An outbreak of Gamescom plague caused chaos in our schedules and organisation, but most of the team is back in business now. Brian sets a perspective on how to balance excitement and expectations now when we're approaching an important milestone in DayZ development. Eugen sums up our immediate internal development goals that will eventually lead us to that BETA milestone, and how they add up to the big picture of DayZ 1.0. We're welcoming back Viktor, who's found some time to reflect upon the new animation changes presented at Gamescom, and there's also Martin's update on the status of a promised 0.63 Dev Log video. As usual, Baty is closing of with awesome community content, and invites everyone to Birmingham's EGX next week! Let's get ready for some reading!

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

 
Greetings Survivors,

Y'know, I've seen a lot of folks talking about 0.63 like it will solve world hunger - which is something I've seen associated with other pending builds before. Be it the new renderer, changes to sound, adjustments to economy, or even the introduction of the V3S. Typically people get pissy with me when I have to try and bring things down to earth, but I'm alright with being the bad guy in this case.

Anytime you change the technology powering a piece of software, hell anytime you change the software itself in any way, you come up against risk. The degree of risk is the factor that fluctuates, and its up to the developers creating said software to weigh the risk of a change, versus the pay off. For us as a team, and for DayZ as a product the pay off is well worth the risk. For years now we've been internally prototyping, be it in documentation, in script, or in intermediate technologies built to serve the gap between what is functioning on the consumer Steam branch, and what is functioning internally on the main trunk.

I've had the pleasure of previewing, discussing, and in some cases "teasing" these prototypes, and documentation for years. Eager to share our intent with you, but often blocked from actually sharing the experience with you due to technical limitations. The .63/Beta update is the first major step towards the technology finally being able to bring this vision forward. It is not the end of the road, but it is most certainly the most important lap we have made

I did not overstate it when I said that the change to animation system, player controller, and scripting language would begin to alter how you interact with the world itself. This is fundamentally a huge change, both internally and externally for you, the consumer. I'm neither trying to charge up the hype train, nor am I trying to crush anyone's hopes and dreams. It's rare that a title gets the support from a company to spend the time working on improving the core technology to better meet the needs of design. Typically, technology limitations inform design within a few small exceptions from time to time. Its been a long road, and bumpy as hell ,but we're finally within sight of being able to finally share with all of you the things we've all worked on for so long.

And we couldn't have done it without all of you.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

 
Hello survivors! Post-gamescom rush has ended quickly with a lot people getting sick, feverish from Gamescom plague. With people missing we were trying to get through the feedback in our internal post-mortem and follow up it up in the plan for following months and weeks before BETA becomes available. I have to say that the road does not end there, and we still are dedicated to polish the experience further before we leave Early Access. What BETA means is that most if not all features promised will be implemented in the new technology, and iterated upon further as we move to leave out of Early Access with 1.0 version. I believe that feedback will be critical in this phase where all the issues need to get ironed out.

In the meantime, we focused on issues either seen during Gamescom or general plans that have been set out. Special attention has been put on critical issues of camera that was still up for refactor. As it is nowhere near the level that we want from the game, nor has the feature set needed. From the clipping issues to twitchy movement and abuse, there is lot of ground to cover.

And there is a lot more as the whole Gamescom experience worked as an amazing focus test on large scale. We had the chance to see how people work around the new stuff available and observe to see the flaws in the whole system. Which was an amazing opportunity, and I can`t wait to have the same experience with other people online, so that we can make this game the best it can be together.

The next step for us, is to finish up more advanced features for melee and ranged combat, additional camera technology to support all the new gameplay, and finalizing the character movement and variation, before we move heavily into area of infected, where some heavy work needs to be done.

Once the base loop feels really good, we will move onto rest of the game to polish all these things in the new technology. We will survive!  

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
Hi everyone. It has been a while since the last time I contributed to the Status Report. The past weeks were a bit hectic with the animation things related to the Gamescom build. I think animators did a great job adding all the content which everyone was able to play for couple of days. We were very pleased by the positive feedback to the new player controller, injured animations, heavy items animations, combat and everything else that was presented.

The version available to play was not final by any means. We are still aiming for significant improvements in many areas of player character and infected as well. The presented wounded character was a first draft in fact. In the upcoming days, weeks and months we will continue on animation improvements and reworks.

Currently, we are also working on some new death animations. We are adding directional deaths for all item types and all stances. Initially, the character will play the pre-recorded animation only but later, we will start with directional death animation and in the middle of the animation, we will switch to ragdoll so that the characters would fall and align with environment nicely.

Another big part of the game that is being worked on are poses for different items. There are hundreds of various food items, weapons or tools that need a proper pose. From the very beginning of the DayZ, we have decided to have a nice holding for each of these items. At the moment, all these poses are being made and added to the game.



- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

 
Survivors, I just want to briefly update you on the status of the 0.63 Dev Log that we teased and promised to deliver after Gamescom. Unfortunately, a sizeable portion of the team (including Baty, Eugen and me) got hit by an outbreak of some sneaky virus that we most likely brought with us back from Gamescom.

Since we have a very small marketing/community team here, this further delayed the production of the Dev Log video, but we're back in business now, and we've also managed to get some additional help from our QA Engineer Dan Fialka (who's been with us at Gamescom as well). He's recording some of the gameplay clips as we speak, so hopefully we'll be able to speed things up a notch now. 

Recording a couple of gameplay clips from an internal build may sound like an an easy task, but if they are supposed to be done according to a script, and connected with a developer voice over, it suddenly becomes a complicated undertaking - especially when the internal build of DayZ just decides to behave weirdly, and randomly throws crashes and glitches your way. Of course, we want to avoid showing these things in official content as much as possible, as the intent is to present the best of what the current build can offer.

If anything, it also shows that the build is simply not ready to be played beyond a very controlled and structured environment that was the Gamescom booth, and that our decision to not release it on a Steam branch was very well reasoned. We'll let you know on our forums and social media channels the moment the video is ready - for now, please hold tight end enjoy some of the community content from Gamescom that we shared in the last Status Report! 

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager

 
Survivors!

The Gamescom epidemic hit a lot of us and I wasn't an exception. But I am ready for a new event! You might know there is a show called EGX in Birmingham, England. I and my colleague, brand manager Martin Čulák, will be there on Friday and we want to meet everyone from DayZ community, who is also planning to attend this gaming event. Watch our Twitter for more information.




Barely Infected came with an amazing idea. He organized a group of survivors and built a camp named "DayZ Village" where all the good people can live together and help each other in this cruel time of apocalypse. This project had great success and The Village is nowadays still pretty crowded. You can find it on Spaggie's server at 185.16.86.48:2402 and The Village is located on the Zub castle. I spent some time there and it was awesome. People are nice, they care about each other and try to protect The Village together. The Village was planned for just one week, but with this success, Barely Infected decided to prolong it.

Barely Infected has documentation of every day on the server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRS5rYnBy3M

You can find a lot of content from creators on Youtube and make your own impression of what is going on on the server. For example from these guys: Gaming Junkie, CitizenZ, CamCANTRUN, Raig Prime, Kerbo, FriendlyNikolai, 2dogsgaming, RageBruh or HandZ.

Here is a funny prank from M1NDER, he pranked the whole village.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzNDI9FCRRo

And one last thing about this event - artwork of DayZ Village by Dominik Figlhuber.




Everyone is looking forward to the 0.63 update. But not as much as this guy. KaskadianRepublik's body is ready. But since 0.63 is still not ready for public, you will need to wait until it's done. 



I want to show you one video. It is about love between a dog and a human. Fluffy cute wolf who wants to eat everyone around him. But Whoopsie DayZ falls in love with him and wants to have him as a pet. How this can end? I laughed a lot, you need to see it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6fmFIaqmCw

Have a nice time guys and see you in two weeks!

Header image by Vernon Price.

- Baty / Community Manager

An outbreak of Gamescom plague caused chaos in our schedules and organisation, but most of the team is back in business now. Brian sets a perspective on how to balance excitement and expectations now when we're approaching an important milestone in DayZ development. Eugen sums up our immediate internal development goals that will eventually lead us to that BETA milestone, and how they add up to the big picture of DayZ 1.0. We're welcoming back Viktor, who's found some time to reflect upon the new animation changes presented at Gamescom, and there's also Martin's update on the status of a promised 0.63 Dev Log video. As usual, Baty is closing of with awesome community content, and invites everyone to Birmingham's EGX next week! Let's get ready for some reading!

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

 
Greetings Survivors,

Y'know, I've seen a lot of folks talking about 0.63 like it will solve world hunger - which is something I've seen associated with other pending builds before. Be it the new renderer, changes to sound, adjustments to economy, or even the introduction of the V3S. Typically people get pissy with me when I have to try and bring things down to earth, but I'm alright with being the bad guy in this case.

Anytime you change the technology powering a piece of software, hell anytime you change the software itself in any way, you come up against risk. The degree of risk is the factor that fluctuates, and its up to the developers creating said software to weigh the risk of a change, versus the pay off. For us as a team, and for DayZ as a product the pay off is well worth the risk. For years now we've been internally prototyping, be it in documentation, in script, or in intermediate technologies built to serve the gap between what is functioning on the consumer Steam branch, and what is functioning internally on the main trunk.

I've had the pleasure of previewing, discussing, and in some cases "teasing" these prototypes, and documentation for years. Eager to share our intent with you, but often blocked from actually sharing the experience with you due to technical limitations. The .63/Beta update is the first major step towards the technology finally being able to bring this vision forward. It is not the end of the road, but it is most certainly the most important lap we have made

I did not overstate it when I said that the change to animation system, player controller, and scripting language would begin to alter how you interact with the world itself. This is fundamentally a huge change, both internally and externally for you, the consumer. I'm neither trying to charge up the hype train, nor am I trying to crush anyone's hopes and dreams. It's rare that a title gets the support from a company to spend the time working on improving the core technology to better meet the needs of design. Typically, technology limitations inform design within a few small exceptions from time to time. Its been a long road, and bumpy as hell ,but we're finally within sight of being able to finally share with all of you the things we've all worked on for so long.

And we couldn't have done it without all of you.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

 
Hello survivors! Post-gamescom rush has ended quickly with a lot people getting sick, feverish from Gamescom plague. With people missing we were trying to get through the feedback in our internal post-mortem and follow up it up in the plan for following months and weeks before BETA becomes available. I have to say that the road does not end there, and we still are dedicated to polish the experience further before we leave Early Access. What BETA means is that most if not all features promised will be implemented in the new technology, and iterated upon further as we move to leave out of Early Access with 1.0 version. I believe that feedback will be critical in this phase where all the issues need to get ironed out.

In the meantime, we focused on issues either seen during Gamescom or general plans that have been set out. Special attention has been put on critical issues of camera that was still up for refactor. As it is nowhere near the level that we want from the game, nor has the feature set needed. From the clipping issues to twitchy movement and abuse, there is lot of ground to cover.

And there is a lot more as the whole Gamescom experience worked as an amazing focus test on large scale. We had the chance to see how people work around the new stuff available and observe to see the flaws in the whole system. Which was an amazing opportunity, and I can`t wait to have the same experience with other people online, so that we can make this game the best it can be together.

The next step for us, is to finish up more advanced features for melee and ranged combat, additional camera technology to support all the new gameplay, and finalizing the character movement and variation, before we move heavily into area of infected, where some heavy work needs to be done.

Once the base loop feels really good, we will move onto rest of the game to polish all these things in the new technology. We will survive!  

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
Hi everyone. It has been a while since the last time I contributed to the Status Report. The past weeks were a bit hectic with the animation things related to the Gamescom build. I think animators did a great job adding all the content which everyone was able to play for couple of days. We were very pleased by the positive feedback to the new player controller, injured animations, heavy items animations, combat and everything else that was presented.

The version available to play was not final by any means. We are still aiming for significant improvements in many areas of player character and infected as well. The presented wounded character was a first draft in fact. In the upcoming days, weeks and months we will continue on animation improvements and reworks.

Currently, we are also working on some new death animations. We are adding directional deaths for all item types and all stances. Initially, the character will play the pre-recorded animation only but later, we will start with directional death animation and in the middle of the animation, we will switch to ragdoll so that the characters would fall and align with environment nicely.

Another big part of the game that is being worked on are poses for different items. There are hundreds of various food items, weapons or tools that need a proper pose. From the very beginning of the DayZ, we have decided to have a nice holding for each of these items. At the moment, all these poses are being made and added to the game.



- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

 
Survivors, I just want to briefly update you on the status of the 0.63 Dev Log that we teased and promised to deliver after Gamescom. Unfortunately, a sizeable portion of the team (including Baty, Eugen and me) got hit by an outbreak of some sneaky virus that we most likely brought with us back from Gamescom.

Since we have a very small marketing/community team here, this further delayed the production of the Dev Log video, but we're back in business now, and we've also managed to get some additional help from our QA Engineer Dan Fialka (who's been with us at Gamescom as well). He's recording some of the gameplay clips as we speak, so hopefully we'll be able to speed things up a notch now. 

Recording a couple of gameplay clips from an internal build may sound like an an easy task, but if they are supposed to be done according to a script, and connected with a developer voice over, it suddenly becomes a complicated undertaking - especially when the internal build of DayZ just decides to behave weirdly, and randomly throws crashes and glitches your way. Of course, we want to avoid showing these things in official content as much as possible, as the intent is to present the best of what the current build can offer.

If anything, it also shows that the build is simply not ready to be played beyond a very controlled and structured environment that was the Gamescom booth, and that our decision to not release it on a Steam branch was very well reasoned. We'll let you know on our forums and social media channels the moment the video is ready - for now, please hold tight end enjoy some of the community content from Gamescom that we shared in the last Status Report! 

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager

 
Survivors!

The Gamescom epidemic hit a lot of us and I wasn't an exception. But I am ready for a new event! You might know there is a show called EGX in Birmingham, England. I and my colleague, brand manager Martin Čulák, will be there on Friday and we want to meet everyone from DayZ community, who is also planning to attend this gaming event. Watch our Twitter for more information.




Barely Infected came with an amazing idea. He organized a group of survivors and built a camp named "DayZ Village" where all the good people can live together and help each other in this cruel time of apocalypse. This project had great success and The Village is nowadays still pretty crowded. You can find it on Spaggie's server at 185.16.86.48:2402 and The Village is located on the Zub castle. I spent some time there and it was awesome. People are nice, they care about each other and try to protect The Village together. The Village was planned for just one week, but with this success, Barely Infected decided to prolong it.

Barely Infected has documentation of every day on the server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRS5rYnBy3M

You can find a lot of content from creators on Youtube and make your own impression of what is going on on the server. For example from these guys: Gaming Junkie, CitizenZ, CamCANTRUN, Raig Prime, Kerbo, FriendlyNikolai, 2dogsgaming, RageBruh or HandZ.

Here is a funny prank from M1NDER, he pranked the whole village.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzNDI9FCRRo

And one last thing about this event - artwork of DayZ Village by Dominik Figlhuber.




Everyone is looking forward to the 0.63 update. But not as much as this guy. KaskadianRepublik's body is ready. But since 0.63 is still not ready for public, you will need to wait until it's done. 



I want to show you one video. It is about love between a dog and a human. Fluffy cute wolf who wants to eat everyone around him. But Whoopsie DayZ falls in love with him and wants to have him as a pet. How this can end? I laughed a lot, you need to see it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6fmFIaqmCw

Have a nice time guys and see you in two weeks!

Header image by Vernon Price.

- Baty / Community Manager

This week, the Status Report fully focuses on recapping our Gamescom experience. We've been presenting the 0.63 playable DEMO in Cologne, Germany the entire past week, and met literally hundreds of players who tried the DEMO live at our booth as we watched them play. We've gathered a lot of important feedback, which both Eugen and Peter cover in their texts. There are also VoDs of Gamescom live streams, some exciting Gamescom gameplay from our community, and more! Let's get to it.

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Martin
• Community Spotlight

 
Gamescom DEMO has been an amazing experience for all of us. Being able to finally get direct feedback on 0.63 and talk to our old school players, or see the new ones playing it for the first time has made me more than a little happy. After getting this DayZ potential ready tech wise, we had a game to share, and talk about. It was exciting and exhausting. We are looking forward to sharing more.

At the same time, I have some less exciting news for you. As the build we brought to Gamescom would still take weeks to get ready for public testing, we will not be releasing the DEMO for Steam. We really wanted to, but it just no longer makes sense to spend time polishing a very small part of the whole BETA experience. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive on the floor, and I do believe we are hitting the right notes on what BETA should feel like. Rather than releasing a DEMO, our goal is to get the BETA/0.63 update out as soon as possible in its entirety on Experimental branch when ready. That does not mean it's going to be rushed. We do believe that the only way out of this hellhole is a really good game that all of us want to play.

We are going to focus on the combat a little while longer to incorporate some of the good feedback that we got, as well as features missing from the DEMO that were cut before it was used on the show floor. There is still a lot of details to implement, or content to convert in that regard. Since we have only returned from Gamescom floor on Sunday late night, we plan to have an internal post-mortem first and get the team together to plan out the next month in detail.

However, as you may know, the scope of BETA is huge, and even though we have developed a lot of these features during the same time as technology, now it is time to put it all together. It’s a painful process, but the game is finally there. We are going to need a lot of balancing runs, polishing and bug fixing before we are happy to put it out. We will be reading the feedback on the details available and try and share with you more as we recover from the trip.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Gamescom 2017 has ended, so let my write down my impressions. At first, knowing all that stuff which was completely missing from the DEMO, or just in early prototype state, and all the remaining limitations we still needs to figure out, I was feeling a bit insecure about the quality of the DEMO build that we brought for showcase at the Gamescom booth. I'm a person who likes to have things in order, and as polished as possible, which leads to situations where I’m just not pleased enough with the current state of the game. So naturally, I was very curious how it's all going to turn out in the end.

To quickly recap what was presented in demo:

• New rocks, roads and their decals with parallax mapping.
• New characters with better body proportions and heads with lifespan, containing growing shaveable beards, washable bloody hands from skinning bodies
• New character controller and animation system with very responsive and fluent character movement, coupled with new physics for better collisions, allowing for smooth traversing through environment (yes even running down/up the hill!)
• New movement sets for turning, injured, falling character as well as carrying heavy items around in hands
• New gestures with the ability to move while using them
• New stamina system, differentiating character movement speed depending on their load
• New melee combat system with attack and hit impacts animations
• New ranged combat with extended weapon handling and aiming with new sway and recoil
• New intuitive way to perform actions with items in hands even while moving, crafting new ones even directly from world and interactions with environment without pixel hunting
• New HUD and inventory with clear layout and resized cargo and item sizes
• New voice communication including personal radio, megaphone and public address system
• New advanced placing which will be used for precise placement of specific items
• New electricity system with cable reels to reach far places
• And much more...

There were thousands of gamers and content creators looking forward to get their hands on the first iteration of what DayZ will become in BETA. It was an interesting mixture of people that never played DayZ before, ones who put it down waiting patiently for BETA, and those who still play DayZ regularly and spent from hundreds to thousands of hours in-game. I've spent a great amount of time observing how people play the game, and discussed with them about what they like on the new DayZ, what would they still like to see improved, and why.

With this approach, I gained a ton of feedback. It was very positive to see and hear that we are actually on the right track, and people do like what they see, and especially how it plays. Bear in mind nothing is set in stone yet, and everything could be changed, especially after valuable feedback we received. It will allow us to refine the design a bit more, so in it’s final form, DayZ could unleash its full potential, and allow people to enjoy what DayZ is so well known for - an emergent gameplay full of interactions, which creates stories filled with unique experience and leaving strong memories in atmospheric world.

After meeting you at Gamescom 2017... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 
As both Eugen and Peter mentioned, Gamescom was a really positive experience for us. The very stressful couple of weeks before we left the office and travelled to Cologne were definitely worth it in the end, as we've been met with a very warm welcome at Gamescom, and also fulfilled our mission: to gather preliminary feedback on an early 0.63 build.

As Baty will share in her part of the Status Report, we did our best to provide some meaningful coverage for those of you not visiting Gamescom. The couple of live streams we organized with Twitch and GameStar.de were quite full of interesting news, so do check them out below, along with content from M1ndr, Barely Infected or Merlin from DayZ Underground.

It';s a bit unfortunate that we were not able to capture a better gameplay clip for both live streams in time (due to both time constraints and last minute fixes to the playable DEMO build), so the presented footage was a bit bare bones and glitchy at times, but as promised, we will deliver a good amount of quality 1080p/60FPS footage in the following days. The footage will take the form of a Dev Log video similar to those made for 0.62, and you can expect around 10 minutes of new content with Eugen's developer narration. 

Also, since we decided not to make the DEMO available on Steam, we'll see if we can at least organise a live stream where you can see live gameplay, and ask us questions. Our pre-gamescom live stream was a bit of a technical failure, so we need to spend some more time planning the live stream, but we have a decent combat plan to make it all happen. 

That's it from me this week. Thanks everyone who visited us at Gamescom, you were awesome! Now, let's see some of the community content from our booth. 

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager


 


Gamescom is over, we are back in Prague, and work on BETA continues. 

It was something new to us and some people in the team have never been to a big event like Gamescom before. It was exhausting, but it was worth it, because your feedback is what we really needed. And we are really happy we got a lot of very positive feedback from you!  





It was a total of 6 of us from the DayZ team, and for five days, you were able to meet us in the booth and play DayZ on 18 PCs.  You could play a short PvP demo, try some features from the upcoming 0.63 build and grab some nice little presents along the way. You've surely seen videos that appeared mostly on Twitter and Reddit from people who have already tried the demo. Unfortunately, as Martin explained, we do not have an official video ready yet, but we will catch up this week and if everything goes according to our plan, the video commented by our Lead Producer Eugen Harton will be released by the end of the week. Before it's out, you can look at the impressions of M1ndr and Rene (Barely Infected) who also visited us to try the DEMO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTxtPMdGQ48
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgquR7cg_c8


There were two live streams during Gamescom where our Lead Producer Eugen was talking about the Gamescom DEMO and BETA. First one on the line was the GameStar.de live stream, and the second one was a Twitch official Gamescom live stream (watch the VOD here, you need to move to time 8:10:55). 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/168939184
 

We also hosted a community meetup at Gamescom, where we met ten of you and barely fit into our small meeting room. For almost two hours, we talked about DayZ and what you can expect from the BETA. And you got some special gifts we prepared for this event. I would like to thank you very much for coming to see us and I hope you enjoyed the meeting as much as we did! 



 

Before Gamescom, we organized an event on Skalisty Island where players became knights and fought in teams to capture the Skalisty castle. Except for a bit of a waiting waiting, everything went well and all players were quite happy.

There were some content creators who were streaming or recording their gameplay which they then placed on YouTube, so those of you who were not there can see it too. Blue team won the battle of the castle, but the greys fought bravely too. I want to thank everyone for their patience and the fact that they have arrived. You can look forward to another event soon! 

Just for clarification, the recording of the developer stream that accompanied the event was removed due to technical issues during the stream. Unfortunately, we did not correctly estimate the demands of the stream on the hardware and therefore the stream was flawed by unpleasant lags. We learned our lesson and it will be better next time. 




I've created a list of YouTube recordings for you, so you can see what was happening through the eyes of several players. If I forgot to include someone just tweet me at @batyalquawen and I'm going to add you to the playlist. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLFzBzEXIs35KV7j1K_ENizLoA2CtXMJrv&v=XGVBMSroIKY


And in the end, I want to show you a funny bug we found yesterday. Adam Franců sent it to me with this description: 

While working on the tourist trails north of Svetloyarsk, we have discovered this massive structure that reesembles the shape of a lunch table. The exact origin and purpose of it is yet to be known. We have sent scout to investigate, reports suggest that this structure pose serious threat to the survivors and we have managed to take it down in a quick map editing action.








Thanks again to everyone who came to play the Gamescom demo and to everyone who gave us any feedback. We really appreciate it. See you in two weeks guys and have a nice start of a new school year! 

Header image by MAMAD_NZR.
 
- Baty / Community Manager

 

This week, the Status Report fully focuses on recapping our Gamescom experience. We've been presenting the 0.63 playable DEMO in Cologne, Germany the entire past week, and met literally hundreds of players who tried the DEMO live at our booth as we watched them play. We've gathered a lot of important feedback, which both Eugen and Peter cover in their texts. There are also VoDs of Gamescom live streams, some exciting Gamescom gameplay from our community, and more! Let's get to it.

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Martin
• Community Spotlight

 
Gamescom DEMO has been an amazing experience for all of us. Being able to finally get direct feedback on 0.63 and talk to our old school players, or see the new ones playing it for the first time has made me more than a little happy. After getting this DayZ potential ready tech wise, we had a game to share, and talk about. It was exciting and exhausting. We are looking forward to sharing more.

At the same time, I have some less exciting news for you. As the build we brought to Gamescom would still take weeks to get ready for public testing, we will not be releasing the DEMO for Steam. We really wanted to, but it just no longer makes sense to spend time polishing a very small part of the whole BETA experience. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive on the floor, and I do believe we are hitting the right notes on what BETA should feel like. Rather than releasing a DEMO, our goal is to get the BETA/0.63 update out as soon as possible in its entirety on Experimental branch when ready. That does not mean it's going to be rushed. We do believe that the only way out of this hellhole is a really good game that all of us want to play.

We are going to focus on the combat a little while longer to incorporate some of the good feedback that we got, as well as features missing from the DEMO that were cut before it was used on the show floor. There is still a lot of details to implement, or content to convert in that regard. Since we have only returned from Gamescom floor on Sunday late night, we plan to have an internal post-mortem first and get the team together to plan out the next month in detail.

However, as you may know, the scope of BETA is huge, and even though we have developed a lot of these features during the same time as technology, now it is time to put it all together. It’s a painful process, but the game is finally there. We are going to need a lot of balancing runs, polishing and bug fixing before we are happy to put it out. We will be reading the feedback on the details available and try and share with you more as we recover from the trip.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Gamescom 2017 has ended, so let my write down my impressions. At first, knowing all that stuff which was completely missing from the DEMO, or just in early prototype state, and all the remaining limitations we still needs to figure out, I was feeling a bit insecure about the quality of the DEMO build that we brought for showcase at the Gamescom booth. I'm a person who likes to have things in order, and as polished as possible, which leads to situations where I’m just not pleased enough with the current state of the game. So naturally, I was very curious how it's all going to turn out in the end.

To quickly recap what was presented in demo:

• New rocks, roads and their decals with parallax mapping.
• New characters with better body proportions and heads with lifespan, containing growing shaveable beards, washable bloody hands from skinning bodies
• New character controller and animation system with very responsive and fluent character movement, coupled with new physics for better collisions, allowing for smooth traversing through environment (yes even running down/up the hill!)
• New movement sets for turning, injured, falling character as well as carrying heavy items around in hands
• New gestures with the ability to move while using them
• New stamina system, differentiating character movement speed depending on their load
• New melee combat system with attack and hit impacts animations
• New ranged combat with extended weapon handling and aiming with new sway and recoil
• New intuitive way to perform actions with items in hands even while moving, crafting new ones even directly from world and interactions with environment without pixel hunting
• New HUD and inventory with clear layout and resized cargo and item sizes
• New voice communication including personal radio, megaphone and public address system
• New advanced placing which will be used for precise placement of specific items
• New electricity system with cable reels to reach far places
• And much more...

There were thousands of gamers and content creators looking forward to get their hands on the first iteration of what DayZ will become in BETA. It was an interesting mixture of people that never played DayZ before, ones who put it down waiting patiently for BETA, and those who still play DayZ regularly and spent from hundreds to thousands of hours in-game. I've spent a great amount of time observing how people play the game, and discussed with them about what they like on the new DayZ, what would they still like to see improved, and why.

With this approach, I gained a ton of feedback. It was very positive to see and hear that we are actually on the right track, and people do like what they see, and especially how it plays. Bear in mind nothing is set in stone yet, and everything could be changed, especially after valuable feedback we received. It will allow us to refine the design a bit more, so in it’s final form, DayZ could unleash its full potential, and allow people to enjoy what DayZ is so well known for - an emergent gameplay full of interactions, which creates stories filled with unique experience and leaving strong memories in atmospheric world.

After meeting you at Gamescom 2017... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 
As both Eugen and Peter mentioned, Gamescom was a really positive experience for us. The very stressful couple of weeks before we left the office and travelled to Cologne were definitely worth it in the end, as we've been met with a very warm welcome at Gamescom, and also fulfilled our mission: to gather preliminary feedback on an early 0.63 build.

As Baty will share in her part of the Status Report, we did our best to provide some meaningful coverage for those of you not visiting Gamescom. The couple of live streams we organized with Twitch and GameStar.de were quite full of interesting news, so do check them out below, along with content from M1ndr, Barely Infected or Merlin from DayZ Underground.

It';s a bit unfortunate that we were not able to capture a better gameplay clip for both live streams in time (due to both time constraints and last minute fixes to the playable DEMO build), so the presented footage was a bit bare bones and glitchy at times, but as promised, we will deliver a good amount of quality 1080p/60FPS footage in the following days. The footage will take the form of a Dev Log video similar to those made for 0.62, and you can expect around 10 minutes of new content with Eugen's developer narration. 

Also, since we decided not to make the DEMO available on Steam, we'll see if we can at least organise a live stream where you can see live gameplay, and ask us questions. Our pre-gamescom live stream was a bit of a technical failure, so we need to spend some more time planning the live stream, but we have a decent combat plan to make it all happen. 

That's it from me this week. Thanks everyone who visited us at Gamescom, you were awesome! Now, let's see some of the community content from our booth. 

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager


 


Gamescom is over, we are back in Prague, and work on BETA continues. 

It was something new to us and some people in the team have never been to a big event like Gamescom before. It was exhausting, but it was worth it, because your feedback is what we really needed. And we are really happy we got a lot of very positive feedback from you!  





It was a total of 6 of us from the DayZ team, and for five days, you were able to meet us in the booth and play DayZ on 18 PCs.  You could play a short PvP demo, try some features from the upcoming 0.63 build and grab some nice little presents along the way. You've surely seen videos that appeared mostly on Twitter and Reddit from people who have already tried the demo. Unfortunately, as Martin explained, we do not have an official video ready yet, but we will catch up this week and if everything goes according to our plan, the video commented by our Lead Producer Eugen Harton will be released by the end of the week. Before it's out, you can look at the impressions of M1ndr and Rene (Barely Infected) who also visited us to try the DEMO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTxtPMdGQ48
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgquR7cg_c8


There were two live streams during Gamescom where our Lead Producer Eugen was talking about the Gamescom DEMO and BETA. First one on the line was the GameStar.de live stream, and the second one was a Twitch official Gamescom live stream (watch the VOD here, you need to move to time 8:10:55). 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/168939184
 

We also hosted a community meetup at Gamescom, where we met ten of you and barely fit into our small meeting room. For almost two hours, we talked about DayZ and what you can expect from the BETA. And you got some special gifts we prepared for this event. I would like to thank you very much for coming to see us and I hope you enjoyed the meeting as much as we did! 



 

Before Gamescom, we organized an event on Skalisty Island where players became knights and fought in teams to capture the Skalisty castle. Except for a bit of a waiting waiting, everything went well and all players were quite happy.

There were some content creators who were streaming or recording their gameplay which they then placed on YouTube, so those of you who were not there can see it too. Blue team won the battle of the castle, but the greys fought bravely too. I want to thank everyone for their patience and the fact that they have arrived. You can look forward to another event soon! 

Just for clarification, the recording of the developer stream that accompanied the event was removed due to technical issues during the stream. Unfortunately, we did not correctly estimate the demands of the stream on the hardware and therefore the stream was flawed by unpleasant lags. We learned our lesson and it will be better next time. 




I've created a list of YouTube recordings for you, so you can see what was happening through the eyes of several players. If I forgot to include someone just tweet me at @batyalquawen and I'm going to add you to the playlist. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLFzBzEXIs35KV7j1K_ENizLoA2CtXMJrv&v=XGVBMSroIKY


And in the end, I want to show you a funny bug we found yesterday. Adam Franců sent it to me with this description: 

While working on the tourist trails north of Svetloyarsk, we have discovered this massive structure that reesembles the shape of a lunch table. The exact origin and purpose of it is yet to be known. We have sent scout to investigate, reports suggest that this structure pose serious threat to the survivors and we have managed to take it down in a quick map editing action.








Thanks again to everyone who came to play the Gamescom demo and to everyone who gave us any feedback. We really appreciate it. See you in two weeks guys and have a nice start of a new school year! 

Header image by MAMAD_NZR.
 
- Baty / Community Manager

 

 
Hello survivors! Where the last couple of Status Reports felt a bit dry and lacking on exciting content, we're doing our best to improve our track record this week! Starting off with Brian, and his excitement which clearly shows that we've had a good couple of rough, but good weeks, through Eugen, who's offering a closer look at the contents of the upcoming Gamescom DEMO, and then over to Peter, who details the changes made to melee and firearms behaviour in 0.63, it's a joyride of teasing new and exciting content. Adam continues by sharing his bits on new decals updates, our Brand Manager Martin assures everyone that the Gamescom news will make its way to everybody, and Baty invites you to Gamescom AND to our upcoming community event next week that goes together with a pre-gamescom developer live stream.

Oh hey, and there's also GIFs showing some new stuff (because yes - it is a long read again). Ready? Go!

• Dev Update/Brian
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Adam
• Dev Update/Martin
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

As we approach Gamescom I can't help but reflect back on all the work, stress, and dedication that has preceded where we are now. Back in the end of 2013 when we were trying to prepare a build for Steam, we couldn't have imagined the opportunities all the time that has been spent on technology, and the foundation of the project would afford us. Looking at the Early Access release of one of my personal favourite pure survival titles, The Long Dark I can't help but remember what that experience was like when it first hit Steam, compared to how amazing it is now.

The team has been working tirelessly for quite some time, and the focus over the last month or so on preparing a functional vertical slice build for Gamescom, which should raise spirits a great deal internally. One of the most frustrating professional experiences for me has been working on adapting the design and experience of DayZ over the years, but knowing that you the consumers couldn't see these changes and get hands on with them until the underlying tech was ready to support it. Gamescom is just over the horizon, and I know everyone here on the team is really focused on trying to get an outstanding snapshot of the new DayZ experience for you all.

Not losing focus on the fact that the development teams'; core goals have been aimed specifically at setting the foundation of DayZ for the years to come is a difficult order. The technology that we hit Steam with fundamentally just can't do justice to the experience we want to bring, and fortunately leadership inside the company has understood that and supported our drive forward. BETA by no means is the end all be all milestone for DayZ - we have plenty of amazing things beyond it and before leaving Early Access - but this is fundamentally the biggest impact on how you the users interact with the world, and establishes the technology baseline that enables us to do all the things we've talked with you about over the years.

It's been a hell of a journey, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey guys! I'm going to get into detail in regards to what the Gamescom DEMO is and what is the plan going forward with it. As the Gamescom is getting closer, things are being set in stone.

When we decided to go forward with the idea (which was about three months ago), we were nowhere near the expected result. However, deadlines and these goals make sure you are able to focus on what is actually important and as such help you eliminate the noise that gets in the way of development. Sometimes it's feature creep, other times you just follow an overly complicated solution to a problem that’s much simpler to solve. The renewed target helped us follow through.

Everything starts with how you control a game, it needs to feel just right. When the game is making it hard to do what you actually want to accomplish through arbitrary complexity or inconsistency, it quickly becomes tedious. As this DEMO features the new player controller, animation system, physics and much more, it will feel different at first glance. Interacting with players, AI or environment should feel much smoother. We will have the new controls printed out for players coming in for an easy reference point.

As this is quite a complex rework of the game, and we want people to test specific things, it will have its own "map" built around Staroye. The map includes new roads, rocks, and more reworked old assets as we are gradually improving visual fidelity, and leaving the old stuff behind. Only subset of player usable items will be spawning for the purpose of quick access, as we expect the turnover to be quite large. The density is also much higher to make sure you can try more things in a short span of time. Besides the map, you can also expect new particle effects implemented with Enfusion technology, new character faces and much more.

It will feature the new inventory implementation, which again should feel much smoother and faster as we have invested quite a lot of time to do this properly. And one large change that we expect to have significant impact on how people play: you won't be able to move with inventory open. A lot of the things that people have used inventory to solve, like finding small items or interacting with their weapon to avoid delayed quick bar, will be long gone. Items will show their icons in the world, as well as all action being moved to contextual methods. And quick bar will become a core part of your setup as you explore the world of DayZ. You will get more slots as you get higher tier items, which in translation will increase the amount of stuff you can get done quickly in the world.

There are tons of new animations coming in to show different states of character, exhaustion for example. And many detailed systems trying to avoid using text and use of heavy UI, so that living your life in Chernarus is all about your character. New gestures that will spice up the interaction between player, hopefully causing a laugh or two. Or making sure you can understand each other over a long distance.

Lot of new UI changes that will focus on giving you enough detail if you want, or just immerse into the character in front of you. Tons of new sounds both ambient, character or weapon related.

There is new synchronisation model that is quite different from what we had before, hoping to support the full scale of 100 players and tons of AI. All these things will be stress tested heavily to make sure there are no issues when we go live. Lot of the things are however heavily work in progress, but also for the first time, all of the new tech is in and working with new data. It's exciting as hell.

And last but not least, new melee combat and ranged combat. But I'll let Peter talk about those  

There will be issues I'm sure, as something always slips past, or gets broken in the last second. This is a complex game in making, and we can't wait to share our progress with you. We are discussing the possibility of making the DEMO available for a limited time on a separate Steam branch, but we'll yet have to see about that.

Programmers
- Weapons actions
- Vehicle controller refactor 
- Melee combat (programming wise)
- Particles (programming wise)
- Physics and optimisation tweaks
- New zombie controller
- CLE (Central Loot Economy) tweaks 
- Bug fixing

Animators
- Animals animations
- IK (Inverse Kinematics) poses
- Injured animations 
- Weapons animations (loading/unloading)
- Bug fixing

Designers
- Melee combat (script wise)
- Communication
- Horticulture 
- Particles (script wise)
- Inventory UI refactor 
- Advance placing system 
- Gamescom demo preparation (spawning, menu, ...)
- Bug fixing

Audio
- Sounds for weapons interactions
- Footsteps sounds (surface vs footwear)
- Ambient sounds
- Bug fixing

QA
- Internal client stabilisation 
- Gamescom demo features testing 
- Bug reporting

Art
- Old assets rework 
- New assets preparation (NW Airfield )
- Object layout for western region 
- Bug fixing

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
As you may know from previous Status Reports, we scratched old firearms and melee implementations and started from the ground up to allow us fulfil our vision of having more control over firearms and melee fights, resulting in much better, authentic user experience. Both ranged and close combat have crucial role in DayZ, may it be in PvE or PvP encounters. Over the last few weeks, there was quite a lot of progress made in both combats, and now as things starts to look well enough, it's a good time to talk about them and showcase them.

Ranged combat with firearms is defined by their handling and aiming models. So far on handling side, we have loading of firearms with either magazine or chambering directly with ammo from inventory, quick slots and even from the ground. Next is the mechanism manipulation itself, were you can feed ammo from a magazine to chamber in case of manual firearms, or eject ammo in automatic ones. It's also used to un-jam the mechanism once it gets jammed by a casing not being ejected properly. We reintroduced zeroing and fire modes, as well as iron sights, though optics are not working now due to some issues we're battling down the line (specifically switching to camera point on optic attachment, to be honest we have ran into some problems with attachments in general lately, as they are not in hierarchical order, so it will require some rewrite).

Aiming model of firearms is where the real fun begins. Currently, we have a new sway mechanic (yay, finally!) - it mimics breathing with constant vertical movement as well as corrections of hands direction with subtle random horizontal movement. It's very effective and robust design solution which allows us to modify output by plenty of factors, like firearm attachments configuration, especially hand-guard and butt-stock, and its weight, character stance and movement, amount of stamina, overall character state with all that unpleasant things like low body temperature or diseases, and of course also the hold breath feature (yes, I'm not kidding).





Recoil is another functional part of the aiming model now. While projectile is fired, we've introduced movement to firearms in all three dimensions. We are experimenting with pre-animated recoils, which are procedurally modified to produce nice looking visuals with ability to differentiate between firearms. Similarly to sway, it can be modified, this time it could depend on calibre, barrel length, overall firearm weight and its attachments, especially muzzle devices like brakes or compensators, and we are also considering impact from stamina. What's still missing is some sights misalignment in the aiming model, same goes to lifting firearms next to obstacles, however we will get there as both are a must have for proper aiming model.





Quick update regarding new melee combat - in current state, it's already way ahead when compared to the old system. Apart from full body attack animations, which can now be chained into combos and opponents reacts to hits with proper strength and directions of impacts, there is also a dashed attack from sprint implemented now. I would like to highlight the current melee targeting implementation which is taking length of a melee weapon into account, as well as distance direction and vertical angle to opponent.

Combined with rotating and dragging character towards selected targets during attack animations, it produces great looking, fluid and addictive melee combat. It's quite hard to miss your opponent now, gone are the days of grotesque melee fights where everybody ran in circles trying to play game of chance to deal some hit.







Last but not least, we also introduced some changes to controls of the new character. What really stands out is changing of stances which is using one key now instead of three previously. With programmers and animators, we are discussing missing moves of new character, like leaning, jumping or climbing, as we would like to push on these and make them more interesting for gameplay.

Apart from Gamescom 2017... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
Much like in the last Status Report, let's begin with a showcase of some additional improvements to the visual fidelity of Chernarus. This time, let's talk about decals.

On Chernarus, decals are primarily used to make specific areas (such as concrete surfaces and roads) look more damaged / abandoned. We cant simply add local damage to the concrete / roads texture itself as it would look too repetitive in the end. And so these decals are a great way to add a local damage exactly where we want.

While decal textures were trying really hard to show that there are holes in the road, they ultimately failed alone because they were missing visual depth in-game. Luckily, this was changed with the recent implementation of parallax mapping for decals. And since we have got new textures for roads for quite some time, we have also decided to re-do textures for all road damage decals so the visuals of decals match together with the new road textures (visual inconsistency between old decals and new roads is one of the reasons we decided to postpone the release of new road textures, originally planned for update 0.62). Here are some examples of how medium and small-sized decals look after these changes:







These changes (along with the new road textures that you can also notice on pictures) will be available with the update 0.63.

And as usual - a short report on what has happened on western border of Chernarus since the last Status Report. Details were added around the Myshkino dam (including the HV power-line connection to Zelenogorsk), new recreational facility of TES company near the shore of Myshkino dam and probably the biggest lumber mill we currently have on Chernarus has been added north of Myshkino military site. These locations will hopefully make encounters in the Myshkino tents valley a bit more interesting and offer additional looting options for the players who prefer to roam the western region of Chernarus.







As always, please remember that all pictures show work-in-progress content.

- Adam Franců / Senior Map Designer


 
As we started outlining our Gamescom DEMO over the last two Status Reports, I've noticed a raising concern in the community about us presenting a build of the game on a gaming convention rather than delivering it directly to the core players on our Experimental and Stable Steam branches. As our community of existing players is what we truly care about the most, I'd like to address these concerns and add further context to Eugen's text above.

First of all, thanks to Brian and his great relationships with guys over at Astro Gaming or Twitch, DayZ's been present at many public events in the past, and I'm sure it's always been fun for everyone to meet and greet while occasionally streaming or presenting some of the upcoming features. Usually, most of the news from these events also made it out to the general public - either by being directly shared by the DayZ team over social media, or organically by someone from the community posting on the forums or Reddit. 

This worked quite well, and considering that those activities were not a part of any sophisticated marketing/promotional plan (there hasn't been anything like that for DayZ, and this won't change until BETA drops on Stable), it's also been quite effective.

Gamescom is a little bit of a step up from these events, as we'll be part of a bigger Bohemia Interactive booth. That means that our presence needs to be a bit more official, that we need to present something meaningful, and ideally also playable. That's where the Gamescom DEMO comes in - as a publicly playable content, it also conveniently solves three problems for us:

a) it helps the development team to deliver a package even before the first BETA build is done internally, or ready for public branches - hopefully helping everybody have a feeling of accomplishment (which Brian nicely described in his part)

b) it allows us to do very early focus tests in a controlled environment where we're standing right next to the person playing

c) it helps us make a point to the general public that we are being serious about our intentions to bring DayZ to a stable 1.0 release, and support it for years to come (which some people still refuse to believe in)

As Eugen already pointed out, we may (or may not), at some point, and in one way or another, make this DEMO available to all of you who won't be able to try it at Gamescom. While it's not fully representative of DayZ as the hardcore survival game it should be (and technically only works in a "LAN" mode as well), we understand that everybody just wants to get their hands on the new player controller!

More importantly though, we have plans for extensive online coverage of all the things we're about to show at Gamescom. Just to pick a few that will happen right during the Gamescom week: we&'ll be live on the Twitch Gamescom stage for about 15 minutes, talking about the DEMO and DayZ BETA in detail, including some gameplay. We'll have a couple of media appointments that will hopefully produce some cool articles, and we'll also be producing our own photos or possibly even some basic video content directly from the show floor.

Now, creating (audio)visual content of any upcoming game changes is always a struggle. With the way our community-driven development works (the moment we have a "legit" build in our hands that we need your feedback on, we drop it to Experimental), it is sometimes literally impossible to even play the internal branch of DayZ for several minutes straight, and prepare content in advance.

This has been the case with the supporting content we're making for Gamescom, and over the last two weeks, it produced some rather hilarious clips:









While those GIFs may look like a lot of fun, the reality is that any bug like that always breaks the gameplay, not to mention the recorded clip or screenshot. Count in some nasty crashes, network issues or general server degradation we still need to resolve, and you have a good reason for our Status Reports rarely including any relevant visual content at all. 

It's also why we're still relatively far from dropping any BETA package to the public Steam branches - while our new player character (and other systems) already work well within the limited scope of the Gamescom DEMO, they are not ready for the full-scale DayZ experience just yet.

Well, that'll do it for today - I hope this helped some of you to get an insight on what's happening around the DayZ office. Baty should have some more details about our upcoming Gamescom coverage! 

P.S. - please do let us know if you're coming to Cologne, and come hang out with us!

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager


 
Hello guys,

We have two weeks till Gamescom and in our office, as in many other gamedev offices around the world, we're preparing for the game show, and we are starting to panic a bit. There is still so much to be done! I spent the last two weeks working on videos, which should be done before Gamescom, but as Martin wrote above, the game is still not in an ideal shape. Therefore, we tried to make the best of the actual unstable version to be able to show you some of the new features which you will be able to experience at Gamescom. I will not try to hide that it is very challenging to capture scenes without any errors and bugs, be we are close to finish and the video should be ready for Gamescom.

In any case, Gamescom is near and the mood in the Dev Team can be best described as:



But enough of silly things. Let’s take a look at what is waiting for us in the next couple of weeks.

Next Thursday 17th August at 17:30 CEST (GMT+1) you can look forward to a stream from our Bohemia Interactive office. We would like to share more information about what you can expect in our booth at Gamescom, we will tell you more about a demo we are preparing and also about a community meet-up which will be organized at Gamescom.  We will talk in more detail about BETA and answer some questions.  And this time, we will have moderators and better sound, so it will surely be better than last time! But the stream will not be only about DayZ. We will talk more about other BI projects, like Mini DAYZ, Ylands and Arma 3. Do not miss this stream; you can learn a lot of new information there!

Simultaneously with the stream, we will host a small event. It will be a battle of the castle again, where we will return to the Middle Ages and play as knights. The event will take place on 17th August at 17:00 CEST (GMT+1) and you can be part of it if you are interested. You can sing up HERE.

And now back to the Gamescom.
It will be held between 23rd and 26th August at Cologne in Germany. As I said in previous Status Report, we will be there, specifically in hall 10.1., booth A010. Beside DayZ team, we will also have Ylands and Arma teams there. You will be able to play the Gamescom DEMO about which the devs were already talking above.

More information about the demo will be revealed at the stream next week. I want to point out that the DayZ and Arma parts will be separated from public area and will only be accessible for adults 18+. But don’t worry if you are not 18 yet. You can come visit us at the community meet-up in front of our booth, talk with the devs and get some gifts. Community meet-up will take place on 25th August at 13:00 CEST, so don’t hesitate to come, we will be happy to see you. And if you come in DayZ cosplay, you will make us even happier!



For those of you that cannot make it to this year’s Gamescom, let me assure you again: we are preparing reports, videos and photos. Don’t forget to follow our social media channels!

 

Finally, we will have a look at some of your creations.

First, I would like to present you a member of Spanish community who is playing on role-play server DayZRP and is sharing his adventures on his YouTube channel. His last video is "La masacre" and as the title suggests, it is about a massacre in Lopatino’s church. There are English subtitles for those who do not understand Spanish. I really like the story and what I like even more is the amazing comic that accompanies the video.





Other parts of the comic can be found on his Twitter channel. 

And now for the mentioned video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HgqfBJ8bak


Further on, I was pleasantly surprised by a community member paulmosin, who is sending his ideas of a real world survivor to our Twitter. 

We love him!








 

On Reddit, I discovered a post by user SpectreRobin. It is a DayZ picture, painted on 3 canvases, which is inspired by a well-known screenshot. It was drawn by his friend, who is a very talented artist. It reminds me of paintings in our office (which I would very much like to take home) and we can be only jealous that he has such a nice decoration on his walls.



Thank you very much for all your content that you share with us on our official social networks, we really appreciate it. We will have to move the next status report to 29th August, because it would be right in the Gamescom week and we will not be able to prepare it while at the convention. But as I wrote above, we will be definitely sharing the photos, experiences and impressions with you the whole week. So make sure to follow us and we are looking forward to seeing you on the stream, and at Gamescom!

Header image by RageBruh.‏ 

- Baty / Community Manager


 

 
Hello survivors! Where the last couple of Status Reports felt a bit dry and lacking on exciting content, we're doing our best to improve our track record this week! Starting off with Brian, and his excitement which clearly shows that we've had a good couple of rough, but good weeks, through Eugen, who's offering a closer look at the contents of the upcoming Gamescom DEMO, and then over to Peter, who details the changes made to melee and firearms behaviour in 0.63, it's a joyride of teasing new and exciting content. Adam continues by sharing his bits on new decals updates, our Brand Manager Martin assures everyone that the Gamescom news will make its way to everybody, and Baty invites you to Gamescom AND to our upcoming community event next week that goes together with a pre-gamescom developer live stream.

Oh hey, and there's also GIFs showing some new stuff (because yes - it is a long read again). Ready? Go!

• Dev Update/Brian
• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Adam
• Dev Update/Martin
• Community Spotlight

 
Greetings Survivors,

As we approach Gamescom I can't help but reflect back on all the work, stress, and dedication that has preceded where we are now. Back in the end of 2013 when we were trying to prepare a build for Steam, we couldn't have imagined the opportunities all the time that has been spent on technology, and the foundation of the project would afford us. Looking at the Early Access release of one of my personal favourite pure survival titles, The Long Dark I can't help but remember what that experience was like when it first hit Steam, compared to how amazing it is now.

The team has been working tirelessly for quite some time, and the focus over the last month or so on preparing a functional vertical slice build for Gamescom, which should raise spirits a great deal internally. One of the most frustrating professional experiences for me has been working on adapting the design and experience of DayZ over the years, but knowing that you the consumers couldn't see these changes and get hands on with them until the underlying tech was ready to support it. Gamescom is just over the horizon, and I know everyone here on the team is really focused on trying to get an outstanding snapshot of the new DayZ experience for you all.

Not losing focus on the fact that the development teams'; core goals have been aimed specifically at setting the foundation of DayZ for the years to come is a difficult order. The technology that we hit Steam with fundamentally just can't do justice to the experience we want to bring, and fortunately leadership inside the company has understood that and supported our drive forward. BETA by no means is the end all be all milestone for DayZ - we have plenty of amazing things beyond it and before leaving Early Access - but this is fundamentally the biggest impact on how you the users interact with the world, and establishes the technology baseline that enables us to do all the things we've talked with you about over the years.

It's been a hell of a journey, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director


 
Hey guys! I'm going to get into detail in regards to what the Gamescom DEMO is and what is the plan going forward with it. As the Gamescom is getting closer, things are being set in stone.

When we decided to go forward with the idea (which was about three months ago), we were nowhere near the expected result. However, deadlines and these goals make sure you are able to focus on what is actually important and as such help you eliminate the noise that gets in the way of development. Sometimes it's feature creep, other times you just follow an overly complicated solution to a problem that’s much simpler to solve. The renewed target helped us follow through.

Everything starts with how you control a game, it needs to feel just right. When the game is making it hard to do what you actually want to accomplish through arbitrary complexity or inconsistency, it quickly becomes tedious. As this DEMO features the new player controller, animation system, physics and much more, it will feel different at first glance. Interacting with players, AI or environment should feel much smoother. We will have the new controls printed out for players coming in for an easy reference point.

As this is quite a complex rework of the game, and we want people to test specific things, it will have its own "map" built around Staroye. The map includes new roads, rocks, and more reworked old assets as we are gradually improving visual fidelity, and leaving the old stuff behind. Only subset of player usable items will be spawning for the purpose of quick access, as we expect the turnover to be quite large. The density is also much higher to make sure you can try more things in a short span of time. Besides the map, you can also expect new particle effects implemented with Enfusion technology, new character faces and much more.

It will feature the new inventory implementation, which again should feel much smoother and faster as we have invested quite a lot of time to do this properly. And one large change that we expect to have significant impact on how people play: you won't be able to move with inventory open. A lot of the things that people have used inventory to solve, like finding small items or interacting with their weapon to avoid delayed quick bar, will be long gone. Items will show their icons in the world, as well as all action being moved to contextual methods. And quick bar will become a core part of your setup as you explore the world of DayZ. You will get more slots as you get higher tier items, which in translation will increase the amount of stuff you can get done quickly in the world.

There are tons of new animations coming in to show different states of character, exhaustion for example. And many detailed systems trying to avoid using text and use of heavy UI, so that living your life in Chernarus is all about your character. New gestures that will spice up the interaction between player, hopefully causing a laugh or two. Or making sure you can understand each other over a long distance.

Lot of new UI changes that will focus on giving you enough detail if you want, or just immerse into the character in front of you. Tons of new sounds both ambient, character or weapon related.

There is new synchronisation model that is quite different from what we had before, hoping to support the full scale of 100 players and tons of AI. All these things will be stress tested heavily to make sure there are no issues when we go live. Lot of the things are however heavily work in progress, but also for the first time, all of the new tech is in and working with new data. It's exciting as hell.

And last but not least, new melee combat and ranged combat. But I'll let Peter talk about those  

There will be issues I'm sure, as something always slips past, or gets broken in the last second. This is a complex game in making, and we can't wait to share our progress with you. We are discussing the possibility of making the DEMO available for a limited time on a separate Steam branch, but we'll yet have to see about that.

Programmers
- Weapons actions
- Vehicle controller refactor 
- Melee combat (programming wise)
- Particles (programming wise)
- Physics and optimisation tweaks
- New zombie controller
- CLE (Central Loot Economy) tweaks 
- Bug fixing

Animators
- Animals animations
- IK (Inverse Kinematics) poses
- Injured animations 
- Weapons animations (loading/unloading)
- Bug fixing

Designers
- Melee combat (script wise)
- Communication
- Horticulture 
- Particles (script wise)
- Inventory UI refactor 
- Advance placing system 
- Gamescom demo preparation (spawning, menu, ...)
- Bug fixing

Audio
- Sounds for weapons interactions
- Footsteps sounds (surface vs footwear)
- Ambient sounds
- Bug fixing

QA
- Internal client stabilisation 
- Gamescom demo features testing 
- Bug reporting

Art
- Old assets rework 
- New assets preparation (NW Airfield )
- Object layout for western region 
- Bug fixing

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
As you may know from previous Status Reports, we scratched old firearms and melee implementations and started from the ground up to allow us fulfil our vision of having more control over firearms and melee fights, resulting in much better, authentic user experience. Both ranged and close combat have crucial role in DayZ, may it be in PvE or PvP encounters. Over the last few weeks, there was quite a lot of progress made in both combats, and now as things starts to look well enough, it's a good time to talk about them and showcase them.

Ranged combat with firearms is defined by their handling and aiming models. So far on handling side, we have loading of firearms with either magazine or chambering directly with ammo from inventory, quick slots and even from the ground. Next is the mechanism manipulation itself, were you can feed ammo from a magazine to chamber in case of manual firearms, or eject ammo in automatic ones. It's also used to un-jam the mechanism once it gets jammed by a casing not being ejected properly. We reintroduced zeroing and fire modes, as well as iron sights, though optics are not working now due to some issues we're battling down the line (specifically switching to camera point on optic attachment, to be honest we have ran into some problems with attachments in general lately, as they are not in hierarchical order, so it will require some rewrite).

Aiming model of firearms is where the real fun begins. Currently, we have a new sway mechanic (yay, finally!) - it mimics breathing with constant vertical movement as well as corrections of hands direction with subtle random horizontal movement. It's very effective and robust design solution which allows us to modify output by plenty of factors, like firearm attachments configuration, especially hand-guard and butt-stock, and its weight, character stance and movement, amount of stamina, overall character state with all that unpleasant things like low body temperature or diseases, and of course also the hold breath feature (yes, I'm not kidding).





Recoil is another functional part of the aiming model now. While projectile is fired, we've introduced movement to firearms in all three dimensions. We are experimenting with pre-animated recoils, which are procedurally modified to produce nice looking visuals with ability to differentiate between firearms. Similarly to sway, it can be modified, this time it could depend on calibre, barrel length, overall firearm weight and its attachments, especially muzzle devices like brakes or compensators, and we are also considering impact from stamina. What's still missing is some sights misalignment in the aiming model, same goes to lifting firearms next to obstacles, however we will get there as both are a must have for proper aiming model.





Quick update regarding new melee combat - in current state, it's already way ahead when compared to the old system. Apart from full body attack animations, which can now be chained into combos and opponents reacts to hits with proper strength and directions of impacts, there is also a dashed attack from sprint implemented now. I would like to highlight the current melee targeting implementation which is taking length of a melee weapon into account, as well as distance direction and vertical angle to opponent.

Combined with rotating and dragging character towards selected targets during attack animations, it produces great looking, fluid and addictive melee combat. It's quite hard to miss your opponent now, gone are the days of grotesque melee fights where everybody ran in circles trying to play game of chance to deal some hit.







Last but not least, we also introduced some changes to controls of the new character. What really stands out is changing of stances which is using one key now instead of three previously. With programmers and animators, we are discussing missing moves of new character, like leaning, jumping or climbing, as we would like to push on these and make them more interesting for gameplay.

Apart from Gamescom 2017... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
Much like in the last Status Report, let's begin with a showcase of some additional improvements to the visual fidelity of Chernarus. This time, let's talk about decals.

On Chernarus, decals are primarily used to make specific areas (such as concrete surfaces and roads) look more damaged / abandoned. We cant simply add local damage to the concrete / roads texture itself as it would look too repetitive in the end. And so these decals are a great way to add a local damage exactly where we want.

While decal textures were trying really hard to show that there are holes in the road, they ultimately failed alone because they were missing visual depth in-game. Luckily, this was changed with the recent implementation of parallax mapping for decals. And since we have got new textures for roads for quite some time, we have also decided to re-do textures for all road damage decals so the visuals of decals match together with the new road textures (visual inconsistency between old decals and new roads is one of the reasons we decided to postpone the release of new road textures, originally planned for update 0.62). Here are some examples of how medium and small-sized decals look after these changes:







These changes (along with the new road textures that you can also notice on pictures) will be available with the update 0.63.

And as usual - a short report on what has happened on western border of Chernarus since the last Status Report. Details were added around the Myshkino dam (including the HV power-line connection to Zelenogorsk), new recreational facility of TES company near the shore of Myshkino dam and probably the biggest lumber mill we currently have on Chernarus has been added north of Myshkino military site. These locations will hopefully make encounters in the Myshkino tents valley a bit more interesting and offer additional looting options for the players who prefer to roam the western region of Chernarus.







As always, please remember that all pictures show work-in-progress content.

- Adam Franců / Senior Map Designer


 
As we started outlining our Gamescom DEMO over the last two Status Reports, I've noticed a raising concern in the community about us presenting a build of the game on a gaming convention rather than delivering it directly to the core players on our Experimental and Stable Steam branches. As our community of existing players is what we truly care about the most, I'd like to address these concerns and add further context to Eugen's text above.

First of all, thanks to Brian and his great relationships with guys over at Astro Gaming or Twitch, DayZ's been present at many public events in the past, and I'm sure it's always been fun for everyone to meet and greet while occasionally streaming or presenting some of the upcoming features. Usually, most of the news from these events also made it out to the general public - either by being directly shared by the DayZ team over social media, or organically by someone from the community posting on the forums or Reddit. 

This worked quite well, and considering that those activities were not a part of any sophisticated marketing/promotional plan (there hasn't been anything like that for DayZ, and this won't change until BETA drops on Stable), it's also been quite effective.

Gamescom is a little bit of a step up from these events, as we'll be part of a bigger Bohemia Interactive booth. That means that our presence needs to be a bit more official, that we need to present something meaningful, and ideally also playable. That's where the Gamescom DEMO comes in - as a publicly playable content, it also conveniently solves three problems for us:

a) it helps the development team to deliver a package even before the first BETA build is done internally, or ready for public branches - hopefully helping everybody have a feeling of accomplishment (which Brian nicely described in his part)

b) it allows us to do very early focus tests in a controlled environment where we're standing right next to the person playing

c) it helps us make a point to the general public that we are being serious about our intentions to bring DayZ to a stable 1.0 release, and support it for years to come (which some people still refuse to believe in)

As Eugen already pointed out, we may (or may not), at some point, and in one way or another, make this DEMO available to all of you who won't be able to try it at Gamescom. While it's not fully representative of DayZ as the hardcore survival game it should be (and technically only works in a "LAN" mode as well), we understand that everybody just wants to get their hands on the new player controller!

More importantly though, we have plans for extensive online coverage of all the things we're about to show at Gamescom. Just to pick a few that will happen right during the Gamescom week: we&'ll be live on the Twitch Gamescom stage for about 15 minutes, talking about the DEMO and DayZ BETA in detail, including some gameplay. We'll have a couple of media appointments that will hopefully produce some cool articles, and we'll also be producing our own photos or possibly even some basic video content directly from the show floor.

Now, creating (audio)visual content of any upcoming game changes is always a struggle. With the way our community-driven development works (the moment we have a "legit" build in our hands that we need your feedback on, we drop it to Experimental), it is sometimes literally impossible to even play the internal branch of DayZ for several minutes straight, and prepare content in advance.

This has been the case with the supporting content we're making for Gamescom, and over the last two weeks, it produced some rather hilarious clips:









While those GIFs may look like a lot of fun, the reality is that any bug like that always breaks the gameplay, not to mention the recorded clip or screenshot. Count in some nasty crashes, network issues or general server degradation we still need to resolve, and you have a good reason for our Status Reports rarely including any relevant visual content at all. 

It's also why we're still relatively far from dropping any BETA package to the public Steam branches - while our new player character (and other systems) already work well within the limited scope of the Gamescom DEMO, they are not ready for the full-scale DayZ experience just yet.

Well, that'll do it for today - I hope this helped some of you to get an insight on what's happening around the DayZ office. Baty should have some more details about our upcoming Gamescom coverage! 

P.S. - please do let us know if you're coming to Cologne, and come hang out with us!

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager


 
Hello guys,

We have two weeks till Gamescom and in our office, as in many other gamedev offices around the world, we're preparing for the game show, and we are starting to panic a bit. There is still so much to be done! I spent the last two weeks working on videos, which should be done before Gamescom, but as Martin wrote above, the game is still not in an ideal shape. Therefore, we tried to make the best of the actual unstable version to be able to show you some of the new features which you will be able to experience at Gamescom. I will not try to hide that it is very challenging to capture scenes without any errors and bugs, be we are close to finish and the video should be ready for Gamescom.

In any case, Gamescom is near and the mood in the Dev Team can be best described as:



But enough of silly things. Let’s take a look at what is waiting for us in the next couple of weeks.

Next Thursday 17th August at 17:30 CEST (GMT+1) you can look forward to a stream from our Bohemia Interactive office. We would like to share more information about what you can expect in our booth at Gamescom, we will tell you more about a demo we are preparing and also about a community meet-up which will be organized at Gamescom.  We will talk in more detail about BETA and answer some questions.  And this time, we will have moderators and better sound, so it will surely be better than last time! But the stream will not be only about DayZ. We will talk more about other BI projects, like Mini DAYZ, Ylands and Arma 3. Do not miss this stream; you can learn a lot of new information there!

Simultaneously with the stream, we will host a small event. It will be a battle of the castle again, where we will return to the Middle Ages and play as knights. The event will take place on 17th August at 17:00 CEST (GMT+1) and you can be part of it if you are interested. You can sing up HERE.

And now back to the Gamescom.
It will be held between 23rd and 26th August at Cologne in Germany. As I said in previous Status Report, we will be there, specifically in hall 10.1., booth A010. Beside DayZ team, we will also have Ylands and Arma teams there. You will be able to play the Gamescom DEMO about which the devs were already talking above.

More information about the demo will be revealed at the stream next week. I want to point out that the DayZ and Arma parts will be separated from public area and will only be accessible for adults 18+. But don’t worry if you are not 18 yet. You can come visit us at the community meet-up in front of our booth, talk with the devs and get some gifts. Community meet-up will take place on 25th August at 13:00 CEST, so don’t hesitate to come, we will be happy to see you. And if you come in DayZ cosplay, you will make us even happier!



For those of you that cannot make it to this year’s Gamescom, let me assure you again: we are preparing reports, videos and photos. Don’t forget to follow our social media channels!

 

Finally, we will have a look at some of your creations.

First, I would like to present you a member of Spanish community who is playing on role-play server DayZRP and is sharing his adventures on his YouTube channel. His last video is "La masacre" and as the title suggests, it is about a massacre in Lopatino’s church. There are English subtitles for those who do not understand Spanish. I really like the story and what I like even more is the amazing comic that accompanies the video.





Other parts of the comic can be found on his Twitter channel. 

And now for the mentioned video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HgqfBJ8bak


Further on, I was pleasantly surprised by a community member paulmosin, who is sending his ideas of a real world survivor to our Twitter. 

We love him!








 

On Reddit, I discovered a post by user SpectreRobin. It is a DayZ picture, painted on 3 canvases, which is inspired by a well-known screenshot. It was drawn by his friend, who is a very talented artist. It reminds me of paintings in our office (which I would very much like to take home) and we can be only jealous that he has such a nice decoration on his walls.



Thank you very much for all your content that you share with us on our official social networks, we really appreciate it. We will have to move the next status report to 29th August, because it would be right in the Gamescom week and we will not be able to prepare it while at the convention. But as I wrote above, we will be definitely sharing the photos, experiences and impressions with you the whole week. So make sure to follow us and we are looking forward to seeing you on the stream, and at Gamescom!

Header image by RageBruh.‏ 

- Baty / Community Manager


 

This week, we're keeping it short and sweet with Eugen, Adam and Baty, as the rest of the team got their hands full with work on major 0.63 tasks. Eugen actually shares more on why we've been quieter than usual the last few Status Reports, and sets some expectations regarding BETA release schedule. Adam is reporting on the ongoing tireless work of the environment team, showcasing some of their recent achievements, and Baty closes off with a little teaser of an upcoming live stream - along with sharing awesome community content, of course! Let's get to it folks. 

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Adam
• Community Spotlight

In BETA we trust, deliver we must. A catchphrase that I've seen on one of our whiteboards a couple weeks ago perfectly summarizes how we as a team feel right now.

We know things haven't been perfect and that the experience that we wanted to provide has not always been consistent with our vision. Technology debt that we have been fighting held us in fairly firm grip where we quickly realized that providing short term solutions over and over isn't going to cut it.

We had to rethink and go back to the drawing board multiple times to start making a fun game. We knew the solutions needed but the time investment was huge with lot of risks ahead. Which is where a lot of the development kept getting slowed down by the complexity of the engine changes that were needed, as well as unexpected issues that kept changing the landscape before us.

It was a risky move that we hope will keep the game alive going forward and bring back those that might have been turned away by the state of the game. As we truly believe that what you players want and we meant to deliver wasn’t doable with the technology we had.

There are players out there who are patiently waiting, while playing the game in a state that it is in now, others who wait for the full release or some who come back every once in a while to see what changed. Some are more invested than others, they read our channels, think about consequences of what we talk about, and some just want to see it in action. As the BETA is becoming a fleshed out reboot of the game all of us wanted, we plan to have a limited playable build at Gamescom this year. We're doing everything we can to make it available at the Bohemia Interactive booth for the visitors to try it out.

The sole focus of this build is gunplay and player movement on an edited version of Chernarus prepared especially for the purpose of this demo. That is why a lot of our efforts have been looking at the flow of player actions, controls and consistency of their outcome. The team will be there in person to discuss the details with those interested. Feedback is the most important thing and we can't wait to see people play it and smoothen the rough edges. 

Now that also means that the next couple of weeks are fully focused on the content of the Gamescom demo, so that there are no major hurdles when fans in Cologne get their hands on it. All departments are trying to iron out the details as much as they can, so that we can have fun with in Germany.

For the first BETA update itself, there is no release date yet. We don't want to let you down unless we're absolutely sure it's coming. The Gamescom demo work itself still counts towards the overall development of course, but we're not ready to put that version of the game on any of the public Steam branches - simply because the feature set of our demo will be limited and does not represent the complete DayZ experience. 

To finish things off, let's take a look at a list of things the team is tackling now:

Programmers

• Weapon actions
• Vehicle controller refactor
• Basic state machines and script classes tweaks
• Melee combat preparation (programming wise)
• Central Loot Economy tweaks
• Physics and optimization tweaks
• New animation system for zombies
• Bug fixing

Animators

• MoCap session preparation
• Animal animations
• Weapon animations

Designers

• Melee combat (script wise)
• Aiming model
• Weapons handling
• Inventory UI refactor (crafting, character)
• Advanced placing system
• New player and item spawn definition

Audio

• Sounds for weapon interactions

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• Internal client stabilization
• New animations/weapons functionality testing

Art

• Gamescom map preparation
• Old assets rework
• Fire mode selector for weapons
• Object layout for western region

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


As we mentioned in earlier status reports, our efforts on improving graphical fidelity does not end with the update 00.62. With such massive change for the environment that update 0.62 has brought, one of the most important things for us is to get the environment right color-wise. That means getting lighting config right and having all assets in our environment properly configured (material and texture wise).

We have already released an update for grass color for 0.62 on June 21 and since then our environment designer Mark has been working tirelessly on another iteration, this time focused mainly on changing another important piece of this whole color puzzle - satellite texture. You know this texture very well, because it is the one that you see whenever you look into the distance (and also texture, that is commonly used on community-made maps, that helps you in travels through Chernarus).

Since Chernarus was originally made for Arma 2 and DayZ version has been built on top of it, it also uses satellite texture from this version. The texture was unfortunately nowhere near to being consistent in the beginning (in terms of the way details were made or in used color pallete) and with the additional things added on top of it in DayZ (northern, western expansion, settlement rework,..), this problem was only deepened.

With the update 0.62, we felt that it is the time we finally look at this problem and make sure satellite texture for the new Chernarus uses somewhat consistent color pallete and looks good both in old and new areas. This change was also particularly important for us with update 0.62 since satellite texture affects colors of grass and ground textures. Now, do not expect that suddenly, a texture that has 15360x15360 pixels will be great in every detail, but the work that has been done so far is a huge step forward and will be good starting point for any additions and improvements.

BEFORE


AFTER


With satellite texture changes of such scale, another pass on colors of grass and bushes/trees was inevitable (to basically bring close and far LOD visuals in-line with colors on new satellite texture plus several issues with material configuration were also fixed). And since all that was purely a data change, we felt that it would be shame not to include it for update 0.62, too. And so all of the changes are now available on Experimental Branch for you to check out.

And I do have also some bonus pictures for you this time - work has progressed on western border of Chernarus. Currently, detailed object layout is being worked on in areas west of Zelonogorsk. First two pictures show new settlement, called Zvir. Third shows Orlye ozero with mountain Velikyj Kotel rising behind. Now please keep in mind that content on these pictures is work-in-progress. If you want to read more about the planned changes on western border, check out the last status report.







- Adam Francu / Senior map designer


Two weeks have passed and it is time again to take a look at what is happening in the community. At first, I would like to talk about an important event which is ahead of us this summer and that is Gamescom. We've been preparing for it for several months and it is very important to us, because we will meet you – the community, and at the same time, we want to show you something new. If you are planning to be at Gamescom, we will be glad to see you. You will find our booth in hall 10.1, where we will be among other Bohemia Interactive games. Also, for the Friday 25th, we are preparing a small meet & greet with developers, including small gifts for you. Cosplayers are welcome! We will tell you more on a live stream before Gamescom, which we are also preparing at the moment and which you definitely should not miss.

Recently, I was playing DayZ when I got a message from streamer Issy telling me she can’t wait to show me what she made. And she sent a picture of shoes she painted in DayZ style! Simply awesome! I had to share that with you.



When browsing through DayZ videos, this DayZ-inspired rap caught my eye, made by DayZ Standalone - Jiveturkey600. He created it on a request from one of the fans, who wanted a song from zombie point of view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=468GVzy3S-Q

Today I would like to focus on an international fan group on Facebook - DayZ Standalone Community, which has over 13000 members. People show off their accomplishments there, look for others to play with or share their own creations. It was this group where I found Mark Duncan Copland’s post showing postcards he receives from his friend Michael. It is amazing to see how DayZ became an important part of your friendship!







 

Another thing that got my attention in this group was a bar in Birmingham, UK, run by Jessica Mitchel  who, as a true fan, decorated the bar windows with DayZ style stickers. 




 

I would like to invite you to a RP event on the Aftermath server which will take place next Wednesday. What is it about?

"Scientists have been carrying out experiments on the residents of Svetlojarsk. Slowly the residents started to notice people becoming sick and ‘turning.’ Information was leaked to the residents that scientists were going to visit the city to see the final result. The remaining residents held a secret meeting, they bought weapons off the black market and planned to capture the scientists to demand a vaccine for their friends and family. Worried that there may not be enough to go around, the civilians not only intended to capture the scientists but also kill anyone else who knew about the virus!"

If the story got you interested, don’t not forget to sing up, because the server is whitelisted. You can find more information on their web pages.

As a last thing, I wanted to show you a beautiful screenshot of the town of Novodmitrovsk in an unusual resolution made by Reddit user NeuroticEUROtic. It is definitely worth sharing!



That is all from me for today. Make sure not to miss the next Status Report, where we will give you more information about the upcoming stream and Gamescom.  Enjoy the summer!

Header image by disastrouscluck.

- Baty / Community Manager

This week, we're keeping it short and sweet with Eugen, Adam and Baty, as the rest of the team got their hands full with work on major 0.63 tasks. Eugen actually shares more on why we've been quieter than usual the last few Status Reports, and sets some expectations regarding BETA release schedule. Adam is reporting on the ongoing tireless work of the environment team, showcasing some of their recent achievements, and Baty closes off with a little teaser of an upcoming live stream - along with sharing awesome community content, of course! Let's get to it folks. 

• Dev Update/Eugen
• Dev Update/Adam
• Community Spotlight

In BETA we trust, deliver we must. A catchphrase that I've seen on one of our whiteboards a couple weeks ago perfectly summarizes how we as a team feel right now.

We know things haven't been perfect and that the experience that we wanted to provide has not always been consistent with our vision. Technology debt that we have been fighting held us in fairly firm grip where we quickly realized that providing short term solutions over and over isn't going to cut it.

We had to rethink and go back to the drawing board multiple times to start making a fun game. We knew the solutions needed but the time investment was huge with lot of risks ahead. Which is where a lot of the development kept getting slowed down by the complexity of the engine changes that were needed, as well as unexpected issues that kept changing the landscape before us.

It was a risky move that we hope will keep the game alive going forward and bring back those that might have been turned away by the state of the game. As we truly believe that what you players want and we meant to deliver wasn’t doable with the technology we had.

There are players out there who are patiently waiting, while playing the game in a state that it is in now, others who wait for the full release or some who come back every once in a while to see what changed. Some are more invested than others, they read our channels, think about consequences of what we talk about, and some just want to see it in action. As the BETA is becoming a fleshed out reboot of the game all of us wanted, we plan to have a limited playable build at Gamescom this year. We're doing everything we can to make it available at the Bohemia Interactive booth for the visitors to try it out.

The sole focus of this build is gunplay and player movement on an edited version of Chernarus prepared especially for the purpose of this demo. That is why a lot of our efforts have been looking at the flow of player actions, controls and consistency of their outcome. The team will be there in person to discuss the details with those interested. Feedback is the most important thing and we can't wait to see people play it and smoothen the rough edges. 

Now that also means that the next couple of weeks are fully focused on the content of the Gamescom demo, so that there are no major hurdles when fans in Cologne get their hands on it. All departments are trying to iron out the details as much as they can, so that we can have fun with in Germany.

For the first BETA update itself, there is no release date yet. We don't want to let you down unless we're absolutely sure it's coming. The Gamescom demo work itself still counts towards the overall development of course, but we're not ready to put that version of the game on any of the public Steam branches - simply because the feature set of our demo will be limited and does not represent the complete DayZ experience. 

To finish things off, let's take a look at a list of things the team is tackling now:

Programmers

• Weapon actions
• Vehicle controller refactor
• Basic state machines and script classes tweaks
• Melee combat preparation (programming wise)
• Central Loot Economy tweaks
• Physics and optimization tweaks
• New animation system for zombies
• Bug fixing

Animators

• MoCap session preparation
• Animal animations
• Weapon animations

Designers

• Melee combat (script wise)
• Aiming model
• Weapons handling
• Inventory UI refactor (crafting, character)
• Advanced placing system
• New player and item spawn definition

Audio

• Sounds for weapon interactions

QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• Internal client stabilization
• New animations/weapons functionality testing

Art

• Gamescom map preparation
• Old assets rework
• Fire mode selector for weapons
• Object layout for western region

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


As we mentioned in earlier status reports, our efforts on improving graphical fidelity does not end with the update 00.62. With such massive change for the environment that update 0.62 has brought, one of the most important things for us is to get the environment right color-wise. That means getting lighting config right and having all assets in our environment properly configured (material and texture wise).

We have already released an update for grass color for 0.62 on June 21 and since then our environment designer Mark has been working tirelessly on another iteration, this time focused mainly on changing another important piece of this whole color puzzle - satellite texture. You know this texture very well, because it is the one that you see whenever you look into the distance (and also texture, that is commonly used on community-made maps, that helps you in travels through Chernarus).

Since Chernarus was originally made for Arma 2 and DayZ version has been built on top of it, it also uses satellite texture from this version. The texture was unfortunately nowhere near to being consistent in the beginning (in terms of the way details were made or in used color pallete) and with the additional things added on top of it in DayZ (northern, western expansion, settlement rework,..), this problem was only deepened.

With the update 0.62, we felt that it is the time we finally look at this problem and make sure satellite texture for the new Chernarus uses somewhat consistent color pallete and looks good both in old and new areas. This change was also particularly important for us with update 0.62 since satellite texture affects colors of grass and ground textures. Now, do not expect that suddenly, a texture that has 15360x15360 pixels will be great in every detail, but the work that has been done so far is a huge step forward and will be good starting point for any additions and improvements.

BEFORE


AFTER


With satellite texture changes of such scale, another pass on colors of grass and bushes/trees was inevitable (to basically bring close and far LOD visuals in-line with colors on new satellite texture plus several issues with material configuration were also fixed). And since all that was purely a data change, we felt that it would be shame not to include it for update 0.62, too. And so all of the changes are now available on Experimental Branch for you to check out.

And I do have also some bonus pictures for you this time - work has progressed on western border of Chernarus. Currently, detailed object layout is being worked on in areas west of Zelonogorsk. First two pictures show new settlement, called Zvir. Third shows Orlye ozero with mountain Velikyj Kotel rising behind. Now please keep in mind that content on these pictures is work-in-progress. If you want to read more about the planned changes on western border, check out the last status report.







- Adam Francu / Senior map designer


Two weeks have passed and it is time again to take a look at what is happening in the community. At first, I would like to talk about an important event which is ahead of us this summer and that is Gamescom. We've been preparing for it for several months and it is very important to us, because we will meet you – the community, and at the same time, we want to show you something new. If you are planning to be at Gamescom, we will be glad to see you. You will find our booth in hall 10.1, where we will be among other Bohemia Interactive games. Also, for the Friday 25th, we are preparing a small meet & greet with developers, including small gifts for you. Cosplayers are welcome! We will tell you more on a live stream before Gamescom, which we are also preparing at the moment and which you definitely should not miss.

Recently, I was playing DayZ when I got a message from streamer Issy telling me she can’t wait to show me what she made. And she sent a picture of shoes she painted in DayZ style! Simply awesome! I had to share that with you.



When browsing through DayZ videos, this DayZ-inspired rap caught my eye, made by DayZ Standalone - Jiveturkey600. He created it on a request from one of the fans, who wanted a song from zombie point of view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=468GVzy3S-Q

Today I would like to focus on an international fan group on Facebook - DayZ Standalone Community, which has over 13000 members. People show off their accomplishments there, look for others to play with or share their own creations. It was this group where I found Mark Duncan Copland’s post showing postcards he receives from his friend Michael. It is amazing to see how DayZ became an important part of your friendship!







 

Another thing that got my attention in this group was a bar in Birmingham, UK, run by Jessica Mitchel  who, as a true fan, decorated the bar windows with DayZ style stickers. 




 

I would like to invite you to a RP event on the Aftermath server which will take place next Wednesday. What is it about?

"Scientists have been carrying out experiments on the residents of Svetlojarsk. Slowly the residents started to notice people becoming sick and ‘turning.’ Information was leaked to the residents that scientists were going to visit the city to see the final result. The remaining residents held a secret meeting, they bought weapons off the black market and planned to capture the scientists to demand a vaccine for their friends and family. Worried that there may not be enough to go around, the civilians not only intended to capture the scientists but also kill anyone else who knew about the virus!"

If the story got you interested, don’t not forget to sing up, because the server is whitelisted. You can find more information on their web pages.

As a last thing, I wanted to show you a beautiful screenshot of the town of Novodmitrovsk in an unusual resolution made by Reddit user NeuroticEUROtic. It is definitely worth sharing!



That is all from me for today. Make sure not to miss the next Status Report, where we will give you more information about the upcoming stream and Gamescom.  Enjoy the summer!

Header image by disastrouscluck.

- Baty / Community Manager