when we finally achieved some reasonable numbers of infected in locations for intended gameplay purposes, it is unthinkable that they will just stand there, ignoring you while filling up empty space in settlements like scenery. It seems some don't remember how harsh infected were in the mod back in the days, when crawling on your belly for long minutes to observe a town to choose an entry point with the least resistance wasn't anything special. Don't forget that infected are meant to be a real threat to survival in Chernarus. You either need to avoid them or fight them (or eventually flee if you are lucky).

There are some known issues in AI which need to be fixed and I understand that it may be hard to have a stealth approach with old habits that came from nearly nonexistent infected in the past, and without the planned presence indicator (combined with how much noise you make and how well you are visible) in the upcoming HUD, you can try to follow some general rules which might help you - stay low, keep distance and avoid their line of sight (yes, they have peripheral vision too). As far as close combat goes, it will be overhauled once the new player is ready and we already started to prototype it in meantime. Of course reported issues like infected running through seemingly closed doors, or spawning right next to you are unacceptable and will be fixed.

If you would like to read more about design of the Infected, check out the Status Report released in 3rd March 2015.

Also, rain and ensuing low body temperatures become a factor to consider in the fight for survival. Which again, is nothing unexpected and you shouldn't be afraid of it, just adapt to it. When all the systems like metabolism, diseases, injuries, stamina, weather impact, infected, predators and others will fall in place and became fine balanced you will witness a definitive survival game, where you need to be careful, have to plan ahead and get prepared for possible upcoming situations - this is DayZ people.

Stay strong and never give up... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer