Good Tuesday Survivors,

While all the players' attention is now turned to E3 in Los Angeles, we are at the office working hard on further updates. Brian will outline our decisions about the distribution of servers for the future, Mirek will show you how close-range combat and camera collision look in 0.63, and Victor is talking about gun animations. Let's have a look!

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Mirek
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Adam
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

I thought this Status Report would be a perfect time to clarify some things with the hive, and the server browser for those that may have missed me speaking about it in 2016. I'm sure some of you may have noticed that the production team recently made the move to separate the Official DayZ servers into their own section of the hive, independent from the community hosted public servers. (Albeit with some difficulty on the game server provider side of properly configuring those community rented publics). One of the things Peter and I sat down and talked about when we looked at how we wanted the server browser to look moving into Beta and beyond, was making it crystal clear for new and existing users what servers were official, and what were user run (as well as modded, of course). Tied into this was a need to divide progression made on user hosted servers from progression on the official DayZ experience. Allowing folks to rent servers introduced a good deal of potential methods to exploit how localized server storage operates, which in turn can flood the public hive with ill-gotten gear. Trying to tackle this by limiting what can be done on the hosting side in the end just limits more and more what those server operators can do, and puts an unneeded responsibility on the limited support resources that are available.

For me (and I think I can safely say for Peter as well) we needed to be certain what the initial experience a new user to DayZ would be experiencing. From a design perspective, it is very hard to be certain exactly what new users are encountering if we aren't clearly presenting them with a straight path to an official experience the first time they play the game. Sure, naming conventions for official servers worked okay for a bit - but at a certain point it just turns into tribal knowledge. The users who have been around for a while, or those who came from the mod understand, but new users can find it daunting. This is why when putting together the first mockups of the new server browser we made sure to earmark a few things:

•  Separating Official, Community, and Modded servers into their own tabs
•  Splitting the Official Servers off from the rest of the public hive to be certain the experience in them comes from them alone
•  Maintaining the public hive on rented servers to continue that tradition of a shared character across many DayZ servers

 

When the new server browser finally gets to the point in which these tabs are in and functional, the whole layout will make much more sense to existing and new users. The first thing they (new users) should experience is DayZ exactly as the developers had intended it. Obviously, if said new user has friends on a community or modded server he/she can navigate there easily. I know it seems like a small thing in the grand scheme of the whole project, and probably fairly trivial given the massive undertaking that beta is with the animation system, new user actions, and so on - but the devil is in the details and as far as I'm concerned, we as a development team needed to take steps to make it easier to understand, and get into the official Bohemia Interactive run experience. Allow folks to easily know what servers they can be certain persistence isn't reset on, and so forth.

The rest of the team will have more interesting and exciting things to talk about this week I'm sure - but I wanted to make sure I took time to address these in progress changes to the organization of the hive, and its intent.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey Guys,

0.62 has hit stable and we tried to livestream after a longer period of time to start practicing for what lies ahead. Hope you liked it!  The strike team for this patch will join rest of our efforts here and march on with BETA tasks forward. That said, for 0.62 you can expect a bit more fixes to the most crucial issues that we can reasonably look into, rolling them to experimental and stable over time. Some of the changes I`ve seen today to coloring of the map and vegetation are amazing. I`m very happy with the visuals that guys have been able to produce. Were also looking into server crashes from storage (persistance) corruption, vehicle tweaks and server browser separation as mentioned by Brian. But there are limits to what we can offer in reasonable time for the old client. 

The track for BETA has moved forward and keeps its focus on weapons and gunplay. So discussions on handling particles, state machines and weapon manipulation are always happening around the office with all people handling their parts of the game in all the features that are on their way for BETA. 

Since there is not that much to report in terms of scope or change of focus. I'll share some interesting stories or problems we have been dealing with in the past two weeks. One of the bigger issues that is bothering us right now is tied to animation of weapons. As the technology changes you have details that can only be built when rest of the modules are in place and testable. Looking at the internal build of the game there are some funny bugs all around the new stuff that one might get a good laugh from but there is no way they can make it live.

While player is animating properly and even uses inverse kinematics in the new modules, configs are getting set up, player turns are tweaked. There are elements on weapons that need to be animated as well. It's one of the older parts of the engine originally and if any of the modders remember. Animating proxies on weapons have been done through configuration files and in text. We're moving away from that, but because how tied it is to some of the not refactored parts we are encountering some interesting things from parts of weapons flying around to being invisible at times. There apparently is still something left that has not been identified properly and we need to solve it as soon as possible. Refactoring something as large as RV engine certainly has its challenges and these things are hard to predict with codebase that old. 

Even from a knowhow standpoint it's not about the skills of the programmer himself, but rather the lack of documentation or knowledge how the previous system has been setup, and why. And as such the debugging of these issues takes time and going forward we want to eliminate as much of the smaller details that are still set up the old way.  Its hours of research and digging from unknown code. And some of you might have a experience doing that. 

On the other hand were also battling the stability of the application itself. As all of you have been plagued by memory crashes, which are very hard to diagnose properly and fix. I have stories of similar issues even taking a year to debug from different projects I had pleasure working with. However were very much focusing on it with internal build as even the development environment gets very frustrating when you can`t iterate without crash sneaking up on you at random times. 

Funny thing is when you look at callstacks from these crashes, they usually just end up in memory sensitive parts of the engine, but the actual issue might have happened minutes before. And tracking it down is an enormous undertaking. We're not taking these issues lightly as for BETA none of these hard stoppers should be present. 

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams:

 

Programmers

• UI Inputs bugfixes
• Communication systems optimization
• Weapon handling and aiming
• Vehicle physics refactor
• Vehicle controller refactor
• 3rd person camera collision changes
• FNX basic state machine and script class tweaking
• IZH18 basic state machine and script class tweaking
• Animation events for player
• Physics collision system refactor and optimization
• Melee damage types
• Different damage levels in selections
• Attachments refactor
• Animals spawning
• AI hierarchy refactor
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes


Animators

• Throwing animations
• Two handed hit reactions
• Player turns for pistols
• Rifle hit reactions
• IZH18 animation tweaks
• Combat player graph

 

Designers

• Fireplace new particle system implementation
• Traps with grenades
• Drag and drop for final inventory design
• Player action targeting and floating cursor
• Communication systems
• Quantity refactor
• Advanced placing system tweaks
• Construction watchtower
• Animation events for player
• New zombie models
• New player models
• Animation events for player
• Server browser separation
• Area damage
• Crafting framework
• Vehicle tweaks

 

Audio

• Positional environment audio tweaks
• Infected audio recording preparation
• Player and weapon animation events setup

 

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• 0.62 feature testing
• Internal client stabilization

 

Art

• Old assets rework
• Buildings optimization
• Doors unification
• Weapon tweaks for new gunplay
• Car wrecks 
• New rock formations
• Color tweaks for Chernarus

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
As we want to accent official DayZ experience vs community one in long run, we separated shards for official and community servers with release of the 0.62 version. Now with upcoming update for 0.62 you will see this change reflected in server browser too. Instead of one 'Internet' tab there are now two tabs to make it clear. First 'Official' tab with all servers operated directly by Bohemia Interactive, while second 'Community' tab pools all servers rented by users.

Further work is being made on crafting system. Now, with item in hands, it's possible to initiate crafting and choose between recipes directly looking at another item in the world, or from the quick bar by holding a slot where said item is assigned. Such possibilities for crafting will help to minimize inventory use. On the other side of core features spectrum, we are working hard in close cooperation with animators and programmers on ranged and melee combat. Focus is currently mostly on the aiming model for firearms (weapon handling part is being worked on in parallel of course), which is combination of hands IK, character turns, it ensures that weapon is always pointing what you are looking at, that model also handles sights misalignment, sway which could be modified by character state from modifiers to stamina and hold breath, and recoil modified by weapon's attachments. Light and heavy hit impacts are now connected to hit events and are played character being hit from both types of combat. We would like to add one more hit impact to the mix which is a knockdown to the ground at the end of combo. You can read more about upcoming new melee combat in one of past Status Reports. I will get back to firearms in more detail in some upcoming Status Reports.

Do you remember that injured animation shown in our official DayZ Early Access launch trailer from the end of 2013? We finally plugged in the injured set of animations to the new character and it directly reflects your health state. Additionally, we also added exhausted idle animation which is connected to the stamina system. With these changes, we are getting closer to our ideal state where it should be easy to observe other character to see what they are actually doing and to judge their overall condition.

Believe what you see... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer



 
First of all, I would like to write about the 0.62 branch state. We have received some important data about client and server crashes, which should help us to stabilize the build present on the stable branch, so hopefully there will be stability improvements soon. We have also merged the fix candidate for floating vehicles and very important physics optimization. Currently, physics is consuming most of the CPU resources (at least on servers), so we hope this optimization will significantly improve server performance. These merges will be available on experimental branch today or tomorrow and we will be very happy if there will be enough players, so we will be able to confirm that this optimization is working well.

On 0.63 - we're cooperating closely with designers and animators. The most of work goes into weapon manipulation now. This basically means we're creating new finite states machines for handling the weapon logic and connecting all weapon manipulation animations into these state machines. If everything goes right, we will show you how firing, reloading, chambering, unjamming and other mechanics look in the next status report.

Another big part of the game - close range fight - is in progress. You saw some animations before, today I would like to show you how first hit animations are looking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXGX42HDYcI

3rd person camera collisions have received some tweaks last two weeks. We are trying to add some dynamics, when camera is obstructed - so here you can see some work in progress stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykucZZRvdM

Please keep in mind we're showing work in progress state, things can change during development and it's very likely that all these features will be tweaked also in the beta stage of development.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer


 
Today I would like to share with you an update from the animations department. In past weeks, we have been focused mainly on player character and weapons. The latest additions to the player are improved turns when standing still. For animations, this means improving and redoing turn animations for all items. We are iterating this now in cooperation with our animation programmer to find the best result that looks and feels good.

Weapons have received some love as well. We have finished all unjamming animations, and we are focusing on implementation. First guns are now animated in the game. We are adding the missing animations like recoil and dry fire for each weapon. At the same time the logic for these firearms is being made so each weapon knows what the character can do with it. Basically, we need to cover all the states the weapon can have and provide animations for it.

We have started implementing hit reactions for the player character. There will be light and heavy animation for each direction, each item and each stance. That is some decent amount of animation data, but we already have a working prototype in the game.

Last but not least, there was small mocap session last week. We have captured some new gestures. Some of them are already implemented and some will be in the upcoming weeks. The gestures menu will now include new signals like Come, Watch, Down, Move, some new taunts and others that were requested by the community.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator


 
As I have mentioned on the live-stream last week, we plan to include additional tweaks to the color of clutter (grass and other miscellaneous objects in forests) for the version 0.62 in the nearest stable update window. I'm glad to announce our environment designer Mark has prepared the first iteration of these changes and it is available on the experimental branch for you to check out. For the full list of changes made please visit the appropriate experimental thread on the official forums HERE. 













-  Adam Franců / Senior map designer


 
Hello Survivors,

So many things happened last week and we are glad everything turned out as planned, because we really made a lot of work on it.
First, we organized an event for content creators and their friends on the new castle the West. It was a PVP event in which one side defended the castle and the other attacked it with the equipment they brought with them. 51 people joined the server, unfortunately not everyone managed to get to the castle, because some of them were killed by wolves or by infected, which are simply the risks of the game. We had 14 members of the dev team there, including the lead designer Peter Nespesny and Sumrak, who is taking care of the Chernarus map and created the castle in which the event took place. The battle was really bloody and the defenders used all their strength to keep the attackers in front of the gates, but eventually succumbed and the attackers took the castle for themselves. I would like to congratulate the winners who earned their victory. How the event looked through the eyes of the attackers can be seen in a video by Jakon72: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OfzTrJ4vW4


Some of the participants in a group photo before start of the battle.


 
Photo of the winners who conquered the castle by Redseven.



Thanks so much to all who attended and we are looking forward to seeing you again on another event.
 

We were running live stream in our office at the same time as the event. We announced the switch of 0.62 update from the Experimental branch to the Stable branch. Lead producer Eugen Harton, lead designer Peter Nespesny, senior map designer Adam Francu and brand manager Martin Čulák jointly discussed what you can expect from the update 0.62 and other interesting topics. In case you missed it, you can find the video on our YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhpG-naXPA

We also released a video that shows the main features of the new update. If you have not seen it, you should definitely watch it because it is very good and it does not take you more than two minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsP11VEZCa8


I would also like to address my colleagues' request from the Feedback Tracker. We need to get as much information as possible about the crashes that happen to you on the Stable and Experimental branches. Therefore, I am asking you to contact our Feedback Tracker in case of crash and upload files from the C:\Users\YourPCName\AppData\Local\DayZ  folder to help to solve the crash problems.

We would like to thank for the reports about leather not getting tanned in barrels. Over the weekend you came up with an incredible number of tickets for this issue and we are just looking into it now. And of course, if you encounter any other bugs, we will be happy if you report it to our Feedback Tracker.

 

Channel Pitstop Head made a two-part talk about DayZ with our creative director Brian Hicks, which is really interesting and can give you answers to some of the questions bothering you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-IUVCGV5XM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64SpKQJ2H7I&t=1287s

And the last piece of community content I'd like to share with you is an amazing artwork by Dominik Figlhuber, who has been able to turn an ordinary DayZ screenshot into amazing art. Simply beautiful, thank you for sharing it with us!



Original screenshot.

 



Waiting at daytime. Alternative edit.

 



Final edit.



And one last thing, I would like to show you a photo I secretly photographed in the office when the designers were discussing weapons for the update 0.63. It's not of a good quality, but I thought you might be interested. And shhh, don't tell them, they do not like taking pictures.



Thank you for your content survivors and see you in two weeks!

Header image by Harold Palmer.

- Baty / Community Manager

Good Tuesday Survivors,

While all the players' attention is now turned to E3 in Los Angeles, we are at the office working hard on further updates. Brian will outline our decisions about the distribution of servers for the future, Mirek will show you how close-range combat and camera collision look in 0.63, and Victor is talking about gun animations. Let's have a look!

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Mirek
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Adam
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

I thought this Status Report would be a perfect time to clarify some things with the hive, and the server browser for those that may have missed me speaking about it in 2016. I'm sure some of you may have noticed that the production team recently made the move to separate the Official DayZ servers into their own section of the hive, independent from the community hosted public servers. (Albeit with some difficulty on the game server provider side of properly configuring those community rented publics). One of the things Peter and I sat down and talked about when we looked at how we wanted the server browser to look moving into Beta and beyond, was making it crystal clear for new and existing users what servers were official, and what were user run (as well as modded, of course). Tied into this was a need to divide progression made on user hosted servers from progression on the official DayZ experience. Allowing folks to rent servers introduced a good deal of potential methods to exploit how localized server storage operates, which in turn can flood the public hive with ill-gotten gear. Trying to tackle this by limiting what can be done on the hosting side in the end just limits more and more what those server operators can do, and puts an unneeded responsibility on the limited support resources that are available.

For me (and I think I can safely say for Peter as well) we needed to be certain what the initial experience a new user to DayZ would be experiencing. From a design perspective, it is very hard to be certain exactly what new users are encountering if we aren't clearly presenting them with a straight path to an official experience the first time they play the game. Sure, naming conventions for official servers worked okay for a bit - but at a certain point it just turns into tribal knowledge. The users who have been around for a while, or those who came from the mod understand, but new users can find it daunting. This is why when putting together the first mockups of the new server browser we made sure to earmark a few things:

•  Separating Official, Community, and Modded servers into their own tabs
•  Splitting the Official Servers off from the rest of the public hive to be certain the experience in them comes from them alone
•  Maintaining the public hive on rented servers to continue that tradition of a shared character across many DayZ servers

 

When the new server browser finally gets to the point in which these tabs are in and functional, the whole layout will make much more sense to existing and new users. The first thing they (new users) should experience is DayZ exactly as the developers had intended it. Obviously, if said new user has friends on a community or modded server he/she can navigate there easily. I know it seems like a small thing in the grand scheme of the whole project, and probably fairly trivial given the massive undertaking that beta is with the animation system, new user actions, and so on - but the devil is in the details and as far as I'm concerned, we as a development team needed to take steps to make it easier to understand, and get into the official Bohemia Interactive run experience. Allow folks to easily know what servers they can be certain persistence isn't reset on, and so forth.

The rest of the team will have more interesting and exciting things to talk about this week I'm sure - but I wanted to make sure I took time to address these in progress changes to the organization of the hive, and its intent.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey Guys,

0.62 has hit stable and we tried to livestream after a longer period of time to start practicing for what lies ahead. Hope you liked it!  The strike team for this patch will join rest of our efforts here and march on with BETA tasks forward. That said, for 0.62 you can expect a bit more fixes to the most crucial issues that we can reasonably look into, rolling them to experimental and stable over time. Some of the changes I`ve seen today to coloring of the map and vegetation are amazing. I`m very happy with the visuals that guys have been able to produce. Were also looking into server crashes from storage (persistance) corruption, vehicle tweaks and server browser separation as mentioned by Brian. But there are limits to what we can offer in reasonable time for the old client. 

The track for BETA has moved forward and keeps its focus on weapons and gunplay. So discussions on handling particles, state machines and weapon manipulation are always happening around the office with all people handling their parts of the game in all the features that are on their way for BETA. 

Since there is not that much to report in terms of scope or change of focus. I'll share some interesting stories or problems we have been dealing with in the past two weeks. One of the bigger issues that is bothering us right now is tied to animation of weapons. As the technology changes you have details that can only be built when rest of the modules are in place and testable. Looking at the internal build of the game there are some funny bugs all around the new stuff that one might get a good laugh from but there is no way they can make it live.

While player is animating properly and even uses inverse kinematics in the new modules, configs are getting set up, player turns are tweaked. There are elements on weapons that need to be animated as well. It's one of the older parts of the engine originally and if any of the modders remember. Animating proxies on weapons have been done through configuration files and in text. We're moving away from that, but because how tied it is to some of the not refactored parts we are encountering some interesting things from parts of weapons flying around to being invisible at times. There apparently is still something left that has not been identified properly and we need to solve it as soon as possible. Refactoring something as large as RV engine certainly has its challenges and these things are hard to predict with codebase that old. 

Even from a knowhow standpoint it's not about the skills of the programmer himself, but rather the lack of documentation or knowledge how the previous system has been setup, and why. And as such the debugging of these issues takes time and going forward we want to eliminate as much of the smaller details that are still set up the old way.  Its hours of research and digging from unknown code. And some of you might have a experience doing that. 

On the other hand were also battling the stability of the application itself. As all of you have been plagued by memory crashes, which are very hard to diagnose properly and fix. I have stories of similar issues even taking a year to debug from different projects I had pleasure working with. However were very much focusing on it with internal build as even the development environment gets very frustrating when you can`t iterate without crash sneaking up on you at random times. 

Funny thing is when you look at callstacks from these crashes, they usually just end up in memory sensitive parts of the engine, but the actual issue might have happened minutes before. And tracking it down is an enormous undertaking. We're not taking these issues lightly as for BETA none of these hard stoppers should be present. 

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams:

 

Programmers

• UI Inputs bugfixes
• Communication systems optimization
• Weapon handling and aiming
• Vehicle physics refactor
• Vehicle controller refactor
• 3rd person camera collision changes
• FNX basic state machine and script class tweaking
• IZH18 basic state machine and script class tweaking
• Animation events for player
• Physics collision system refactor and optimization
• Melee damage types
• Different damage levels in selections
• Attachments refactor
• Animals spawning
• AI hierarchy refactor
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes


Animators

• Throwing animations
• Two handed hit reactions
• Player turns for pistols
• Rifle hit reactions
• IZH18 animation tweaks
• Combat player graph

 

Designers

• Fireplace new particle system implementation
• Traps with grenades
• Drag and drop for final inventory design
• Player action targeting and floating cursor
• Communication systems
• Quantity refactor
• Advanced placing system tweaks
• Construction watchtower
• Animation events for player
• New zombie models
• New player models
• Animation events for player
• Server browser separation
• Area damage
• Crafting framework
• Vehicle tweaks

 

Audio

• Positional environment audio tweaks
• Infected audio recording preparation
• Player and weapon animation events setup

 

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• 0.62 feature testing
• Internal client stabilization

 

Art

• Old assets rework
• Buildings optimization
• Doors unification
• Weapon tweaks for new gunplay
• Car wrecks 
• New rock formations
• Color tweaks for Chernarus

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
As we want to accent official DayZ experience vs community one in long run, we separated shards for official and community servers with release of the 0.62 version. Now with upcoming update for 0.62 you will see this change reflected in server browser too. Instead of one 'Internet' tab there are now two tabs to make it clear. First 'Official' tab with all servers operated directly by Bohemia Interactive, while second 'Community' tab pools all servers rented by users.

Further work is being made on crafting system. Now, with item in hands, it's possible to initiate crafting and choose between recipes directly looking at another item in the world, or from the quick bar by holding a slot where said item is assigned. Such possibilities for crafting will help to minimize inventory use. On the other side of core features spectrum, we are working hard in close cooperation with animators and programmers on ranged and melee combat. Focus is currently mostly on the aiming model for firearms (weapon handling part is being worked on in parallel of course), which is combination of hands IK, character turns, it ensures that weapon is always pointing what you are looking at, that model also handles sights misalignment, sway which could be modified by character state from modifiers to stamina and hold breath, and recoil modified by weapon's attachments. Light and heavy hit impacts are now connected to hit events and are played character being hit from both types of combat. We would like to add one more hit impact to the mix which is a knockdown to the ground at the end of combo. You can read more about upcoming new melee combat in one of past Status Reports. I will get back to firearms in more detail in some upcoming Status Reports.

Do you remember that injured animation shown in our official DayZ Early Access launch trailer from the end of 2013? We finally plugged in the injured set of animations to the new character and it directly reflects your health state. Additionally, we also added exhausted idle animation which is connected to the stamina system. With these changes, we are getting closer to our ideal state where it should be easy to observe other character to see what they are actually doing and to judge their overall condition.

Believe what you see... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer



 
First of all, I would like to write about the 0.62 branch state. We have received some important data about client and server crashes, which should help us to stabilize the build present on the stable branch, so hopefully there will be stability improvements soon. We have also merged the fix candidate for floating vehicles and very important physics optimization. Currently, physics is consuming most of the CPU resources (at least on servers), so we hope this optimization will significantly improve server performance. These merges will be available on experimental branch today or tomorrow and we will be very happy if there will be enough players, so we will be able to confirm that this optimization is working well.

On 0.63 - we're cooperating closely with designers and animators. The most of work goes into weapon manipulation now. This basically means we're creating new finite states machines for handling the weapon logic and connecting all weapon manipulation animations into these state machines. If everything goes right, we will show you how firing, reloading, chambering, unjamming and other mechanics look in the next status report.

Another big part of the game - close range fight - is in progress. You saw some animations before, today I would like to show you how first hit animations are looking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXGX42HDYcI

3rd person camera collisions have received some tweaks last two weeks. We are trying to add some dynamics, when camera is obstructed - so here you can see some work in progress stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykucZZRvdM

Please keep in mind we're showing work in progress state, things can change during development and it's very likely that all these features will be tweaked also in the beta stage of development.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer


 
Today I would like to share with you an update from the animations department. In past weeks, we have been focused mainly on player character and weapons. The latest additions to the player are improved turns when standing still. For animations, this means improving and redoing turn animations for all items. We are iterating this now in cooperation with our animation programmer to find the best result that looks and feels good.

Weapons have received some love as well. We have finished all unjamming animations, and we are focusing on implementation. First guns are now animated in the game. We are adding the missing animations like recoil and dry fire for each weapon. At the same time the logic for these firearms is being made so each weapon knows what the character can do with it. Basically, we need to cover all the states the weapon can have and provide animations for it.

We have started implementing hit reactions for the player character. There will be light and heavy animation for each direction, each item and each stance. That is some decent amount of animation data, but we already have a working prototype in the game.

Last but not least, there was small mocap session last week. We have captured some new gestures. Some of them are already implemented and some will be in the upcoming weeks. The gestures menu will now include new signals like Come, Watch, Down, Move, some new taunts and others that were requested by the community.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator


 
As I have mentioned on the live-stream last week, we plan to include additional tweaks to the color of clutter (grass and other miscellaneous objects in forests) for the version 0.62 in the nearest stable update window. I'm glad to announce our environment designer Mark has prepared the first iteration of these changes and it is available on the experimental branch for you to check out. For the full list of changes made please visit the appropriate experimental thread on the official forums HERE. 













-  Adam Franců / Senior map designer


 
Hello Survivors,

So many things happened last week and we are glad everything turned out as planned, because we really made a lot of work on it.
First, we organized an event for content creators and their friends on the new castle the West. It was a PVP event in which one side defended the castle and the other attacked it with the equipment they brought with them. 51 people joined the server, unfortunately not everyone managed to get to the castle, because some of them were killed by wolves or by infected, which are simply the risks of the game. We had 14 members of the dev team there, including the lead designer Peter Nespesny and Sumrak, who is taking care of the Chernarus map and created the castle in which the event took place. The battle was really bloody and the defenders used all their strength to keep the attackers in front of the gates, but eventually succumbed and the attackers took the castle for themselves. I would like to congratulate the winners who earned their victory. How the event looked through the eyes of the attackers can be seen in a video by Jakon72: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OfzTrJ4vW4


Some of the participants in a group photo before start of the battle.


 
Photo of the winners who conquered the castle by Redseven.



Thanks so much to all who attended and we are looking forward to seeing you again on another event.
 

We were running live stream in our office at the same time as the event. We announced the switch of 0.62 update from the Experimental branch to the Stable branch. Lead producer Eugen Harton, lead designer Peter Nespesny, senior map designer Adam Francu and brand manager Martin Čulák jointly discussed what you can expect from the update 0.62 and other interesting topics. In case you missed it, you can find the video on our YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhpG-naXPA

We also released a video that shows the main features of the new update. If you have not seen it, you should definitely watch it because it is very good and it does not take you more than two minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsP11VEZCa8


I would also like to address my colleagues' request from the Feedback Tracker. We need to get as much information as possible about the crashes that happen to you on the Stable and Experimental branches. Therefore, I am asking you to contact our Feedback Tracker in case of crash and upload files from the C:\Users\YourPCName\AppData\Local\DayZ  folder to help to solve the crash problems.

We would like to thank for the reports about leather not getting tanned in barrels. Over the weekend you came up with an incredible number of tickets for this issue and we are just looking into it now. And of course, if you encounter any other bugs, we will be happy if you report it to our Feedback Tracker.

 

Channel Pitstop Head made a two-part talk about DayZ with our creative director Brian Hicks, which is really interesting and can give you answers to some of the questions bothering you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-IUVCGV5XM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64SpKQJ2H7I&t=1287s

And the last piece of community content I'd like to share with you is an amazing artwork by Dominik Figlhuber, who has been able to turn an ordinary DayZ screenshot into amazing art. Simply beautiful, thank you for sharing it with us!



Original screenshot.

 



Waiting at daytime. Alternative edit.

 



Final edit.



And one last thing, I would like to show you a photo I secretly photographed in the office when the designers were discussing weapons for the update 0.63. It's not of a good quality, but I thought you might be interested. And shhh, don't tell them, they do not like taking pictures.



Thank you for your content survivors and see you in two weeks!

Header image by Harold Palmer.

- Baty / Community Manager

This week, we're looking back at the release of 0.62 on Exerimental, outlining some of the issues that we'd like to see resolved before going to Stable (both visual and audio oriented). Peter and Eugen are sharing some of the work being currently done for BETA, and Baty is sharing her top picks of all the amazing content you created since 0.62 released last week.

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Adam
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Andrej
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

This Status Report, I don't have a whole ton for you. Obviously, 95% of the team is focused on 0.63 and getting it to a point in which we can begin testing on Experimental branch for that build. As some of you may not be aware, 0.62 recently hit Experimental, and the team has pulled a lot of good and actionable bug data from that build, as well as some strong feedback in regards to the first iteration of the new ambient audio.

You'll all be pleased to know that every bit of feedback regarding said new ambient audio is being investigated, and the audio team will be able to iterate upon some of that feedback. Any up to date progress we make will always be posted by Baty in the Experimental Patch Discussion section of the forums.

The team is currently tracking feedback in regards to the following on 0.62 Experimental:

• Misc feedback in regards to audio volume, general audio system behavior
• Behavior of some trees in the wind

 

There are also some attempted fixes included in today's Experimental update regardin:

• Collisions with some tree models
• Ironsights sometimes backing off after a few seconds
• Issues binding some mouse keys 

 

I'm sure Eugen will have some more meat on the bone when it comes to the progress on 0.63 itself. I for one am really, really anticipating being able to share the functionality of 0.63.

Stay safe out there!

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey guys!

So 0.62 Experimental happened and I can't thank you enough for the amazing content that you created with the new visuals for forests. There are many improvements that will still be coming to visuals over time - like reworking old low-quality assets and adding new features to the map as mentioned in Adam's Q&A video. It is a good showcase of the quality we aim for in both the visuals and gameplay for the 0.63/BETA release.

I mentioned a couple of things here previously that have now come in motion, full force. We have progressed and started working on smaller feature sets that will define gameplay of the BETA. One of the largest topics of discussion in the offices have been weapons and their handling for the new player. To understand what that means I have to sadly hit you with a large wall of text.

When you look at the live game, and what is happening on stable/experimental, you still see (for the most part) a content that is running on old technology. Since for BETA release, we have expanded the gunplay beyond what was possible previously, it means many things will be changing, and many have been mentioned here. However, to give you a sense of scale.

The work on the new animation system and all of its features took almost a year and a half of work. Animations for all of your weapons, with variations from continuous reloading, chambering, magazine manipulation, jamming, and more, took probably over a year in itself. All that culminating with implementation of aiming model that will support better implementation of recoil, sway, player turns, and even heavily improved manipulation of weapons in different stances.

A whole lot of our content is starting to get implemented - as I said before, we're finally making a game, instead of fully focusing on the technology. In the list below, I mention FNX and IZH18 - two weapons that are the first to be handled using these new systems. And I can't wait to have a shootout here with the guys once these are fully working internally.

For all these things:

• User actions that enable player to interact with items and objects, weapons included
• Synchronization setup that is largely inspired by what Overwatch did for their networking 
• Animation system that will make your avatar a living breathing human 
• Damage system that is easily tweakable and supports all sorts of hitzones, impact animations 
• New particle effects and sounds
• New character representation with all the things actually creating a survival experience

 

It's not that we don't expect bugs from their first iterations, but the reality for us is, that we have been working for 4 years now on things that you couldn't get your hands on in-game as of yet. And as the list of features above shows, all these systems can't really work without each other.

Even the new network synchronization is optimized for the new player and new physics. It makes me sad that it couldn't happen sooner, but I believe we will have a great game for you with 0.63/BETA.

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams:

Programmers

• UI Inputs
• Communication systems (megaphone, static radio, public address system)
• Weapon handling and aiming
• Vehicle physics refactor
• Vehicle controller refactor
• 3rd person camera collision changes
• FNX basic state machine and script class
• IZH18 basic state machine and script class
• Animation events for player
• Performance optimizations for item spawning
• Physics collision system refactor and optimization
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes

Animators

• Weapon mechanics animations polishing (unjamming, reloads)
• Inverse Kinematics poses
• Hit reactions on player
• Ranged combat prototype
• Player turns tweaking

Designers

• User actions in multiplayer
• Player representation
• New player and item spawn definition
• Player action targeting and floating cursor
• Communication systems
• Tree collisions fixes
• Advanced placing system
• Construction watchtower
• Diseases refactor for new player representation
• Animation events for player
• New zombie models
• New player models
• Animation events for player

Audio

• Positional environment audio tweaks
• Infected audio recording preparation
• Player and weapon animation events setup

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• 0.62 feature testing
• Internal client stabilization
• User actions for 0.63 testing

Art

• Old assets rework
• Buildings optimization
• Doors unification

These are thousands of hours spent on our side to bring a dream that is yet to be fully realized. Curiosity, Creativity, Community. Three pillars of Bohemia Interactive that we want to uphold.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Among plenty of other issues we face, picking items from the world is another one which is far from ideal in its current state. Aiming precisely with cursor on items could be fine, unless you run into some annoyances. Some items are rendered too small on the screen because of their close-to-real-life dimensions, and they are often being obstructed with other objects in world like dense grass, and tend to mimic underlying surface textures.

You know the drill, many times it's difficult to find a pistol, or even a rifle in some cases, and pick it up (I don't even want to mention special cases like ammo piles). At the end, such frustration leads to the use of the vicinity part of inventory screen as the path of the least resistance. Each open of the inventory screen disrupts the immersion of being right there for you as a player, and if I count in movement during opening the inventory (leading to jogging in chaotic patterns to find that damn ammo pile), it's breaking immersion also for all observers who had to look at your misery.

Along with restriction of character movement while in inventory, we added dynamic selection of target, which evaluates conditions such as distance from player, screen center and angle. Selected target is then visually marked by snapping interaction icon to it in screen space. We went beyond items and similarly, we applied this system also to interaction with vehicles and static objects in world like doors or ladders. I like fluid interconnection of a gven item and the action which it brings to the table. It feels natural and adds to the physicality of the world - it even feels closer to hand to use your eyes for coordination, instead of rigorous movement with whole head around. You can see it in action on examples below.





Maybe you are wondering now, why we just simply didn't apply highlighting to items and objects? Apart from highlights being quite artificial and also immersion breaking, they are not solving one of the problems mentioned above - frequent necessity to pixel hunt with your center of the screen. But never say never, maybe there will be some very decent version of highlighting in future to make it more seamless and to pop up items a bit, even when I'm not kinda fan of it.

Dynamic target selection is still in progress and there are some small issues we need to solve, for example shaking of icon caused currently by insufficient frequency of UI updates on client side. However, from first tests of its current iteration, it feels really good, and what matters the most - it's very helpful!

They will not hide anymore... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 

Dev Update/Adam

Almost a week since 0.62 update release on Experimental branch - I hope that you are having a good time exploring the new Chernarus! First, I would like to give you a small insight into what is happening in our department, mainly what are our plans towards the Stable release of update 0.62.

• Additional improvements and fixes to the surface mask - to resolve issues such as forest clutter appearance in the middle of industrial area in Solnichniy
• Satellite texture and ground clutter changes - decreasing overall brightness along with other tweaks (aimed at improving visuals of short and tall grass)
• Lighting config tweaks
• Map improvements and fixes

 

Now I would like to talk a bit about client performance on the new Chernarus. So far, we have observed quite positive reception from the experimental branch testing - everyone is welcomed there, please report if you encounter any issues on feedback tracker.

As I already mentioned in previous Status Reports, the introduction of Enfusion renderer back in update 0.60 gave us quite a big room for possible landscape improvements in many parts of Chernarus. Goal of update .62 was to use this room (where possible) to improve visual fidelity of Chernarus.

Many of the existing locations on Chernarus increased in detail drastically and while the new vegetation assets are much better optimized than the old ones, it will still most likely end up with the same or slightly decreased performance. Now I would like to say that nothing is settled at this point.

From the data point of view, we are still using some legacy vegetation assets (such as bushes and few selected solitary trees). This is however just a temporary arrangement, as replacements will be coming in future updates and will of course result in performance increase in almost all areas (old bushes are used around the whole map even in update 0.62).

There are more optimizations on data side planned (mainly related to buildings and the use of textures). For update 0.63, we have changed completely the whole structure for environment assets, which mainly makes loading faster, but it also makes data more readable, and this will ultimately make the lives of future community modders simpler.

On the programming side, there are optimizations on their way (starting with update 0.63), from which both PC and console versions will benefit greatly. Unfortunately, given the current differences between internal and public branches, it is not feasible to merge any complicated code in short time, and while we are already observing a better performance on internal branch, none of those improvements can be merged back into 0.62 branch.



- Adam Franců / Senior Map Designer




 
We're happy to say our new ambient audio is finally out on experimental. We have rebuilt all ambient sounds and added positional sound effects on the vegetation. We are now testing the mix, repetition cycles and we're listening to feedback from you and the QA department, so expect a lot of tweaks before the stable release. We are also preparing positional SFX for the buildings but that will have to wait till 0.63 because of some subtle changes to building models.

Apart form ambient sounds, we're actively working on BETA preparation where we have thousands of new sounds for the new player and user actions. There is an audio recording session planned for next month where we're gonna record new sounds for players, as well as infected.

We're also working closely with animation department, so you can expect many new SFX for every new animation that will come with the 0.63 update.

- Andrej Sinkević / Sound Designer 




 
Hello guys!

We released the update 0.62 to Experimental branch in the night hours last week and we were holding our breath waiting for your first reactions.

When we checked first streams to see your impressions, we were very happy and relieved. You were excited by this new update! New trees, ambient sound, wind - you loved it and you were sharing your experience with us on social networks, which we really appreciate. When you work on something like this for a long time, you are happy when people like your hard work.







We really appreciated your feedback. It is helping us to move closer to the release of the 0.62 to Stable branch. We are still looking for issues, if you find any bugs or if your game crashes, please report it to our Feedback Tracker, our QA guys will take care of you.

If you never tried an Experimental branch and you want to play on unstable servers, we have instructions for you on our official forums:

https://forums.dayz.com/topic/177199-experimental-branch-testing-how-to/

If you never heard about new 0.62 update and If you want to know what is new, here is the list of the most important things:

• New tree models
• Denser forests
• New clutter (grass, small plants)
• New surface textures - plains and such
• Improved wind behavior
• New shader for the wind, affecting trees and grass
• Tweaked and changed lighting for the world
• Small improvements to satellite textures
• Rain affected by wind and refinement of its behavior in general
• Many reworked locations on Chernarus
• Reworked ghillie (to be consistent with new tech)
• Small bugfixes to some issues from 0.61
• New ambient sounds

 

We are talking about the new update in depth on our forums, join us and tell us your feedback, positive or negative, it's up to you:

https://forums.dayz.com/topic/236800-exp-update-062139507/

With the arrival of 0.62, a lot of videos started appearing on YouTube, introducing the new update. I admit that so many of them were so good, I was having a hard time choosing the ones to show you today. Finally, I picked a great story by Rene a.k.a. Barely Infected, which contains exploration of new locations in the west, telling of scary stories at dark night as well as creating new friendships. It is a bit longer, but believe me that it is worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcb05uYqYrg

Another video I wanted to show you is a snapshot movie from a smaller, but very skilled YouTuber called uncuepagamer, that shows the beauty of the small village Nizhnoye and its surroundings. Those few shots are enough to capture the great looks of the new update.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4rFzDBZ8co

If you like events, do note that there will be one taking place on the 7th June 2017 on French server Team ONU. You can find more info about it here.



At the end, I would like to remind you about the video from last week which some of you may have missed due to the hustle around the new update release. It is the first part of Q&A video with our senior map designer Adam Franců. Make sure to check it out, you will learn a lot of interesting information and you will find the promised scenes from "real Chernarus" I mentioned in the last Status Report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxyAQ4B9xys

That is all from me for today, if you are preparing an event on your server, or if you have any interesting content for the next Status Report, send me a Tweet on our official Twitter and you may find it here the next time.

Header image provided by Gordon Freeman.

- Baty / Community Manager



 

This week, we're looking back at the release of 0.62 on Exerimental, outlining some of the issues that we'd like to see resolved before going to Stable (both visual and audio oriented). Peter and Eugen are sharing some of the work being currently done for BETA, and Baty is sharing her top picks of all the amazing content you created since 0.62 released last week.

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Adam
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Andrej
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

This Status Report, I don't have a whole ton for you. Obviously, 95% of the team is focused on 0.63 and getting it to a point in which we can begin testing on Experimental branch for that build. As some of you may not be aware, 0.62 recently hit Experimental, and the team has pulled a lot of good and actionable bug data from that build, as well as some strong feedback in regards to the first iteration of the new ambient audio.

You'll all be pleased to know that every bit of feedback regarding said new ambient audio is being investigated, and the audio team will be able to iterate upon some of that feedback. Any up to date progress we make will always be posted by Baty in the Experimental Patch Discussion section of the forums.

The team is currently tracking feedback in regards to the following on 0.62 Experimental:

• Misc feedback in regards to audio volume, general audio system behavior
• Behavior of some trees in the wind

 

There are also some attempted fixes included in today's Experimental update regardin:

• Collisions with some tree models
• Ironsights sometimes backing off after a few seconds
• Issues binding some mouse keys 

 

I'm sure Eugen will have some more meat on the bone when it comes to the progress on 0.63 itself. I for one am really, really anticipating being able to share the functionality of 0.63.

Stay safe out there!

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey guys!

So 0.62 Experimental happened and I can't thank you enough for the amazing content that you created with the new visuals for forests. There are many improvements that will still be coming to visuals over time - like reworking old low-quality assets and adding new features to the map as mentioned in Adam's Q&A video. It is a good showcase of the quality we aim for in both the visuals and gameplay for the 0.63/BETA release.

I mentioned a couple of things here previously that have now come in motion, full force. We have progressed and started working on smaller feature sets that will define gameplay of the BETA. One of the largest topics of discussion in the offices have been weapons and their handling for the new player. To understand what that means I have to sadly hit you with a large wall of text.

When you look at the live game, and what is happening on stable/experimental, you still see (for the most part) a content that is running on old technology. Since for BETA release, we have expanded the gunplay beyond what was possible previously, it means many things will be changing, and many have been mentioned here. However, to give you a sense of scale.

The work on the new animation system and all of its features took almost a year and a half of work. Animations for all of your weapons, with variations from continuous reloading, chambering, magazine manipulation, jamming, and more, took probably over a year in itself. All that culminating with implementation of aiming model that will support better implementation of recoil, sway, player turns, and even heavily improved manipulation of weapons in different stances.

A whole lot of our content is starting to get implemented - as I said before, we're finally making a game, instead of fully focusing on the technology. In the list below, I mention FNX and IZH18 - two weapons that are the first to be handled using these new systems. And I can't wait to have a shootout here with the guys once these are fully working internally.

For all these things:

• User actions that enable player to interact with items and objects, weapons included
• Synchronization setup that is largely inspired by what Overwatch did for their networking 
• Animation system that will make your avatar a living breathing human 
• Damage system that is easily tweakable and supports all sorts of hitzones, impact animations 
• New particle effects and sounds
• New character representation with all the things actually creating a survival experience

 

It's not that we don't expect bugs from their first iterations, but the reality for us is, that we have been working for 4 years now on things that you couldn't get your hands on in-game as of yet. And as the list of features above shows, all these systems can't really work without each other.

Even the new network synchronization is optimized for the new player and new physics. It makes me sad that it couldn't happen sooner, but I believe we will have a great game for you with 0.63/BETA.

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams:

Programmers

• UI Inputs
• Communication systems (megaphone, static radio, public address system)
• Weapon handling and aiming
• Vehicle physics refactor
• Vehicle controller refactor
• 3rd person camera collision changes
• FNX basic state machine and script class
• IZH18 basic state machine and script class
• Animation events for player
• Performance optimizations for item spawning
• Physics collision system refactor and optimization
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes

Animators

• Weapon mechanics animations polishing (unjamming, reloads)
• Inverse Kinematics poses
• Hit reactions on player
• Ranged combat prototype
• Player turns tweaking

Designers

• User actions in multiplayer
• Player representation
• New player and item spawn definition
• Player action targeting and floating cursor
• Communication systems
• Tree collisions fixes
• Advanced placing system
• Construction watchtower
• Diseases refactor for new player representation
• Animation events for player
• New zombie models
• New player models
• Animation events for player

Audio

• Positional environment audio tweaks
• Infected audio recording preparation
• Player and weapon animation events setup

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• 0.62 feature testing
• Internal client stabilization
• User actions for 0.63 testing

Art

• Old assets rework
• Buildings optimization
• Doors unification

These are thousands of hours spent on our side to bring a dream that is yet to be fully realized. Curiosity, Creativity, Community. Three pillars of Bohemia Interactive that we want to uphold.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Among plenty of other issues we face, picking items from the world is another one which is far from ideal in its current state. Aiming precisely with cursor on items could be fine, unless you run into some annoyances. Some items are rendered too small on the screen because of their close-to-real-life dimensions, and they are often being obstructed with other objects in world like dense grass, and tend to mimic underlying surface textures.

You know the drill, many times it's difficult to find a pistol, or even a rifle in some cases, and pick it up (I don't even want to mention special cases like ammo piles). At the end, such frustration leads to the use of the vicinity part of inventory screen as the path of the least resistance. Each open of the inventory screen disrupts the immersion of being right there for you as a player, and if I count in movement during opening the inventory (leading to jogging in chaotic patterns to find that damn ammo pile), it's breaking immersion also for all observers who had to look at your misery.

Along with restriction of character movement while in inventory, we added dynamic selection of target, which evaluates conditions such as distance from player, screen center and angle. Selected target is then visually marked by snapping interaction icon to it in screen space. We went beyond items and similarly, we applied this system also to interaction with vehicles and static objects in world like doors or ladders. I like fluid interconnection of a gven item and the action which it brings to the table. It feels natural and adds to the physicality of the world - it even feels closer to hand to use your eyes for coordination, instead of rigorous movement with whole head around. You can see it in action on examples below.





Maybe you are wondering now, why we just simply didn't apply highlighting to items and objects? Apart from highlights being quite artificial and also immersion breaking, they are not solving one of the problems mentioned above - frequent necessity to pixel hunt with your center of the screen. But never say never, maybe there will be some very decent version of highlighting in future to make it more seamless and to pop up items a bit, even when I'm not kinda fan of it.

Dynamic target selection is still in progress and there are some small issues we need to solve, for example shaking of icon caused currently by insufficient frequency of UI updates on client side. However, from first tests of its current iteration, it feels really good, and what matters the most - it's very helpful!

They will not hide anymore... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 

Dev Update/Adam

Almost a week since 0.62 update release on Experimental branch - I hope that you are having a good time exploring the new Chernarus! First, I would like to give you a small insight into what is happening in our department, mainly what are our plans towards the Stable release of update 0.62.

• Additional improvements and fixes to the surface mask - to resolve issues such as forest clutter appearance in the middle of industrial area in Solnichniy
• Satellite texture and ground clutter changes - decreasing overall brightness along with other tweaks (aimed at improving visuals of short and tall grass)
• Lighting config tweaks
• Map improvements and fixes

 

Now I would like to talk a bit about client performance on the new Chernarus. So far, we have observed quite positive reception from the experimental branch testing - everyone is welcomed there, please report if you encounter any issues on feedback tracker.

As I already mentioned in previous Status Reports, the introduction of Enfusion renderer back in update 0.60 gave us quite a big room for possible landscape improvements in many parts of Chernarus. Goal of update .62 was to use this room (where possible) to improve visual fidelity of Chernarus.

Many of the existing locations on Chernarus increased in detail drastically and while the new vegetation assets are much better optimized than the old ones, it will still most likely end up with the same or slightly decreased performance. Now I would like to say that nothing is settled at this point.

From the data point of view, we are still using some legacy vegetation assets (such as bushes and few selected solitary trees). This is however just a temporary arrangement, as replacements will be coming in future updates and will of course result in performance increase in almost all areas (old bushes are used around the whole map even in update 0.62).

There are more optimizations on data side planned (mainly related to buildings and the use of textures). For update 0.63, we have changed completely the whole structure for environment assets, which mainly makes loading faster, but it also makes data more readable, and this will ultimately make the lives of future community modders simpler.

On the programming side, there are optimizations on their way (starting with update 0.63), from which both PC and console versions will benefit greatly. Unfortunately, given the current differences between internal and public branches, it is not feasible to merge any complicated code in short time, and while we are already observing a better performance on internal branch, none of those improvements can be merged back into 0.62 branch.



- Adam Franců / Senior Map Designer




 
We're happy to say our new ambient audio is finally out on experimental. We have rebuilt all ambient sounds and added positional sound effects on the vegetation. We are now testing the mix, repetition cycles and we're listening to feedback from you and the QA department, so expect a lot of tweaks before the stable release. We are also preparing positional SFX for the buildings but that will have to wait till 0.63 because of some subtle changes to building models.

Apart form ambient sounds, we're actively working on BETA preparation where we have thousands of new sounds for the new player and user actions. There is an audio recording session planned for next month where we're gonna record new sounds for players, as well as infected.

We're also working closely with animation department, so you can expect many new SFX for every new animation that will come with the 0.63 update.

- Andrej Sinkević / Sound Designer 




 
Hello guys!

We released the update 0.62 to Experimental branch in the night hours last week and we were holding our breath waiting for your first reactions.

When we checked first streams to see your impressions, we were very happy and relieved. You were excited by this new update! New trees, ambient sound, wind - you loved it and you were sharing your experience with us on social networks, which we really appreciate. When you work on something like this for a long time, you are happy when people like your hard work.







We really appreciated your feedback. It is helping us to move closer to the release of the 0.62 to Stable branch. We are still looking for issues, if you find any bugs or if your game crashes, please report it to our Feedback Tracker, our QA guys will take care of you.

If you never tried an Experimental branch and you want to play on unstable servers, we have instructions for you on our official forums:

https://forums.dayz.com/topic/177199-experimental-branch-testing-how-to/

If you never heard about new 0.62 update and If you want to know what is new, here is the list of the most important things:

• New tree models
• Denser forests
• New clutter (grass, small plants)
• New surface textures - plains and such
• Improved wind behavior
• New shader for the wind, affecting trees and grass
• Tweaked and changed lighting for the world
• Small improvements to satellite textures
• Rain affected by wind and refinement of its behavior in general
• Many reworked locations on Chernarus
• Reworked ghillie (to be consistent with new tech)
• Small bugfixes to some issues from 0.61
• New ambient sounds

 

We are talking about the new update in depth on our forums, join us and tell us your feedback, positive or negative, it's up to you:

https://forums.dayz.com/topic/236800-exp-update-062139507/

With the arrival of 0.62, a lot of videos started appearing on YouTube, introducing the new update. I admit that so many of them were so good, I was having a hard time choosing the ones to show you today. Finally, I picked a great story by Rene a.k.a. Barely Infected, which contains exploration of new locations in the west, telling of scary stories at dark night as well as creating new friendships. It is a bit longer, but believe me that it is worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcb05uYqYrg

Another video I wanted to show you is a snapshot movie from a smaller, but very skilled YouTuber called uncuepagamer, that shows the beauty of the small village Nizhnoye and its surroundings. Those few shots are enough to capture the great looks of the new update.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4rFzDBZ8co

If you like events, do note that there will be one taking place on the 7th June 2017 on French server Team ONU. You can find more info about it here.



At the end, I would like to remind you about the video from last week which some of you may have missed due to the hustle around the new update release. It is the first part of Q&A video with our senior map designer Adam Franců. Make sure to check it out, you will learn a lot of interesting information and you will find the promised scenes from "real Chernarus" I mentioned in the last Status Report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxyAQ4B9xys

That is all from me for today, if you are preparing an event on your server, or if you have any interesting content for the next Status Report, send me a Tweet on our official Twitter and you may find it here the next time.

Header image provided by Gordon Freeman.

- Baty / Community Manager



 

This week, Brian is addressing how walkie talkies in DayZ are the new server-wide chat. Eugen is touching upon the complexity of DayZ, as well as some of the recent tasks of the entire team. We also feature Peter who shares exciting news about changing the inner workings of loot spawns (this will be an extra crunchy topic for any future DayZ modders out there!) Next up are our map designers Mark and Adam, and yes, they have some screenshots for you this time! 

To finish it all of in style, Baty is sharing a couple of photos from our trip to the real Chernarus, where we were filming the upcoming Q&A video last week. Let's get to it, it's a long one folks, but full of great development news! 

• Dev Update/Hicks
  
• Dev Update/Eugen
  
• Dev Update/Peter
  
• Dev Update/Adam
  
• Dev Update/Mark
  
• Community Spotlight

 
The last time we spoke I mentioned discussing the impact of sway, and the implications on gameplay. I think one of the overlooked aspects of replacing the animation system, and legacy player is the fact that this isn't just a "change" in how sway / hold breath, and the likes behave. With the legacy setup, early on Peter and I both supported adjustments to try and refine where it was sitting as an experience in game. Pretty rapidly we realized that where we wanted it to be, and what the technology would allow us to do were two things very much apart. Rather than wasting development time trying to iterate and iterate upon a system that was slated to be replaced, the focus was placed on functionally where we wanted to be with the final product.


Its important to understand that as I said earlier - this isn't just a change. This is a replacement of the technology and player - so the old methods for sway, stamina, and such are gone. As we move towards beta, and start getting those builds into the hands of players - then we can refine the new methods of sway, and get it to a point in which you still need to be aware of your stance, weight (hopefully!), and the amount of sprinting you are doing - but that it is entirely manageable and does not feel like this daunting and overwhelming rigid inflexibility it can become in some situations with the current legacy Steam builds.

In addition to this, Peter and I have also been spending some time discussing the implication of server wide chat (specifically VOIP). I've noticed aside from strong private shard communities like DayZ Underground - folks don't seem to be utilizing radios in game. While on servers such as that, I find the communication across the map with random players occurs far more often. Personally, I'm a firm supporter of radios being starting gear so that every player can opt-in to server wide communication should they choose it - but I'm still working on converting Peter to this mindset. One of the limiting factors I've noticed the community discussing is the rate at which radios consume batteries, and the hunt for batteries themselves being both unrewarding and difficult.


I know a lot of folks have expressed a desire for the old global chat (which personally I do not miss at all) - and some have also expressed an interest in the old kill feed. A default on global chat is just not something we ever felt had a place in DayZ. That said, it can easily be turned on for mod authors, a kill feed as well shouldn't be difficult to put together.


For Peter and I - the immersion of the radios themselves, paired with the fact that they effectively serve as an opt-in global VOIP, is incredibly attractive. As I'm sure you all recall - we increased their range greatly several builds back. Aside from availability of the radios themselves, and consumption of batteries, I think they represent where we'd like global VOIP to be. So I encourage you all to utilize them more, so I can convince Peter that they should totally be player starting gear.

C'mon - do it. You never know who will be on the other end.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

 
Hey guys! First things first, I want to share the conclusion to the story I mentioned here the last time! We managed to fix the crash - yay! This means that everything seems to be in place for 0.62 on Experimental and I can't wait for you guys to play with the new environment visuals and sounds. There is still space to improve and make things more distinct, but the work does not stop there after we send 0.62 to Experimental/Stable. It's the first step to get visuals and audio where one would expect them in 2017.

To continue with stories from the development front, large part of our daily routine here is planning for BETA, and doing recaps with the aim to refocus the development, structuring our team into smaller feature teams. In the last two weeks, we revisited mind maps of these feature blocks to set up a core functionality of DayZ - starting with larger ones, and working our way down to smaller, more actionable items that we can "close" as development items.

DayZ is a complex game. It's a system sandbox where its gameplay loop starts working only when all the small details are in, and start interacting with each other. It's one of the hardest genres to iterate upon, as you can't structure the features easily, and every single thing can break the gameplay ecosystem. I highly recommend the original Deus Ex postmortem that was featured at GDC 2017 by Warren Spector himself.

If you separate the work we have done over the years, you can simplify it into three layers: engine, data and gameplay. Engine is the core base and modules upon which we want to build this game, data are visual assets (e.g. models) or audio that support the features, and gameplay is represented in both code and script. That’s why we have technical designers writing script, and gameplay programmers doing the same for the DayZ codebase.

Over the course of the last two years, these two groups (programmers and scripters) have been focused on closing core support systems for the architecture of gameplay in the new engine, and haven't had the chance to see their individual parts of the game work together. It's exciting now that what you could previously see only in a debug mode, or under parameters for internal client, is now finally able to support actual gameplay, and can be seen inside the game in a broader context. It’s a start of something much bigger for everybody in here.

Instead of focusing on systems and technology, we are finally making a game. The core gameplay loop is our focus now, split into melee combat, ranged combat, player character and its interaction with the world, and the infected (and their interactions with the world). All these pieces we have been building are slowly getting playable. There are still hurdles along the way and ahead of us - but that’s how development works.

What we're doing now is obviously one of the most critical parts of DayZ development, but all these previous decisions to create tech first, and focus on enjoyable experience later, are going to benefit the game (and gameplay) in the long run.

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams :

Programmers

• AI script implementation
• Zombie behavior script representation
• Inventory and item conditions
• Item spawn definition
• User actions in multiplayer
• Network traffic optimization
• Sound event manager
• Performance optimizations and multithreading changes
• Input changes
• Navigation changes
• Hit reactions on player 
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes

Animators

• Weapon mechanics animations polishing (unjamming, reloads)
• Inverse Kinematics poses
• Hit reactions on player
• Melee combat prototype
• Ranged combat prototype

Designers

• User actions in multiplayer
• Player representation
• New player and item spawn definition
• Inventory UI refactor
• Radial menu for gestures
• Soft Skills
• Player action targeting

Audio

• Positional environment audio
• Infected audio recording preparation
• Player and weapon animation events setup

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• 0.62 feature testing
• Internal client stabilization

Art

• Tree fire geometry
• Buildings optimization
• Doors unification

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
In regards to Central Economy, there were some changes made in terms of loot spawning and its definition for BETA version that we are working on. Till now, loot placement was defined directly as specific point per one item in .p3d files, grouped in named selections (which are paired with categories and tags in configs and areas in area map later). There has been a need to pay close attention to dimensions of given items against each other, and available space around them to avoid unnecessary clipping between items, or between item and building itself.

This process was tedious as it lacked sufficient spatial orientation in object editor, leading to prolonged time needed to populate a building (for example, the school building has tens of thousands of spawn points defined in the old system). Not to mention that packing and exporting proxies was mandatory in order to be able to see new/adjusted spawn points working in game, stretching the time even further. You can see how it was set for the police station on the screenshot below. 



Instead of exact points, the new loot placement uses ranges. Range simply defines a circular area within which item can be spawned. During placement of these ranges, they are checked against each other and building itself in real time. This approach avoids any clipping and collisions of items during spawning. Placement output is stored as XML directly in the mission folder, so it's very convenient for modding, it also can be loaded and edited.

The best part of this new system is that it's completely defined and visualized directly in game, from free-fly camera. Additionally, everything is real time, which (coupled with independence from addons) cuts down the time required for setup dramatically.



After introduction of this new system, we managed to get from more than 1.000.000 spawn points (mind that was after massive reduction for 0.61 version from 4.000.000+ spawn points) to current ~130.000 used, and at the end, what matters the most is the increased server performance.

Don't waste time doing unnecessary things... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer



Hi everyone, Mark Gill here! I'm one of the map designers who has done many tasks for Chernarus, but more recently I've been focused on developing the new Chernarus forests for this 0.62 visual upgrade. This has been a lengthy, challenging, but also rewarding process. I will try to share some of the thought process behind the changes that were made.



With the new forest overhaul, we hope the survivor experience in DayZ will be greatly enhanced. We tried to make traveling through forests a more immersive experiance. Repetition can quickly become boring on a map of our scale, so as you traverse through forests across the map, the visuals will change at a fairly rapid pace. This was a large undertaking, but it was important to keep the visual stimuli changing in unpredictable ways.



We were able to increase the number of tree variations thanks to our talented artists to create types of forest that display different characteristics. The overall shape, size, and canopy development gives sections of forest a sense of age. These sections can vary from close spacing of younger variants. to farther spacing of older variants. There are limits to density due to the performance impact, but hopefully the amount of variables at play will keep you on your toes as you travel across the map.



Broadleaf hedgerows and forest edges now have a lower profile than in the past. This looks more natural and adds more coverage at a lower height. With this change, sections of forest are more self-contained with this "bushier" egde-line. This helps block some sight in and out of deep forest. While much thinner then reality, this balanced result is an important improvement to the visuals as well as gameplay. Moving as an individual or group in and out forest should be a more significant shift as well as hiding. While you may feel safe and hidden within deep forest sections, there is also the opposite of not knowing who may be nearby.





We hope you will enjoy your freshly upgraded playground!

- Mark Gill/ Map Designer

 

Hello everyone, I hope that you enjoyed this SR's contribution from Mark, our map designer, who has showed a great passion for such whopping task as transforming the nature of Chernarus is. He spend countless amount of time designing and configuring how the new forests and individual vegetation looks and we are all excited for the day when you finally be able to experience new Chernarus too.

We are currently really busy with map tweaking to make sure we can deliver the new Chernarus in best possible shape we can in given time. Please keep in mind that update .62 has touched almost every corner of Chernarus and while we do our best to make sure everything will look just like we wanted, there will be some minor map-related issues. Also, keep in mind that update .62 contains initial changes to the whole western border, completely getting rid of old terrain and object layout and replacing it with much more detailed landscape and layout. This work, labelled as western expansion, is however split into several phases and more additions and fixes are planned for later updates.



In addition to many great improvements to the way grass, trees look and behave in wind, our programmers also went and fixed many issues related to lighting and sky. One of the major things was that before 062, shadows were turned off too early / too late and that impacted the quality of scene (mainly interiors) in a very bad way. This issue was fixed along with many more (like smoother sky-fog transition, reduced size of the moon and sun, moon visibility, horizon look, and more...). These changes have enabled us to focus on lighting config for Chernarus, which saw some great changes. While we do not consider it to be final, we hope that it will prove to be a very fitting addition to the visual update coming with 0.62.



Additionally, in January 24th SR I promised you that I will show you the new railway stone bridge, so here it is! Coming in 0.62 along with many additional changes to the railway network of Chernarus!



See you in Chernarus!

- Adam Franců / Senior Map Designer


 
Last week, together with our Brand Manager Martin and our external camera crew, we embarked to the real world model for Chernarus to shoot a new Q&A video with our Map Designer Adam Franců a.k.a Sumrak (a well known Arma 3 modder). The real Chernarus is found in the vicinity of the town of Ústi nad Labem in the Czech Republic and we already talked about it in the March Status Report.

As a first thing we aimed for the "Pik Kozlova" (or Kozí vrch in the real world), which offers beautiful view of the outskirts of Ústi nad Labem that you most likely know from the game as Chernogorsk. Even from such distance, you can recognize typical blocks of flats in Chapaevsk, Novoselky and Dubky, where you surely more than once encountered camping snipers. The real Chernarus does not have a sea, because we don’t have any in the Czech Republic, but you can recognize the shore as the curve of the river Labe. I have snapped a couple of photos for you to compare the “real Chernarus” and it's game counterpart as shown in update 0.62.
 
Comparison of Ústi nad Labem and Chernogorsk:





Later on, we moved to Lipová, which was the original village you know as Starý Sobor. It has the characteristic red barn and two large abandoned cowsheds. I looked behind the buildings, where the military tents are supposed to be, but of course they were not there. There is an area with concrete floor instead, where silage used to be fermented.





Abadoned cowsheds:





After Lipová, we travelled to village Javory, which can remind you of ingame Gorka. That is where the church is located, that you can see in many locations in the game. We wanted to have a look inside, but there was a sign saying “gassed, do not enter”, so we decided to not take the risk and after a bit of filming we left the town and headed for the Zub castle.





If you used to run through Moglievka to Vyshnoye in game, you might have noticed ruins of the castle Zub on your left hand side. The castle is really there, at least its remnants, and it is called Blansko. It is slightly smaller than in game, but it provides an amazing view of the surrounding countryside. You can see the small village of Vyshnoye and its vicinity. The name of the real village is the same as of the castle – Blansko. And one point of interest - a community member Ivan tweeted to us that he hid a non-public geocache with DayZ motive nearby the castle. So if you will be around and manage to find it, let us know its content, because we are curious what is inside and we didn’t find it.





It was an absolutely amazing experience for me, because I felt like I was really in the game. We did not need a map, we know Chernarus like the back of our hands, therefore we know exactly which way to choose and where everything is. If you will ever have the opportunity to visit Czech Republic, make sure not to miss this experience. I am definitely planning to go back to real Chernarus, this time on foot, with tent and some beans for couple of days, because it is worth it, will you join me?

I hope you enjoyed my short report and I can not wait to show you the video we filmed there. If you were also on a trip through the real Chernarus, do not hesitate to show off and tweet to us what you liked the most and some of your pictures! Have a great time and see you in Chernarus, this time in game!

Header image: Mark_Knophler

- Baty / Community Manager

This week, Brian is addressing how walkie talkies in DayZ are the new server-wide chat. Eugen is touching upon the complexity of DayZ, as well as some of the recent tasks of the entire team. We also feature Peter who shares exciting news about changing the inner workings of loot spawns (this will be an extra crunchy topic for any future DayZ modders out there!) Next up are our map designers Mark and Adam, and yes, they have some screenshots for you this time! 

To finish it all of in style, Baty is sharing a couple of photos from our trip to the real Chernarus, where we were filming the upcoming Q&A video last week. Let's get to it, it's a long one folks, but full of great development news! 

• Dev Update/Hicks
  
• Dev Update/Eugen
  
• Dev Update/Peter
  
• Dev Update/Adam
  
• Dev Update/Mark
  
• Community Spotlight

 
The last time we spoke I mentioned discussing the impact of sway, and the implications on gameplay. I think one of the overlooked aspects of replacing the animation system, and legacy player is the fact that this isn't just a "change" in how sway / hold breath, and the likes behave. With the legacy setup, early on Peter and I both supported adjustments to try and refine where it was sitting as an experience in game. Pretty rapidly we realized that where we wanted it to be, and what the technology would allow us to do were two things very much apart. Rather than wasting development time trying to iterate and iterate upon a system that was slated to be replaced, the focus was placed on functionally where we wanted to be with the final product.


Its important to understand that as I said earlier - this isn't just a change. This is a replacement of the technology and player - so the old methods for sway, stamina, and such are gone. As we move towards beta, and start getting those builds into the hands of players - then we can refine the new methods of sway, and get it to a point in which you still need to be aware of your stance, weight (hopefully!), and the amount of sprinting you are doing - but that it is entirely manageable and does not feel like this daunting and overwhelming rigid inflexibility it can become in some situations with the current legacy Steam builds.

In addition to this, Peter and I have also been spending some time discussing the implication of server wide chat (specifically VOIP). I've noticed aside from strong private shard communities like DayZ Underground - folks don't seem to be utilizing radios in game. While on servers such as that, I find the communication across the map with random players occurs far more often. Personally, I'm a firm supporter of radios being starting gear so that every player can opt-in to server wide communication should they choose it - but I'm still working on converting Peter to this mindset. One of the limiting factors I've noticed the community discussing is the rate at which radios consume batteries, and the hunt for batteries themselves being both unrewarding and difficult.


I know a lot of folks have expressed a desire for the old global chat (which personally I do not miss at all) - and some have also expressed an interest in the old kill feed. A default on global chat is just not something we ever felt had a place in DayZ. That said, it can easily be turned on for mod authors, a kill feed as well shouldn't be difficult to put together.


For Peter and I - the immersion of the radios themselves, paired with the fact that they effectively serve as an opt-in global VOIP, is incredibly attractive. As I'm sure you all recall - we increased their range greatly several builds back. Aside from availability of the radios themselves, and consumption of batteries, I think they represent where we'd like global VOIP to be. So I encourage you all to utilize them more, so I can convince Peter that they should totally be player starting gear.

C'mon - do it. You never know who will be on the other end.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

 
Hey guys! First things first, I want to share the conclusion to the story I mentioned here the last time! We managed to fix the crash - yay! This means that everything seems to be in place for 0.62 on Experimental and I can't wait for you guys to play with the new environment visuals and sounds. There is still space to improve and make things more distinct, but the work does not stop there after we send 0.62 to Experimental/Stable. It's the first step to get visuals and audio where one would expect them in 2017.

To continue with stories from the development front, large part of our daily routine here is planning for BETA, and doing recaps with the aim to refocus the development, structuring our team into smaller feature teams. In the last two weeks, we revisited mind maps of these feature blocks to set up a core functionality of DayZ - starting with larger ones, and working our way down to smaller, more actionable items that we can "close" as development items.

DayZ is a complex game. It's a system sandbox where its gameplay loop starts working only when all the small details are in, and start interacting with each other. It's one of the hardest genres to iterate upon, as you can't structure the features easily, and every single thing can break the gameplay ecosystem. I highly recommend the original Deus Ex postmortem that was featured at GDC 2017 by Warren Spector himself.

If you separate the work we have done over the years, you can simplify it into three layers: engine, data and gameplay. Engine is the core base and modules upon which we want to build this game, data are visual assets (e.g. models) or audio that support the features, and gameplay is represented in both code and script. That’s why we have technical designers writing script, and gameplay programmers doing the same for the DayZ codebase.

Over the course of the last two years, these two groups (programmers and scripters) have been focused on closing core support systems for the architecture of gameplay in the new engine, and haven't had the chance to see their individual parts of the game work together. It's exciting now that what you could previously see only in a debug mode, or under parameters for internal client, is now finally able to support actual gameplay, and can be seen inside the game in a broader context. It’s a start of something much bigger for everybody in here.

Instead of focusing on systems and technology, we are finally making a game. The core gameplay loop is our focus now, split into melee combat, ranged combat, player character and its interaction with the world, and the infected (and their interactions with the world). All these pieces we have been building are slowly getting playable. There are still hurdles along the way and ahead of us - but that’s how development works.

What we're doing now is obviously one of the most critical parts of DayZ development, but all these previous decisions to create tech first, and focus on enjoyable experience later, are going to benefit the game (and gameplay) in the long run.

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams :

Programmers

• AI script implementation
• Zombie behavior script representation
• Inventory and item conditions
• Item spawn definition
• User actions in multiplayer
• Network traffic optimization
• Sound event manager
• Performance optimizations and multithreading changes
• Input changes
• Navigation changes
• Hit reactions on player 
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes

Animators

• Weapon mechanics animations polishing (unjamming, reloads)
• Inverse Kinematics poses
• Hit reactions on player
• Melee combat prototype
• Ranged combat prototype

Designers

• User actions in multiplayer
• Player representation
• New player and item spawn definition
• Inventory UI refactor
• Radial menu for gestures
• Soft Skills
• Player action targeting

Audio

• Positional environment audio
• Infected audio recording preparation
• Player and weapon animation events setup

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• 0.62 feature testing
• Internal client stabilization

Art

• Tree fire geometry
• Buildings optimization
• Doors unification

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
In regards to Central Economy, there were some changes made in terms of loot spawning and its definition for BETA version that we are working on. Till now, loot placement was defined directly as specific point per one item in .p3d files, grouped in named selections (which are paired with categories and tags in configs and areas in area map later). There has been a need to pay close attention to dimensions of given items against each other, and available space around them to avoid unnecessary clipping between items, or between item and building itself.

This process was tedious as it lacked sufficient spatial orientation in object editor, leading to prolonged time needed to populate a building (for example, the school building has tens of thousands of spawn points defined in the old system). Not to mention that packing and exporting proxies was mandatory in order to be able to see new/adjusted spawn points working in game, stretching the time even further. You can see how it was set for the police station on the screenshot below. 



Instead of exact points, the new loot placement uses ranges. Range simply defines a circular area within which item can be spawned. During placement of these ranges, they are checked against each other and building itself in real time. This approach avoids any clipping and collisions of items during spawning. Placement output is stored as XML directly in the mission folder, so it's very convenient for modding, it also can be loaded and edited.

The best part of this new system is that it's completely defined and visualized directly in game, from free-fly camera. Additionally, everything is real time, which (coupled with independence from addons) cuts down the time required for setup dramatically.



After introduction of this new system, we managed to get from more than 1.000.000 spawn points (mind that was after massive reduction for 0.61 version from 4.000.000+ spawn points) to current ~130.000 used, and at the end, what matters the most is the increased server performance.

Don't waste time doing unnecessary things... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer



Hi everyone, Mark Gill here! I'm one of the map designers who has done many tasks for Chernarus, but more recently I've been focused on developing the new Chernarus forests for this 0.62 visual upgrade. This has been a lengthy, challenging, but also rewarding process. I will try to share some of the thought process behind the changes that were made.



With the new forest overhaul, we hope the survivor experience in DayZ will be greatly enhanced. We tried to make traveling through forests a more immersive experiance. Repetition can quickly become boring on a map of our scale, so as you traverse through forests across the map, the visuals will change at a fairly rapid pace. This was a large undertaking, but it was important to keep the visual stimuli changing in unpredictable ways.



We were able to increase the number of tree variations thanks to our talented artists to create types of forest that display different characteristics. The overall shape, size, and canopy development gives sections of forest a sense of age. These sections can vary from close spacing of younger variants. to farther spacing of older variants. There are limits to density due to the performance impact, but hopefully the amount of variables at play will keep you on your toes as you travel across the map.



Broadleaf hedgerows and forest edges now have a lower profile than in the past. This looks more natural and adds more coverage at a lower height. With this change, sections of forest are more self-contained with this "bushier" egde-line. This helps block some sight in and out of deep forest. While much thinner then reality, this balanced result is an important improvement to the visuals as well as gameplay. Moving as an individual or group in and out forest should be a more significant shift as well as hiding. While you may feel safe and hidden within deep forest sections, there is also the opposite of not knowing who may be nearby.





We hope you will enjoy your freshly upgraded playground!

- Mark Gill/ Map Designer

 

Hello everyone, I hope that you enjoyed this SR's contribution from Mark, our map designer, who has showed a great passion for such whopping task as transforming the nature of Chernarus is. He spend countless amount of time designing and configuring how the new forests and individual vegetation looks and we are all excited for the day when you finally be able to experience new Chernarus too.

We are currently really busy with map tweaking to make sure we can deliver the new Chernarus in best possible shape we can in given time. Please keep in mind that update .62 has touched almost every corner of Chernarus and while we do our best to make sure everything will look just like we wanted, there will be some minor map-related issues. Also, keep in mind that update .62 contains initial changes to the whole western border, completely getting rid of old terrain and object layout and replacing it with much more detailed landscape and layout. This work, labelled as western expansion, is however split into several phases and more additions and fixes are planned for later updates.



In addition to many great improvements to the way grass, trees look and behave in wind, our programmers also went and fixed many issues related to lighting and sky. One of the major things was that before 062, shadows were turned off too early / too late and that impacted the quality of scene (mainly interiors) in a very bad way. This issue was fixed along with many more (like smoother sky-fog transition, reduced size of the moon and sun, moon visibility, horizon look, and more...). These changes have enabled us to focus on lighting config for Chernarus, which saw some great changes. While we do not consider it to be final, we hope that it will prove to be a very fitting addition to the visual update coming with 0.62.



Additionally, in January 24th SR I promised you that I will show you the new railway stone bridge, so here it is! Coming in 0.62 along with many additional changes to the railway network of Chernarus!



See you in Chernarus!

- Adam Franců / Senior Map Designer


 
Last week, together with our Brand Manager Martin and our external camera crew, we embarked to the real world model for Chernarus to shoot a new Q&A video with our Map Designer Adam Franců a.k.a Sumrak (a well known Arma 3 modder). The real Chernarus is found in the vicinity of the town of Ústi nad Labem in the Czech Republic and we already talked about it in the March Status Report.

As a first thing we aimed for the "Pik Kozlova" (or Kozí vrch in the real world), which offers beautiful view of the outskirts of Ústi nad Labem that you most likely know from the game as Chernogorsk. Even from such distance, you can recognize typical blocks of flats in Chapaevsk, Novoselky and Dubky, where you surely more than once encountered camping snipers. The real Chernarus does not have a sea, because we don’t have any in the Czech Republic, but you can recognize the shore as the curve of the river Labe. I have snapped a couple of photos for you to compare the “real Chernarus” and it's game counterpart as shown in update 0.62.
 
Comparison of Ústi nad Labem and Chernogorsk:





Later on, we moved to Lipová, which was the original village you know as Starý Sobor. It has the characteristic red barn and two large abandoned cowsheds. I looked behind the buildings, where the military tents are supposed to be, but of course they were not there. There is an area with concrete floor instead, where silage used to be fermented.





Abadoned cowsheds:





After Lipová, we travelled to village Javory, which can remind you of ingame Gorka. That is where the church is located, that you can see in many locations in the game. We wanted to have a look inside, but there was a sign saying “gassed, do not enter”, so we decided to not take the risk and after a bit of filming we left the town and headed for the Zub castle.





If you used to run through Moglievka to Vyshnoye in game, you might have noticed ruins of the castle Zub on your left hand side. The castle is really there, at least its remnants, and it is called Blansko. It is slightly smaller than in game, but it provides an amazing view of the surrounding countryside. You can see the small village of Vyshnoye and its vicinity. The name of the real village is the same as of the castle – Blansko. And one point of interest - a community member Ivan tweeted to us that he hid a non-public geocache with DayZ motive nearby the castle. So if you will be around and manage to find it, let us know its content, because we are curious what is inside and we didn’t find it.





It was an absolutely amazing experience for me, because I felt like I was really in the game. We did not need a map, we know Chernarus like the back of our hands, therefore we know exactly which way to choose and where everything is. If you will ever have the opportunity to visit Czech Republic, make sure not to miss this experience. I am definitely planning to go back to real Chernarus, this time on foot, with tent and some beans for couple of days, because it is worth it, will you join me?

I hope you enjoyed my short report and I can not wait to show you the video we filmed there. If you were also on a trip through the real Chernarus, do not hesitate to show off and tweet to us what you liked the most and some of your pictures! Have a great time and see you in Chernarus, this time in game!

Header image: Mark_Knophler

- Baty / Community Manager

Hello Survivors!

Another beefy Status Report this week! Brian talks about basic vehicle goals for BETA, Eugen shares a story about one of our development decisions, and Peter and Mirek go more in depth about some of their recent work! Let's get to it.

 

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Mirek
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

As Eugen is covering what the current tasks are, that frees me up to talk about some of the mechanics and systems that we (Peter, myself, the development team as a whole) are looking forward to improving upon in beta and the milestones past that. Given that after checking the various communities centered around DayZ, I noticed a group of posts doing their best impression of the World War 3 style courtroom audience summoned by the Q entity in Star Trek's Encounter at Farpoint when discussing the current state of vehicles, I figured now is as good a time as any to clear up some things when it comes to them, in DayZ. (The vehicles, not Q's apparitions) 

]While I personally love the work Peter and the design team did on manual transmissions in DayZ, vehicle handling and mechanics as a whole are far from where we want them to be. The biggest culprit of this, obviously, is physics, and their handling on terrain. We did show some of the changes being worked on for that area of the vehicles, but many may have missed it.



It's fair to say that vehicles in DayZ's Alpha phase of Early Access have received the least amount of user visible love. Part of that is due to the complex physics situation in DayZ, as we still currently operate two completely separate physics systems. Another part of that is due to so much of the focus being on technology, and getting it in place to support DayZ as we want it to be. I'm looking forward to that, as from my perspective, vehicles are a critical component of mid-to-late game DayZ gameplay - and quite honestly, without them in a satisfying state, you tend to just end up with a walking simulator ;)

Let me give you guys a look at some of the areas we will be looking at improving into and throughout Beta.

• Terrain handling / acceleration

• SFX (Engines / Transmission)

• UI (Specifically in the toggle-able HUD that we have shown before - so that 3PP players can see the same critical info 1PP can)

• Feedback on vehicle damage state (Aside from damage materials, and doors falling off - think smoke from a damaged engine, engine stumble/diesel when running out of fuel)

• Proper destruction of vehicle when it has been destroyed (rather than the current state of the vehicle just not turning on)

Don't think for a moment anyone on the dev team looks at vehicles the way they are now and says ]"Y'know what - that's perfect, ship it" - far from it. All of us are just as antsy and eager to see DayZ's systems start to flesh out and polish as we all want them to be - we just have to knuckle down and understand that the technology to support our vision needs to be ready for us to start implementing this. 

This exact reason, and so much more is why all of us are so focused on, and excited to enter the BETA phase of DayZ's Early Access. I'll leave you all with that, as I'd like to put together Peter and I's thoughts on stamina, and weapon sway for the next Status Report. For now, just promise not to kill me on sight when you see me in Severograd.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey guys, as some of you have noticed, I have omitted listing audio changes as part of 0.62 update in the last Status Report. That was an honest mistake, but it also highlights what a dynamic place game development is. I`ll try and have my contribution structured as a goal for the future Status Updates. Usually, I'll begin with a "story from development", just so you can see what kind of decision making is happening everyday, as well as going through the things we have been working on in the respective departments for each patch separately.

0.62 Strike Team Update & Development Story

This time, it’s a story AND a progress update - yay!

0.62 patch was originally planned for delivery (on Experimental branch)during the second week of April, but due to complications and cooperation on engine milestones, it became apparent that we needed to close them sequentially, rather than working on both at once. Remember that only small team is working on 0.62 at the moment, as almost all of us are focusing on BETA/0.63 delivery.

However, back to the topic at hand. Originally, that shouldn't have been that much of a problem. As we started testing the 0.62 update, we quickly found out that when we enable the new positional environmental sounds (basically the reworked Arma 3 tech introduced with the Eden Update that is becoming a part of Enfusion Engine platform), we encountered a crash.

The crash itself manifests when you switch window focus fast enough during startup, but it can manifest at any point, this is just the easiest way to get it. The crash is based around file system and resource management of our engine - one of the last remaining parts that are not rewritten for DayZ yet.

We have a couple of options now: We can either rework the content to work with the old system to make the new sounds function, but lose the ability for positional audio in environments, or fix the bug in the resource management and make the old system work with the new content and data.

We can also rewrite the system completely to get the pattern of these crashes fixed on the platform as a whole.

It might look like a small thing, but the positional environment audio makes the game much more immersive. And the issues go much deeper than that, as the same system might be causing some console performance issues (and more). To get an overview and make a right decision requires fast, but actionable intel. These things happen often when working with older technology, especially when you are in a process of refactoring it as well.

This resource management has been the culprit of many issues in the past, but so far it held the test of time. That might not be the case going forward, and might need some serious looking into.



 

0.63 BETA Strike Team Update

As for the work with BETA Strike Team, I list them below. One line of text / bullet point usually means it's in the hands of a single person working on the feature and handling the ownership. However, be aware that I need to simplify it to make things at least a little bit digestible, so it's hard to strike the right amount of detail without basically reworking JIRA tasks to show them here:

Programmers

• AI script implementation
• Zombie behavior script representation
• Wind rework and debugs
• Inventory and item conditions
• Item spawn definition
• User actions in multiplayer
• Exhausted and hurt player animation support
• Network traffic optimization
• New version check (to prevent edge cases of connecting to a different build of a game)
• Lightning fixes (new lightning setup)
• Sound event manager
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes

Animators

• Weapon mechanics animations polishing (unjamming, reloads)
• Inverse Kinematics poses
• Mocap (Player turns and more)
• Hit reactions on player
• Animation plugins
• Cow and Bull refactor for the new animation system

Designers

• User actions in multiplayer
• Player representation
• New item hierarchy definition
• New player and item spawn definition
• Inventory UI refactor
• Lifespan
• Tree fire geometry
• Tons of bug fixes

Audio

• Positional environment audio

QA
• Playtest 0.62
• Door rework priority assignment (standardized door sizes)
• Performance profiling in 0.62
• Client performance benchmarks in 0.62



I know that a list is not the best way to present the progress, but might be interesting for the development folks out there. However, I would also like to make it much more representative. There are tons of things happening at the same time, and we are in process of visualizing the sprint in very near future and I`ll try and share our overview of BETA progress when things settle down.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer



 
Along with upcoming changes to doors behavior I wrote about in the past, another issue which we definitely need to address and solve is the wide variety of different widths and heights of door openings. It may sound like a marginal issue, but I encourage you to continue reading, and discover how it affects gameplay.

Nearly every opening in DayZ is unique, which is caused by historical reasons and non-existing metrics back then (we are using a mixture of different structures collected from Operation Flashpoint, Arma 1, Arma 2, and some new ones made exclusively for DayZ). Apart from the fact that doors with dimensions below ideal standard just look bad and out of place (not to mention handles placed in above knees height) and feel odd (especially from the first person camera), they are also hindering the "fluency" of player movement.

Character collisions coupled with old clunky locomotion are introducing unwanted challenge in such simple action as going through the door, turning doors into an obstacle. Internal tests made with both old and new characters show us that a minimum clear opening of doors in DayZ should have clear width of 120cm and clear height of 220cm, and these dimensions were established as required metrics.



Everything below causes issues with character navigation, and feels odd especially in first person camera, where opening seems very narrow and low due to camera FOV and perspective. Also the third person camera then shows unnecessary jumping down while going through the door (if their opening height is under 220cm). New doors metrics with their new behavior will add a lot to responsiveness and smooth movement through the environment and its obstacles.

As we are continuing to work on 0.63 version AKA BETA, programmers are getting rid of old systems down the road. Lastly, old player has been completely removed internally, and with it also firearms handling (that includes firearms action like chambering, reloading, shooting… etc.) and aiming model (which means sway, recoil, dexterity, aiming, holding breath…), together with melee fighting (traced swings…) are gone forever as these were integral parts of the old player.

This untied our hands as now is the time when prototypes based on design I mentioned in past Status Reports (8 March 2017 and 28 September 2016) start being implemented in close cooperation between programmers, animators and us managing the design and script side of things.

Rewrite of firearms also allows us to introduce mechanics like changeable gun barrels (we have 2 more barrels for AUG ready to experiment with), different muzzle speeds for the same ammunition type depending on barrel length (which helps balancing firearms between each other, or vice versa), different muzzle speeds for different ammunition type used in same firearm (pellets vs slugs anyone?), switching between scope and sights if possible (like AK family, AUG…) and refinement of, and more importantly, connecting already introduced firearms mechanics like unjamming, mechanism manipulation, chambering and others to the new animation system .

I just can't wait for the moment these systems will be fully re-implemented, as it will change the combat experience a lot in general.

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
We have finished network part of user action system as I described in  my last Status Report contribution. It's worth to mention that this change has decreased network traffic from clients significantly and now our client on 0.63 sends (with some small exceptions) only input packets. This change will help a lot to resolve issues like late hits registration and it also should help to overall game responsibility.

Weapon system has received some new features, like changeable barrels and muzzles and support for attached grenade launchers. Basic implementation for weapon jamming is ready since last week.

And another small new feature - we're working on a system that will select communication channel for chat and voice automatically, so players won't have to change channel using keyboard cursor keys.

Apart from that, most of our time is still being spend on the new player implementation - tweaking movement and collisions, creating new weapon aiming system and connecting it all to other gameplay systems - we'll talk about these later on, when they are ready.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer



 
Greetings Survivors, It is getting warmer outside in Europe, but not even the nice weather can stop you from playing your favorite game. With every day, we are getting closer to release of the 0.62 Update and the community is trembling with impatience and nervousness. But don’t worry, I am also looking forward to the release of the new update, same as you.

As you surely know from previous Status Reports, update 0.62 will also contain map updates, which are being taken care of by our map designer Adam Franců a.k.a. Sumrak. We will be shooting new Q&A video with him in the next couple of days. If you have any questions regarding his work and the DayZ map, feel free to ask him .

And now for the things that landed on our Twitter, official forum or Reddit over the last two weeks. 
 
When I opened Twitter today, the first thing that caught my eye was an elaborate figurine made by Bragawn. It’s almost unbelievable that it is made entirely of paper! Great job! 




Next, I would like to share with you two videos that I found interesting. First one is for fans of role-play gameplay style. It is a ritual of Cult of Papa filmed by three different people and edited into one video by Ron Fox. Can you guess the place where it was filmed? Hail Papa!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOV0ItLExYA

The other video is for PvP lovers. Absolutely brilliant singing opening and ending by IsSy is followed by exciting action with a lot of victims. Good aim Inherwake!  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JboHRg5vCo

For the end, I would like to introduce a smaller streamer from Australia who I like for his enthusiasm, optimism and being always cheerful. Make sure to check out his Twitch channel, you will surely be infected with his positivity! 



 

If you have any DayZ creations of your own that you'd like to share, tweet them to us on our official Twitter channel. You might just honor the next status report with your talent! 

Awesome header image submitted by: [O.N.U] Damigo 

- Baty / Community Manager

Hello Survivors!

Another beefy Status Report this week! Brian talks about basic vehicle goals for BETA, Eugen shares a story about one of our development decisions, and Peter and Mirek go more in depth about some of their recent work! Let's get to it.

 

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Mirek
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

As Eugen is covering what the current tasks are, that frees me up to talk about some of the mechanics and systems that we (Peter, myself, the development team as a whole) are looking forward to improving upon in beta and the milestones past that. Given that after checking the various communities centered around DayZ, I noticed a group of posts doing their best impression of the World War 3 style courtroom audience summoned by the Q entity in Star Trek's Encounter at Farpoint when discussing the current state of vehicles, I figured now is as good a time as any to clear up some things when it comes to them, in DayZ. (The vehicles, not Q's apparitions) 

]While I personally love the work Peter and the design team did on manual transmissions in DayZ, vehicle handling and mechanics as a whole are far from where we want them to be. The biggest culprit of this, obviously, is physics, and their handling on terrain. We did show some of the changes being worked on for that area of the vehicles, but many may have missed it.



It's fair to say that vehicles in DayZ's Alpha phase of Early Access have received the least amount of user visible love. Part of that is due to the complex physics situation in DayZ, as we still currently operate two completely separate physics systems. Another part of that is due to so much of the focus being on technology, and getting it in place to support DayZ as we want it to be. I'm looking forward to that, as from my perspective, vehicles are a critical component of mid-to-late game DayZ gameplay - and quite honestly, without them in a satisfying state, you tend to just end up with a walking simulator ;)

Let me give you guys a look at some of the areas we will be looking at improving into and throughout Beta.

• Terrain handling / acceleration

• SFX (Engines / Transmission)

• UI (Specifically in the toggle-able HUD that we have shown before - so that 3PP players can see the same critical info 1PP can)

• Feedback on vehicle damage state (Aside from damage materials, and doors falling off - think smoke from a damaged engine, engine stumble/diesel when running out of fuel)

• Proper destruction of vehicle when it has been destroyed (rather than the current state of the vehicle just not turning on)

Don't think for a moment anyone on the dev team looks at vehicles the way they are now and says ]"Y'know what - that's perfect, ship it" - far from it. All of us are just as antsy and eager to see DayZ's systems start to flesh out and polish as we all want them to be - we just have to knuckle down and understand that the technology to support our vision needs to be ready for us to start implementing this. 

This exact reason, and so much more is why all of us are so focused on, and excited to enter the BETA phase of DayZ's Early Access. I'll leave you all with that, as I'd like to put together Peter and I's thoughts on stamina, and weapon sway for the next Status Report. For now, just promise not to kill me on sight when you see me in Severograd.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey guys, as some of you have noticed, I have omitted listing audio changes as part of 0.62 update in the last Status Report. That was an honest mistake, but it also highlights what a dynamic place game development is. I`ll try and have my contribution structured as a goal for the future Status Updates. Usually, I'll begin with a "story from development", just so you can see what kind of decision making is happening everyday, as well as going through the things we have been working on in the respective departments for each patch separately.

0.62 Strike Team Update & Development Story

This time, it’s a story AND a progress update - yay!

0.62 patch was originally planned for delivery (on Experimental branch)during the second week of April, but due to complications and cooperation on engine milestones, it became apparent that we needed to close them sequentially, rather than working on both at once. Remember that only small team is working on 0.62 at the moment, as almost all of us are focusing on BETA/0.63 delivery.

However, back to the topic at hand. Originally, that shouldn't have been that much of a problem. As we started testing the 0.62 update, we quickly found out that when we enable the new positional environmental sounds (basically the reworked Arma 3 tech introduced with the Eden Update that is becoming a part of Enfusion Engine platform), we encountered a crash.

The crash itself manifests when you switch window focus fast enough during startup, but it can manifest at any point, this is just the easiest way to get it. The crash is based around file system and resource management of our engine - one of the last remaining parts that are not rewritten for DayZ yet.

We have a couple of options now: We can either rework the content to work with the old system to make the new sounds function, but lose the ability for positional audio in environments, or fix the bug in the resource management and make the old system work with the new content and data.

We can also rewrite the system completely to get the pattern of these crashes fixed on the platform as a whole.

It might look like a small thing, but the positional environment audio makes the game much more immersive. And the issues go much deeper than that, as the same system might be causing some console performance issues (and more). To get an overview and make a right decision requires fast, but actionable intel. These things happen often when working with older technology, especially when you are in a process of refactoring it as well.

This resource management has been the culprit of many issues in the past, but so far it held the test of time. That might not be the case going forward, and might need some serious looking into.



 

0.63 BETA Strike Team Update

As for the work with BETA Strike Team, I list them below. One line of text / bullet point usually means it's in the hands of a single person working on the feature and handling the ownership. However, be aware that I need to simplify it to make things at least a little bit digestible, so it's hard to strike the right amount of detail without basically reworking JIRA tasks to show them here:

Programmers

• AI script implementation
• Zombie behavior script representation
• Wind rework and debugs
• Inventory and item conditions
• Item spawn definition
• User actions in multiplayer
• Exhausted and hurt player animation support
• Network traffic optimization
• New version check (to prevent edge cases of connecting to a different build of a game)
• Lightning fixes (new lightning setup)
• Sound event manager
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes

Animators

• Weapon mechanics animations polishing (unjamming, reloads)
• Inverse Kinematics poses
• Mocap (Player turns and more)
• Hit reactions on player
• Animation plugins
• Cow and Bull refactor for the new animation system

Designers

• User actions in multiplayer
• Player representation
• New item hierarchy definition
• New player and item spawn definition
• Inventory UI refactor
• Lifespan
• Tree fire geometry
• Tons of bug fixes

Audio

• Positional environment audio

QA
• Playtest 0.62
• Door rework priority assignment (standardized door sizes)
• Performance profiling in 0.62
• Client performance benchmarks in 0.62



I know that a list is not the best way to present the progress, but might be interesting for the development folks out there. However, I would also like to make it much more representative. There are tons of things happening at the same time, and we are in process of visualizing the sprint in very near future and I`ll try and share our overview of BETA progress when things settle down.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer



 
Along with upcoming changes to doors behavior I wrote about in the past, another issue which we definitely need to address and solve is the wide variety of different widths and heights of door openings. It may sound like a marginal issue, but I encourage you to continue reading, and discover how it affects gameplay.

Nearly every opening in DayZ is unique, which is caused by historical reasons and non-existing metrics back then (we are using a mixture of different structures collected from Operation Flashpoint, Arma 1, Arma 2, and some new ones made exclusively for DayZ). Apart from the fact that doors with dimensions below ideal standard just look bad and out of place (not to mention handles placed in above knees height) and feel odd (especially from the first person camera), they are also hindering the "fluency" of player movement.

Character collisions coupled with old clunky locomotion are introducing unwanted challenge in such simple action as going through the door, turning doors into an obstacle. Internal tests made with both old and new characters show us that a minimum clear opening of doors in DayZ should have clear width of 120cm and clear height of 220cm, and these dimensions were established as required metrics.



Everything below causes issues with character navigation, and feels odd especially in first person camera, where opening seems very narrow and low due to camera FOV and perspective. Also the third person camera then shows unnecessary jumping down while going through the door (if their opening height is under 220cm). New doors metrics with their new behavior will add a lot to responsiveness and smooth movement through the environment and its obstacles.

As we are continuing to work on 0.63 version AKA BETA, programmers are getting rid of old systems down the road. Lastly, old player has been completely removed internally, and with it also firearms handling (that includes firearms action like chambering, reloading, shooting… etc.) and aiming model (which means sway, recoil, dexterity, aiming, holding breath…), together with melee fighting (traced swings…) are gone forever as these were integral parts of the old player.

This untied our hands as now is the time when prototypes based on design I mentioned in past Status Reports (8 March 2017 and 28 September 2016) start being implemented in close cooperation between programmers, animators and us managing the design and script side of things.

Rewrite of firearms also allows us to introduce mechanics like changeable gun barrels (we have 2 more barrels for AUG ready to experiment with), different muzzle speeds for the same ammunition type depending on barrel length (which helps balancing firearms between each other, or vice versa), different muzzle speeds for different ammunition type used in same firearm (pellets vs slugs anyone?), switching between scope and sights if possible (like AK family, AUG…) and refinement of, and more importantly, connecting already introduced firearms mechanics like unjamming, mechanism manipulation, chambering and others to the new animation system .

I just can't wait for the moment these systems will be fully re-implemented, as it will change the combat experience a lot in general.

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
We have finished network part of user action system as I described in  my last Status Report contribution. It's worth to mention that this change has decreased network traffic from clients significantly and now our client on 0.63 sends (with some small exceptions) only input packets. This change will help a lot to resolve issues like late hits registration and it also should help to overall game responsibility.

Weapon system has received some new features, like changeable barrels and muzzles and support for attached grenade launchers. Basic implementation for weapon jamming is ready since last week.

And another small new feature - we're working on a system that will select communication channel for chat and voice automatically, so players won't have to change channel using keyboard cursor keys.

Apart from that, most of our time is still being spend on the new player implementation - tweaking movement and collisions, creating new weapon aiming system and connecting it all to other gameplay systems - we'll talk about these later on, when they are ready.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer



 
Greetings Survivors, It is getting warmer outside in Europe, but not even the nice weather can stop you from playing your favorite game. With every day, we are getting closer to release of the 0.62 Update and the community is trembling with impatience and nervousness. But don’t worry, I am also looking forward to the release of the new update, same as you.

As you surely know from previous Status Reports, update 0.62 will also contain map updates, which are being taken care of by our map designer Adam Franců a.k.a. Sumrak. We will be shooting new Q&A video with him in the next couple of days. If you have any questions regarding his work and the DayZ map, feel free to ask him .

And now for the things that landed on our Twitter, official forum or Reddit over the last two weeks. 
 
When I opened Twitter today, the first thing that caught my eye was an elaborate figurine made by Bragawn. It’s almost unbelievable that it is made entirely of paper! Great job! 




Next, I would like to share with you two videos that I found interesting. First one is for fans of role-play gameplay style. It is a ritual of Cult of Papa filmed by three different people and edited into one video by Ron Fox. Can you guess the place where it was filmed? Hail Papa!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOV0ItLExYA

The other video is for PvP lovers. Absolutely brilliant singing opening and ending by IsSy is followed by exciting action with a lot of victims. Good aim Inherwake!  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JboHRg5vCo

For the end, I would like to introduce a smaller streamer from Australia who I like for his enthusiasm, optimism and being always cheerful. Make sure to check out his Twitch channel, you will surely be infected with his positivity! 



 

If you have any DayZ creations of your own that you'd like to share, tweet them to us on our official Twitter channel. You might just honor the next status report with your talent! 

Awesome header image submitted by: [O.N.U] Damigo 

- Baty / Community Manager

Evening Survivors!

This week, you'll hear from our Creative Director Brian Hicks and our Lead Producer Eugen Harton - as the department leads are fully focused on catching up on their tasks after a short Easter holiday, both Brian and Eugen are doing their best to report for them. Both also explain why some of the long-announced content isn''t in the game yet, and what needs to be done to have it available during BETA.

Mind you, while our today's Status Report is a bit of a long read, it's also full of vital development information on the upcoming 0.62 and BETA updates, so get comfy, pour yourself a drink of your preference and reserve some time for reading - it's worth it! Also, Baty has some nice eye-candy bonus at the very end, so those who make it all the way through will surely be rewarded :)

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors.

I watch a good deal of DayZ Twitch streams and YouTube videos in my free time - and over the last week or so, I saw something that concerned me: hearing conversation in regards to gameplay mechanics or systems currently implemented in the most basic form, and if they are intended (by developers) to ever change.

Between the new user actions and rewrite to Enforce script, and the decision for designers to stop writing new systems in SQF and focus entirely on creating new gameplay systems in the new tech - it can easily seem (to those who don't closely follow development) that we just don't care about the issues currently on the Steam build, or don't ever intend to address them. That couldn't be farther from the case.

For example, Peter and I have been going over functional issues with the central economy we want to see addressed for BETA and beyond - these aren't things that are being ignored. Far from it, but as always, the goal for the team is getting to the final product as quickly and efficiently as possible.

While the economy functions at a playable level and much of the technology required for the final product is there, the priority for the programmers responsible for the Central Economy of DayZ moves on to the next piece of the puzzle - in this particular case, support for public access to server files and required software, modding, and off-line mode.

When those critical technology tasks (that are being worked on by those specific programmers) are implemented into the internal version of the game, that's where we can shift our focus on iterating upon some of the functional issues of the Central Economy.

What kind of functional issues with the economy? Well - just to list a few:

• Dynamic Event spawning behavior
• Dynamic Event item spawn quantity control
• Zone/Area restricted items bunching up in specific towns after extended persistence uptime
• Repeated spawns of the same item types in a structure
• Consistent availability of early game basic supplies

 

Also take a look at Peter's contribution to the last SR - it's a good example of how the current state of things is not final, how our features and systems will be iterated upon and improved.

To be honest, there isn't much of anything in the Alpha phase of DayZ that is functionally (from a design perspective) "complete". Nearly every gameplay system or mechanic the player touches is at a basic functional level, meaning the tech/script/animations are present and it operates in one way or another. Fleshing it out, addressing functional and gameplay issues - that isn't something we should be wasting time and resources on, especially when so much of it is being replaced.

"What about all that cool stuff you guys have shown for years but never ended up in the game?" You might ask - "What happened to that?!" - While I know both Eugen and myself have discussed this before, I can't fault anyone for missing it - it certainly is not easy trying to search or go back through Status Reports on http://dayz.com/ at the very least.


Nearly everything that has been discussed since we stopped prototyping gameplay mechanics in SQF, stopped creating animations for new items on the old animation system, and so on is, and has been worked on. I know it can seem like cool things like base building, soft skills, or player facial hair growth has disappeared because we haven't publicly associated it with a specific release.

The reality of the situation is, with pretty much everything on that proverbial list being dependent upon the new player, and the focus for BETA being on getting the game stable and playable on the new engine modules - we're playing our cards close to the chest.

While we may end up with a BETA candidate build that has a huge chunk of the content and gameplay systems backlog functional in it - it's just as possible that we'll end up with a smaller chunk of the backlog content and systems in that first BETA build, and the rest of the list will follow up as quick as possible (which should be at a much quicker pace, having shed a good chunk of our nasty tech debt and overhead from supporting legacy and new tech). 

We're in that situation because it is the technology - the foundation of everything inside DayZ that you guys experience - that is setting the pace and progress towards our goals right now.

As we get closer to these core components of DayZ's underlying technology being functional and usable in a multiplayer state, we can better gauge what the gameplay and content ingredients of the BETA milestone are.

I know for some of you, a good deal of this is information is something you all already know, as Eugen and I both have spoken on it several times before (and I couldn't have put it better than Eugen's contribution to the last SR), but for as many of you that may follow development closely and know all this already - there are just as many that might have missed some of this down the pipe.

You know what they say: now they know... and knowing is half the battle.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hi there survivors, since some of you appreciated my last Status Report contribution, I'm going to try and keep them as regular as possible. While knowing that my wall of text is not going to be an easy read for everyone, I do believe it's necessary to try and write stuff in technical detail in order to have an provide an honest coverage of what's happening in the DayZ Dev Team offices.

There will be a lot of stuff happening over the coming months, and I want to guide you through it with as much information as possible. At this point, there are two large releases scheduled for this year. and we're fully focused on those. The development is divided into strike teams - a smaller strike team is working on the 0.62 update, which we internally like to call a "Visual Upgrade". It contains tweaks to lighting and new forests, as well as general world fidelity improvements (we have more to come in that department for follow-up/future updates as well).

As far as what that means in a bit more detail, the Visual Upgrade coming with the 0.62 update will feature:

• New tree models
• Denser forests
• New clutter (grass, small plants)
• New surface textures (roads, plains and such)
• Improved wind behavior
• New shader for the wind, affecting trees and grass
• Tweaked and changed lighting for the world (for a more apocalyptic feel, yay!)
• Small improvements to satellite textures
• Rain affected by wind and refinement of its behavior in general
• Many reworked locations on Chernarus
• Reworked ghillie (to be consistent with new tech
• Small bugfixes to some issues from 0.61

The 0.62 update will NOT introduce:

• Any changes to gameplay
• Any changes to buildings and structures (in terms of model graphical fidelity)
• Any changes to player model fidelity
• Any changes to animation fidelity
• Any of the gameplay changes, or new content that we've been occasionally mentioning in Status Reports 
  (those are all scheduled for BETA/0.63)

After this milestone, the strike team for 0.62 will merge with the current 0.63 strike team, and join their efforts to reach BETA on our Steam branches as soon as possible. BETA/0.63 will be a major change for the game as a whole. That is the update that you guys have all been waiting for, and we have been working hard to reach that goal for the past few years. What does that mean in more concrete terms though?

All the new engine technology we have developed for DayZ, along with the content of the current game - all merged in and improved, as it has been refactored from functionality point, design-wise, and in terms of fidelity as well. Moreover, additional content and features that we couldn't properly implement on the legacy tech.

Besides all the refined features, content and overall improvements to the DayZ experience, we also aim to release a handy toolset very near to (or along with) the initial BETA/0.63 update. This toolset will contain the much-requested server files. 

I know you are all asking: But when?!?! As much as I would love to tell you now, we want to be able to deliver a seamless core gameplay loop without bugs breaking it at first. Our main goal now is to get the melee combat and ranged combat work on the new technology, and in a real game environment, not only in a debug mode.

A lot of work has been done already (like new synchronization, damage system, player representation, and more), so this means mostly adding support in synchronization, and adding content for new features in the animation system are ahead of us, but it's still a lot to handle.

So just so you get the idea of what work is being done at the moment (from the perspective of disciplines):

Gameplay team

• Refactor of hard coded world interactions to script. There were still a couple left (opening doors for example). Creation of core synchronization model for these
• Moving VOIP to server authoritative completely
• New weapons API for weapon script implementation
• Inventory conditions implementation for item states and more
• Optimizations of item spawning for server performance
• AI script API for behavior modification
• New player spawn definition
• New item spawn definition
• Vehicle behavior in new technology
• Backend toolset (srvlet) for central manipulation of economy, and server management (community version)

Design team

• User actions manager for the new synchronization model
• Player representation refactor and debug functionality for new player (visualization and toggles for testing and manipulation)
• New hierarchy of item configurations (includes new technology like damage system, procedural coloring and such)
• Data re-structuralization to suit the new setup (file structures at the moment)
• Inventory refactor and optimization according to internal version
• Integration of soft skills to actions in game
• Electricity and its implementation
• Placing of items in world and its implementation

Animation team

• Implementation of animation player turns
• Polishing new weapon animations (unjamming)
• Implementation of hit reactions to melee combat in the new system
• Work on inverse kinematics and item poses
• Tweaking player graph
• Implementation of detailed user actions animations

Engine team

• Toolset refinement
• New inverse kinematics implementation
• New physics representation for non-player entities
• New shaders for trees and grass
• Hit reactions in animation system
• Synchronization of new animation system
• Player turns
• Aiming model

Art team

-New models (sorry, don't want to spoil stuff! )

As you can see, there is a lot of work ongoing, in order to implement all the new technology and content. Most of the tasks are now aiming to get things working together as seamlessly as possible, and a lot of them are playable in different debug environments.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Hello Survivors, before we look at the community content for the last two weeks, I would like to tell you about a 0.61 crash we are looking for that we are not able to reproduce internally. Your game can crash when connecting to the server after waiting in a queue, and when that happens, that is what we are looking for.

Should this happen to you, we would appreciate if you could send the crash dump files from folder Users\YourPCName\AppData\Local\DayZ to our Feedback Tracker.

We are discussing this issue further on our official forums - come join us:

 https://forums.dayz.com/topic/236621-i-am-looking-for-crash-can-you-help-me/ 

Overall, we welcome reports of any crashes that you will be able to reproduce - please send them together with the dump files using the Feedback Tracker. Every report will massively contribute to speeding up the fixing process of those issues.
 

If the wallpaper from the last Status Report was not enough for you, we have another one here, that landed on our Twitter account and that could suit your desktop well. Gaming Roach edited his screenshot into an amazing wallpaper with infected as the main theme. You can find his original screenshot here. You have some talent, man!



Today, I would like to dedicate some space to one of the role-play communities. I am a big fan of role-playing myself, and I really enjoy watching entertaining videos from post-apocalyptic Chernarus. One of them is this video from an RPevent on the whitelisted AftermathRP server that is being organized every 2-3 months. It is about the evacuation of civilians by NATO group from Staroye to Chernogorsk's docklands, while a group of Russian rebels tries to stop them. Here is a part of the official event description from their pages:


"When news first broke out about the virus, many assumed it was just the flu - horrible to have, but with treatment, something you can overcome. This was not because the survivors did not understand what the infected were, it was because of what they were told.  Information was withheld to prevent widespread panic, to make evacuations easier and more importantly, to ensure that no one knew what was happening inside of the country, should they ever get out or be able to call home.

NATO started with their evacuation of civilians.  They went into towns and camps, large in numbers and ‘rounded up’ those were staying there.  If any questions were asked, NATO would simply point to one of the many flu warning posters they had put up around the country and inform people that it is a perfectly normal procedure, and they were just going to check people for symptoms, treat the ill and take the healthy to a safe location."


If you are interested in role-play or if you want to be a participant in the next event here is more information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwnsuGVHZA8

A friendly reminder like every week:[/u] If you want to be a part of the Community Spotlight, tweet us your content to our official Twitter account or send me a private message on our official forumprivate message on our official forum.

Header image provided by TheDethscythe.

- Baty / Community Manager

Evening Survivors!

This week, you'll hear from our Creative Director Brian Hicks and our Lead Producer Eugen Harton - as the department leads are fully focused on catching up on their tasks after a short Easter holiday, both Brian and Eugen are doing their best to report for them. Both also explain why some of the long-announced content isn''t in the game yet, and what needs to be done to have it available during BETA.

Mind you, while our today's Status Report is a bit of a long read, it's also full of vital development information on the upcoming 0.62 and BETA updates, so get comfy, pour yourself a drink of your preference and reserve some time for reading - it's worth it! Also, Baty has some nice eye-candy bonus at the very end, so those who make it all the way through will surely be rewarded :)

• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors.

I watch a good deal of DayZ Twitch streams and YouTube videos in my free time - and over the last week or so, I saw something that concerned me: hearing conversation in regards to gameplay mechanics or systems currently implemented in the most basic form, and if they are intended (by developers) to ever change.

Between the new user actions and rewrite to Enforce script, and the decision for designers to stop writing new systems in SQF and focus entirely on creating new gameplay systems in the new tech - it can easily seem (to those who don't closely follow development) that we just don't care about the issues currently on the Steam build, or don't ever intend to address them. That couldn't be farther from the case.

For example, Peter and I have been going over functional issues with the central economy we want to see addressed for BETA and beyond - these aren't things that are being ignored. Far from it, but as always, the goal for the team is getting to the final product as quickly and efficiently as possible.

While the economy functions at a playable level and much of the technology required for the final product is there, the priority for the programmers responsible for the Central Economy of DayZ moves on to the next piece of the puzzle - in this particular case, support for public access to server files and required software, modding, and off-line mode.

When those critical technology tasks (that are being worked on by those specific programmers) are implemented into the internal version of the game, that's where we can shift our focus on iterating upon some of the functional issues of the Central Economy.

What kind of functional issues with the economy? Well - just to list a few:

• Dynamic Event spawning behavior
• Dynamic Event item spawn quantity control
• Zone/Area restricted items bunching up in specific towns after extended persistence uptime
• Repeated spawns of the same item types in a structure
• Consistent availability of early game basic supplies

 

Also take a look at Peter's contribution to the last SR - it's a good example of how the current state of things is not final, how our features and systems will be iterated upon and improved.

To be honest, there isn't much of anything in the Alpha phase of DayZ that is functionally (from a design perspective) "complete". Nearly every gameplay system or mechanic the player touches is at a basic functional level, meaning the tech/script/animations are present and it operates in one way or another. Fleshing it out, addressing functional and gameplay issues - that isn't something we should be wasting time and resources on, especially when so much of it is being replaced.

"What about all that cool stuff you guys have shown for years but never ended up in the game?" You might ask - "What happened to that?!" - While I know both Eugen and myself have discussed this before, I can't fault anyone for missing it - it certainly is not easy trying to search or go back through Status Reports on http://dayz.com/ at the very least.


Nearly everything that has been discussed since we stopped prototyping gameplay mechanics in SQF, stopped creating animations for new items on the old animation system, and so on is, and has been worked on. I know it can seem like cool things like base building, soft skills, or player facial hair growth has disappeared because we haven't publicly associated it with a specific release.

The reality of the situation is, with pretty much everything on that proverbial list being dependent upon the new player, and the focus for BETA being on getting the game stable and playable on the new engine modules - we're playing our cards close to the chest.

While we may end up with a BETA candidate build that has a huge chunk of the content and gameplay systems backlog functional in it - it's just as possible that we'll end up with a smaller chunk of the backlog content and systems in that first BETA build, and the rest of the list will follow up as quick as possible (which should be at a much quicker pace, having shed a good chunk of our nasty tech debt and overhead from supporting legacy and new tech). 

We're in that situation because it is the technology - the foundation of everything inside DayZ that you guys experience - that is setting the pace and progress towards our goals right now.

As we get closer to these core components of DayZ's underlying technology being functional and usable in a multiplayer state, we can better gauge what the gameplay and content ingredients of the BETA milestone are.

I know for some of you, a good deal of this is information is something you all already know, as Eugen and I both have spoken on it several times before (and I couldn't have put it better than Eugen's contribution to the last SR), but for as many of you that may follow development closely and know all this already - there are just as many that might have missed some of this down the pipe.

You know what they say: now they know... and knowing is half the battle.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hi there survivors, since some of you appreciated my last Status Report contribution, I'm going to try and keep them as regular as possible. While knowing that my wall of text is not going to be an easy read for everyone, I do believe it's necessary to try and write stuff in technical detail in order to have an provide an honest coverage of what's happening in the DayZ Dev Team offices.

There will be a lot of stuff happening over the coming months, and I want to guide you through it with as much information as possible. At this point, there are two large releases scheduled for this year. and we're fully focused on those. The development is divided into strike teams - a smaller strike team is working on the 0.62 update, which we internally like to call a "Visual Upgrade". It contains tweaks to lighting and new forests, as well as general world fidelity improvements (we have more to come in that department for follow-up/future updates as well).

As far as what that means in a bit more detail, the Visual Upgrade coming with the 0.62 update will feature:

• New tree models
• Denser forests
• New clutter (grass, small plants)
• New surface textures (roads, plains and such)
• Improved wind behavior
• New shader for the wind, affecting trees and grass
• Tweaked and changed lighting for the world (for a more apocalyptic feel, yay!)
• Small improvements to satellite textures
• Rain affected by wind and refinement of its behavior in general
• Many reworked locations on Chernarus
• Reworked ghillie (to be consistent with new tech
• Small bugfixes to some issues from 0.61

The 0.62 update will NOT introduce:

• Any changes to gameplay
• Any changes to buildings and structures (in terms of model graphical fidelity)
• Any changes to player model fidelity
• Any changes to animation fidelity
• Any of the gameplay changes, or new content that we've been occasionally mentioning in Status Reports 
  (those are all scheduled for BETA/0.63)

After this milestone, the strike team for 0.62 will merge with the current 0.63 strike team, and join their efforts to reach BETA on our Steam branches as soon as possible. BETA/0.63 will be a major change for the game as a whole. That is the update that you guys have all been waiting for, and we have been working hard to reach that goal for the past few years. What does that mean in more concrete terms though?

All the new engine technology we have developed for DayZ, along with the content of the current game - all merged in and improved, as it has been refactored from functionality point, design-wise, and in terms of fidelity as well. Moreover, additional content and features that we couldn't properly implement on the legacy tech.

Besides all the refined features, content and overall improvements to the DayZ experience, we also aim to release a handy toolset very near to (or along with) the initial BETA/0.63 update. This toolset will contain the much-requested server files. 

I know you are all asking: But when?!?! As much as I would love to tell you now, we want to be able to deliver a seamless core gameplay loop without bugs breaking it at first. Our main goal now is to get the melee combat and ranged combat work on the new technology, and in a real game environment, not only in a debug mode.

A lot of work has been done already (like new synchronization, damage system, player representation, and more), so this means mostly adding support in synchronization, and adding content for new features in the animation system are ahead of us, but it's still a lot to handle.

So just so you get the idea of what work is being done at the moment (from the perspective of disciplines):

Gameplay team

• Refactor of hard coded world interactions to script. There were still a couple left (opening doors for example). Creation of core synchronization model for these
• Moving VOIP to server authoritative completely
• New weapons API for weapon script implementation
• Inventory conditions implementation for item states and more
• Optimizations of item spawning for server performance
• AI script API for behavior modification
• New player spawn definition
• New item spawn definition
• Vehicle behavior in new technology
• Backend toolset (srvlet) for central manipulation of economy, and server management (community version)

Design team

• User actions manager for the new synchronization model
• Player representation refactor and debug functionality for new player (visualization and toggles for testing and manipulation)
• New hierarchy of item configurations (includes new technology like damage system, procedural coloring and such)
• Data re-structuralization to suit the new setup (file structures at the moment)
• Inventory refactor and optimization according to internal version
• Integration of soft skills to actions in game
• Electricity and its implementation
• Placing of items in world and its implementation

Animation team

• Implementation of animation player turns
• Polishing new weapon animations (unjamming)
• Implementation of hit reactions to melee combat in the new system
• Work on inverse kinematics and item poses
• Tweaking player graph
• Implementation of detailed user actions animations

Engine team

• Toolset refinement
• New inverse kinematics implementation
• New physics representation for non-player entities
• New shaders for trees and grass
• Hit reactions in animation system
• Synchronization of new animation system
• Player turns
• Aiming model

Art team

-New models (sorry, don't want to spoil stuff! )

As you can see, there is a lot of work ongoing, in order to implement all the new technology and content. Most of the tasks are now aiming to get things working together as seamlessly as possible, and a lot of them are playable in different debug environments.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Hello Survivors, before we look at the community content for the last two weeks, I would like to tell you about a 0.61 crash we are looking for that we are not able to reproduce internally. Your game can crash when connecting to the server after waiting in a queue, and when that happens, that is what we are looking for.

Should this happen to you, we would appreciate if you could send the crash dump files from folder Users\YourPCName\AppData\Local\DayZ to our Feedback Tracker.

We are discussing this issue further on our official forums - come join us:

 https://forums.dayz.com/topic/236621-i-am-looking-for-crash-can-you-help-me/ 

Overall, we welcome reports of any crashes that you will be able to reproduce - please send them together with the dump files using the Feedback Tracker. Every report will massively contribute to speeding up the fixing process of those issues.
 

If the wallpaper from the last Status Report was not enough for you, we have another one here, that landed on our Twitter account and that could suit your desktop well. Gaming Roach edited his screenshot into an amazing wallpaper with infected as the main theme. You can find his original screenshot here. You have some talent, man!



Today, I would like to dedicate some space to one of the role-play communities. I am a big fan of role-playing myself, and I really enjoy watching entertaining videos from post-apocalyptic Chernarus. One of them is this video from an RPevent on the whitelisted AftermathRP server that is being organized every 2-3 months. It is about the evacuation of civilians by NATO group from Staroye to Chernogorsk's docklands, while a group of Russian rebels tries to stop them. Here is a part of the official event description from their pages:


"When news first broke out about the virus, many assumed it was just the flu - horrible to have, but with treatment, something you can overcome. This was not because the survivors did not understand what the infected were, it was because of what they were told.  Information was withheld to prevent widespread panic, to make evacuations easier and more importantly, to ensure that no one knew what was happening inside of the country, should they ever get out or be able to call home.

NATO started with their evacuation of civilians.  They went into towns and camps, large in numbers and ‘rounded up’ those were staying there.  If any questions were asked, NATO would simply point to one of the many flu warning posters they had put up around the country and inform people that it is a perfectly normal procedure, and they were just going to check people for symptoms, treat the ill and take the healthy to a safe location."


If you are interested in role-play or if you want to be a participant in the next event here is more information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwnsuGVHZA8

A friendly reminder like every week:[/u] If you want to be a part of the Community Spotlight, tweet us your content to our official Twitter account or send me a private message on our official forumprivate message on our official forum.

Header image provided by TheDethscythe.

- Baty / Community Manager