Two weeks have passed, and we're bringing you the latest progress from the Dev Team - the usual setup got a bit of a twist with Eugen traveling this week, but we've got a whole lot of news nevertheless! Let's keep it short, and do some reading, survivors! It's good for you.

• Dev Update/Martin
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Adam
• Dev Update/Filip
• Community Spotlight

 
Hello everyone! As Eugen is traveling this week, it's my turn to contribute to the Status Report (after quite some time), and provide some summary of the past two weeks in the DayZ Dev Team. With February in full swing, we're approaching the moment where with each week, the 0.63 experimental release is becoming more and more likely. We're about to start team-wide play-tests to get our internal servers as full as possible in order to get proper data on server synchronization and performance. With that said, there are still elementary parts (like swimming and vaulting) of the game that are very much work in progress, and for that reason, we are still not feeling very comfortable talking about any potential 0.63 Experimental release dates publicly.

Considering some feedback we got under the last Status Report on Twitter, we've been looking ways how to still communicate the state of things more clearly, potentially as a progressively updated online task list. Together with Eugen and Baty, we've compiled a to-do list of sorts (basically our Experimental goals from the BETA Status Report) where we want to provide a simple overview of the current state of each key part of the 0.63 update. We'll check if and how we can publish it (we still need to work out some specifics with our team leads, also during the play-tests I mentioned), but suffice to say - there is a lot of work in progress, and less things that we would already be able to tick off as "ready for Experimental". 

While we don't want to give in to some unnecessary rush, there is also the other side of things that kind of makes us want to progress towards the 0.63 Experimental PC release as fast as possible. Our release schedule for this year is pretty tight. The main goal is to have the PC BETA and 1.0 all happen in 2018, and we're also getting much closer to bringing DayZ to console players. Our good relationship with both Sony and Microsoft opens interesting opportunities for cooperation, and since we've always had our focus aimed at the existing PC community of players first and foremost, it's in our own best interest to bring you solid PC releases ASAP so that we can also satisfy the large audience waiting for DayZ on consoles. 

Despite the not-so-huge amount of work going into our console builds of the game, we're basically able to run our regular PC 0.63 builds on both consoles with no major issues in gameplay or performance, and so the progress towards PC releases of 0.63 Experimental and Stable is critical also from this point of view - not only we really want you to have something to play already, we also want to grow our community further. 

Let's see how that works - we'll keep you posted! Meanwhile, see you in Chernarus! (Or on the forums, social media channels, and Reddit!)

- Martin Čulák / Brand & PR Manager

 
Our first working implementation of the new melee combat looked great, especially with predefined combos chained by attacks flying through the air. However, after applying a rule set to it and passing some internal play-tests, we have confirmed that it would be really hard to wrap our intentions of melee combat around these predefined combo attacks.

As gameplay is the most important thing in DayZ, I don’t want to compromise on possibilities. Ideally, players should be always able to choose which attack option at hand they can use. Considering that predefined combo chains were composed of different attack types, players were not able to choose between light and heavy attack types. Since their order was firmly determined, it made melee combat feel like something that's a bit out of your hands, which made it less interesting in the end.

We have decided to try one more prototype, in which the player is able to freely choose which attack to perform - a light or a heavy one. Immediately after the first play-test run, it was clear that’s the right direction to make the melee combat more "controllable". We will continue to iterate and improve the melee so that we finally arrive at the final implementation. It's safe to say that despite the shift from predefined combos, the new melee combat will still maintain visual variety in terms of movement, as there are still attack variations from both the left and the right side, and for both light and heavy attack types. These variants are seamlessly blended together, creating a continuous flow of attacks that simply looks nice.



The infected AI that you know well from 0.62 and older versions of DayZ was kind of always limited, and it never met our expectations, nor came close to the behaviours we defined in the design team. Currently, the infected AI is being heavily re-worked, incorporating the new animation system. We are cooperating closely with our programming team to achieve all the intended features.

The primary goal is to make the infected feel better on every level you can imagine. May it be more clever use of sensors to strengthen stealth, luring and aggro, adding search behaviour around the last known position of their target, or simply much improved readability of infected AI, utilising transitions like lost interest, target confirmed or target lost between their states. There are some significant changes coming to their melee combat as well, with jumping attacks making a comeback.  

Don't end up feeding yourself to the infected... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 
Hi everyone. The entire team is still really busy implementing the remaining parts of our animation system overhaul, so today, I would like to at least quickly share with you a couple of fresh GIFs from the development. After receiving the implementation of the new ladder climbing from our programmers, we are currently applying some final touches to ladder animations and behaviour. We're finally able to enter/exit the ladders in a rather smooth way, and also climb and even slide down the ladder. There's still some polish and fine-tuning to do before we can make ladders experimental ready, but we're getting there! The team is also busy with weapons, player turn animations and unconscious animations:





- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

 
In this Status Report, I would like to talk about another map feature of the upcoming 0.63 update - Tourist Trails. The Chernarussian Tourist Club (also known short as КЧТ) is responsible for a wide network of the tourist trails in the Republic of Chernarus. In South Zagoria (province of Chernarus that we have in DayZ), they maintain roughly 200 kilometers of tourist trails. From the northern border mountains, through the central fields to the important destinations in coastal towns. Connecting many of the historic and natural landmarks, but also showing perhaps not often visited places in South Zagoria. All that to make your travels easier and safer.



The idea of having the tourist trails on Chernarus has been floating around since early Arma 2 days. It was brought up again at the start of DayZ development with more details fleshed out. But given the rapid iterations on Chernarus+ map, it was not really feasible to start with the actual implementation until the map was in a more stable state. With the release of the update 0.62 (which introduced a total vegetation overhaul along with the western border rework), we felt that the map has finally reached a somewhat stable state that would allow us to finally return to the idea of tourist trails.

We have re-visited the original plans, made several improvements and re-designed the planned trail network to support all the map changes that happened over past couple of years. A result of this task is an overwhelming, 200 kilometer long trail network - so what helped us getting there?

• 4 different color markings to mark the trails
  • you will find these on trees, rocks, poles,...

• in real life, you would also find arrow versions of these markings, but to avoid too much duplication in data, we had to design every hard turn of the trail without the arrow markings.

 

• 93 custom directional crossroad signs
  • tailored for each trail crossroad, any important place (stops), and for the start/end of each trail
  • crossroad signs contain the local name and mark the crossroad's elevation above sea level (in meters)
  • individual plates cover every possible direction you can take, along with the travel distance (in kilometers) to three following crossroad/directional/trail signs
  • same as traffic directional signs and settlements signs, everything on these plates is written in Russian (Cyrillic)

 

• 2 types of the actual path models for the trails
  • we use these models when the trail goes through the meadows, fields, and forests
  • roughly 60% of the whole trail network is covered by these models - because as in real life, trails are also using the existing road network (excluding major roads so tourists are not in a danger of a serious car accident)

 

• 2 types of tourist shelters
  • to make bigger trail crossroads more interesting and believable
  • brand new assets that serve as shelter for players during rainy weather, or when you just want to get a bit of a rest before continuing your journey

 

In addition to these, we also have one other supporting asset that may or may not make it into 0.63:

• Map stands
  • in real life, these are present mostly on major trail crossroads in order to help tourists to get a bigger picture and plan their trip
  • we've got several prototypes so far, but still ironing out the best shape, size and the map coverage (if it will be the entire map or, for example, quarters)
  • there will be a "you are here" sign on the map to help you pinpoint your current location

Overall, tourist trails gave us a nice opportunity to improve our landscape - many improvements were done to it while the network itself was worked on. Additionally, it also gave us an opportunity to revisit all the locations names and make them actually visible directly within the environment.

We hope that they will prove to be a useful feature when navigating through our 225 square kilometers of environment, and that you will have great encounters with other like-minded survivors there. We certainly enjoyed building the network and we hope that we will meet some of you there when this feature hits the live servers!



-  Adam Franců /  Map Designer

 
Hi everyone!

Over the course of the past two weeks, we continued our work on footsteps and cloth rustle sounds. It's kind of a tedious work because we have to implement these sounds into all animations - and the number of animations in DayZ is pretty overwhelming :).

Another big task ahead of us is represented by an update of ambient sounds. We intend to create a more dynamic and realistic soundscape than before. We do not want to relate only upon flat 2D ambient sounds, but rather want to use as many positional sounds as the audio engine will allow us to have. Within the next couple of weeks, we will see how far we can push it!

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

 
Hello Survivors!

I would like to start a new tradition - answering some of the community's most asked questions in every Status Report and post it to a special thread on our official forums.

So, let's check out what you want to know:

• Will DayZ be released on consoles?

Yes, Xbox One version will be out this year in the Xbox Game Preview program. We are also working on a PlayStation 4 version and want to provide more details about that soon!

• Can you give us some modding tools already, goddamnit?!

Not right now, we can't. There are ultimately two main reasons for that: we're simply not ready to legitimately support modding until we have a solid foundation in what is a game functional on an elementary level. We also need that game to be in YOUR hands and we need you to be able to run your own servers. That will not happen before 0.63 hits Stable. In addition to that, we're also still evaluating how far along will DayZ be moddable, and how we can best support modders with all the necessary modding tools. 

• How long do we need to wait for the 0.63 Experimental? We want to play it so bad!

I know, we want to let you play it too! Right now though, it just really needs more love from the DayZ Dev Team. It's not fun to play yet. All the teams are working like devils now, trust me - I am sitting right next to them in the office, I can see it all happening and I want to play it with the community as bad as everyone. But 0.63 still needs more time!

 

Yes, the base building is also not ready yet but we know how much you are looking forward to trying it. An example is Axel, who made this cool base building concept.

https://youtu.be/CL2b9Wn2TUo

 

We have a DayZ Tip by NomadGaming. We know vehicles are sometimes pain in the ass in the current version, and you can get them stuck pretty easily. But don't forget - if you can't unstuck them, just destroy them with a matchbox, and they are going to re-spawn!

https://youtu.be/5LzixUw2eI4

 

We had Gaming Roach Entertainment here before and they are back with another cool cinematic. It is a story about mother who wants to protect her daughter from dangerous people in every way she can. Another good job Gaming Roach, you amazed me again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBCIIvNcP5U

 

What about some DayZ in real life? BarelyInfected has done a short video, it is nice to see his face again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtJO6MYZug8

 

Do you know RDiddy? He is the Australian streamer who loves jumping with cars in DayZ. This is the best jump he'S ever made! GG RDiddy!



 

Let's check out some more screenshots.

dayz_bron sent a beautiful screenshot to Reddit and I want to share it with you.



 

Another amazing view from Green Moutain by DrDesync. Be careful, I was shot standing there like this!



 

  And now is the time for your favorite riddle!

  Who answered correctly last time?

• Jakon
• $€i¥ablitz
• Jeff Day
• CryDoXz
• Polski.Tytan
• TheReverned
• 14400bps is enough
• Dmitry Mirnyy‏
• Uncuepa
• Boio
• Summer
• vini

True DayZ pros!

I asked our map designer Adam for a hard location this time. Can you guess where it is? Send the location to our official Twitter account and be on the wall of fame next time!



 

Thank you for all your content and enjoy the Valentine's Day. And don't forget that we love you! <3

- Baty / Community Manager

 

Header image by Watchman.

Two weeks have passed, and we're bringing you the latest progress from the Dev Team - the usual setup got a bit of a twist with Eugen traveling this week, but we've got a whole lot of news nevertheless! Let's keep it short, and do some reading, survivors! It's good for you.

• Dev Update/Martin
• Dev Update/Peter
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Dev Update/Adam
• Dev Update/Filip
• Community Spotlight

 
Hello everyone! As Eugen is traveling this week, it's my turn to contribute to the Status Report (after quite some time), and provide some summary of the past two weeks in the DayZ Dev Team. With February in full swing, we're approaching the moment where with each week, the 0.63 experimental release is becoming more and more likely. We're about to start team-wide play-tests to get our internal servers as full as possible in order to get proper data on server synchronization and performance. With that said, there are still elementary parts (like swimming and vaulting) of the game that are very much work in progress, and for that reason, we are still not feeling very comfortable talking about any potential 0.63 Experimental release dates publicly.

Considering some feedback we got under the last Status Report on Twitter, we've been looking ways how to still communicate the state of things more clearly, potentially as a progressively updated online task list. Together with Eugen and Baty, we've compiled a to-do list of sorts (basically our Experimental goals from the BETA Status Report) where we want to provide a simple overview of the current state of each key part of the 0.63 update. We'll check if and how we can publish it (we still need to work out some specifics with our team leads, also during the play-tests I mentioned), but suffice to say - there is a lot of work in progress, and less things that we would already be able to tick off as "ready for Experimental". 

While we don't want to give in to some unnecessary rush, there is also the other side of things that kind of makes us want to progress towards the 0.63 Experimental PC release as fast as possible. Our release schedule for this year is pretty tight. The main goal is to have the PC BETA and 1.0 all happen in 2018, and we're also getting much closer to bringing DayZ to console players. Our good relationship with both Sony and Microsoft opens interesting opportunities for cooperation, and since we've always had our focus aimed at the existing PC community of players first and foremost, it's in our own best interest to bring you solid PC releases ASAP so that we can also satisfy the large audience waiting for DayZ on consoles. 

Despite the not-so-huge amount of work going into our console builds of the game, we're basically able to run our regular PC 0.63 builds on both consoles with no major issues in gameplay or performance, and so the progress towards PC releases of 0.63 Experimental and Stable is critical also from this point of view - not only we really want you to have something to play already, we also want to grow our community further. 

Let's see how that works - we'll keep you posted! Meanwhile, see you in Chernarus! (Or on the forums, social media channels, and Reddit!)

- Martin Čulák / Brand & PR Manager

 
Our first working implementation of the new melee combat looked great, especially with predefined combos chained by attacks flying through the air. However, after applying a rule set to it and passing some internal play-tests, we have confirmed that it would be really hard to wrap our intentions of melee combat around these predefined combo attacks.

As gameplay is the most important thing in DayZ, I don’t want to compromise on possibilities. Ideally, players should be always able to choose which attack option at hand they can use. Considering that predefined combo chains were composed of different attack types, players were not able to choose between light and heavy attack types. Since their order was firmly determined, it made melee combat feel like something that's a bit out of your hands, which made it less interesting in the end.

We have decided to try one more prototype, in which the player is able to freely choose which attack to perform - a light or a heavy one. Immediately after the first play-test run, it was clear that’s the right direction to make the melee combat more "controllable". We will continue to iterate and improve the melee so that we finally arrive at the final implementation. It's safe to say that despite the shift from predefined combos, the new melee combat will still maintain visual variety in terms of movement, as there are still attack variations from both the left and the right side, and for both light and heavy attack types. These variants are seamlessly blended together, creating a continuous flow of attacks that simply looks nice.



The infected AI that you know well from 0.62 and older versions of DayZ was kind of always limited, and it never met our expectations, nor came close to the behaviours we defined in the design team. Currently, the infected AI is being heavily re-worked, incorporating the new animation system. We are cooperating closely with our programming team to achieve all the intended features.

The primary goal is to make the infected feel better on every level you can imagine. May it be more clever use of sensors to strengthen stealth, luring and aggro, adding search behaviour around the last known position of their target, or simply much improved readability of infected AI, utilising transitions like lost interest, target confirmed or target lost between their states. There are some significant changes coming to their melee combat as well, with jumping attacks making a comeback.  

Don't end up feeding yourself to the infected... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

 
Hi everyone. The entire team is still really busy implementing the remaining parts of our animation system overhaul, so today, I would like to at least quickly share with you a couple of fresh GIFs from the development. After receiving the implementation of the new ladder climbing from our programmers, we are currently applying some final touches to ladder animations and behaviour. We're finally able to enter/exit the ladders in a rather smooth way, and also climb and even slide down the ladder. There's still some polish and fine-tuning to do before we can make ladders experimental ready, but we're getting there! The team is also busy with weapons, player turn animations and unconscious animations:





- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

 
In this Status Report, I would like to talk about another map feature of the upcoming 0.63 update - Tourist Trails. The Chernarussian Tourist Club (also known short as КЧТ) is responsible for a wide network of the tourist trails in the Republic of Chernarus. In South Zagoria (province of Chernarus that we have in DayZ), they maintain roughly 200 kilometers of tourist trails. From the northern border mountains, through the central fields to the important destinations in coastal towns. Connecting many of the historic and natural landmarks, but also showing perhaps not often visited places in South Zagoria. All that to make your travels easier and safer.



The idea of having the tourist trails on Chernarus has been floating around since early Arma 2 days. It was brought up again at the start of DayZ development with more details fleshed out. But given the rapid iterations on Chernarus+ map, it was not really feasible to start with the actual implementation until the map was in a more stable state. With the release of the update 0.62 (which introduced a total vegetation overhaul along with the western border rework), we felt that the map has finally reached a somewhat stable state that would allow us to finally return to the idea of tourist trails.

We have re-visited the original plans, made several improvements and re-designed the planned trail network to support all the map changes that happened over past couple of years. A result of this task is an overwhelming, 200 kilometer long trail network - so what helped us getting there?

• 4 different color markings to mark the trails
  • you will find these on trees, rocks, poles,...

• in real life, you would also find arrow versions of these markings, but to avoid too much duplication in data, we had to design every hard turn of the trail without the arrow markings.

 

• 93 custom directional crossroad signs
  • tailored for each trail crossroad, any important place (stops), and for the start/end of each trail
  • crossroad signs contain the local name and mark the crossroad's elevation above sea level (in meters)
  • individual plates cover every possible direction you can take, along with the travel distance (in kilometers) to three following crossroad/directional/trail signs
  • same as traffic directional signs and settlements signs, everything on these plates is written in Russian (Cyrillic)

 

• 2 types of the actual path models for the trails
  • we use these models when the trail goes through the meadows, fields, and forests
  • roughly 60% of the whole trail network is covered by these models - because as in real life, trails are also using the existing road network (excluding major roads so tourists are not in a danger of a serious car accident)

 

• 2 types of tourist shelters
  • to make bigger trail crossroads more interesting and believable
  • brand new assets that serve as shelter for players during rainy weather, or when you just want to get a bit of a rest before continuing your journey

 

In addition to these, we also have one other supporting asset that may or may not make it into 0.63:

• Map stands
  • in real life, these are present mostly on major trail crossroads in order to help tourists to get a bigger picture and plan their trip
  • we've got several prototypes so far, but still ironing out the best shape, size and the map coverage (if it will be the entire map or, for example, quarters)
  • there will be a "you are here" sign on the map to help you pinpoint your current location

Overall, tourist trails gave us a nice opportunity to improve our landscape - many improvements were done to it while the network itself was worked on. Additionally, it also gave us an opportunity to revisit all the locations names and make them actually visible directly within the environment.

We hope that they will prove to be a useful feature when navigating through our 225 square kilometers of environment, and that you will have great encounters with other like-minded survivors there. We certainly enjoyed building the network and we hope that we will meet some of you there when this feature hits the live servers!



-  Adam Franců /  Map Designer

 
Hi everyone!

Over the course of the past two weeks, we continued our work on footsteps and cloth rustle sounds. It's kind of a tedious work because we have to implement these sounds into all animations - and the number of animations in DayZ is pretty overwhelming :).

Another big task ahead of us is represented by an update of ambient sounds. We intend to create a more dynamic and realistic soundscape than before. We do not want to relate only upon flat 2D ambient sounds, but rather want to use as many positional sounds as the audio engine will allow us to have. Within the next couple of weeks, we will see how far we can push it!

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer

 
Hello Survivors!

I would like to start a new tradition - answering some of the community's most asked questions in every Status Report and post it to a special thread on our official forums.

So, let's check out what you want to know:

• Will DayZ be released on consoles?

Yes, Xbox One version will be out this year in the Xbox Game Preview program. We are also working on a PlayStation 4 version and want to provide more details about that soon!

• Can you give us some modding tools already, goddamnit?!

Not right now, we can't. There are ultimately two main reasons for that: we're simply not ready to legitimately support modding until we have a solid foundation in what is a game functional on an elementary level. We also need that game to be in YOUR hands and we need you to be able to run your own servers. That will not happen before 0.63 hits Stable. In addition to that, we're also still evaluating how far along will DayZ be moddable, and how we can best support modders with all the necessary modding tools. 

• How long do we need to wait for the 0.63 Experimental? We want to play it so bad!

I know, we want to let you play it too! Right now though, it just really needs more love from the DayZ Dev Team. It's not fun to play yet. All the teams are working like devils now, trust me - I am sitting right next to them in the office, I can see it all happening and I want to play it with the community as bad as everyone. But 0.63 still needs more time!

 

Yes, the base building is also not ready yet but we know how much you are looking forward to trying it. An example is Axel, who made this cool base building concept.

https://youtu.be/CL2b9Wn2TUo

 

We have a DayZ Tip by NomadGaming. We know vehicles are sometimes pain in the ass in the current version, and you can get them stuck pretty easily. But don't forget - if you can't unstuck them, just destroy them with a matchbox, and they are going to re-spawn!

https://youtu.be/5LzixUw2eI4

 

We had Gaming Roach Entertainment here before and they are back with another cool cinematic. It is a story about mother who wants to protect her daughter from dangerous people in every way she can. Another good job Gaming Roach, you amazed me again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBCIIvNcP5U

 

What about some DayZ in real life? BarelyInfected has done a short video, it is nice to see his face again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtJO6MYZug8

 

Do you know RDiddy? He is the Australian streamer who loves jumping with cars in DayZ. This is the best jump he'S ever made! GG RDiddy!



 

Let's check out some more screenshots.

dayz_bron sent a beautiful screenshot to Reddit and I want to share it with you.



 

Another amazing view from Green Moutain by DrDesync. Be careful, I was shot standing there like this!



 

  And now is the time for your favorite riddle!

  Who answered correctly last time?

• Jakon
• $€i¥ablitz
• Jeff Day
• CryDoXz
• Polski.Tytan
• TheReverned
• 14400bps is enough
• Dmitry Mirnyy‏
• Uncuepa
• Boio
• Summer
• vini

True DayZ pros!

I asked our map designer Adam for a hard location this time. Can you guess where it is? Send the location to our official Twitter account and be on the wall of fame next time!



 

Thank you for all your content and enjoy the Valentine's Day. And don't forget that we love you! <3

- Baty / Community Manager

 

Header image by Watchman.

We're keeping it short, but sweet this week - we've got some changes in the team, and so along with his regular dev update, Eugen is taking the time to thank some of his team members and to say goodbye. Since we're at saying good byes, Peter is finally done with having apple tree and stone texture spamming in the game, and hints at our new dynamic ambient loot spawning. Finishing off the dev part, we have Mirek teasing bits about the infected movement, and our Audio Designer Filip sharing his latest and greatest. As always, Baty adds your awesome community content, and the ever famous Status Report riddle! let's get to it, survivors.

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

 
When something ends, something else begins. As I mentioned in the Year in Review video, it's always hard losing team members, but it's a necessary part of the development cycle. Lots of people have joined the team over the last four years, growing from a strong core into a large, two-studio production with almost 80 developers full time. Some are moving on to new challenges, and I wanted to thank them for their contribution to what DayZ should be. A monumental undertaking that all these people were part of.

My thanks go specifically (but not exclusively) to Andrej Sinkević (who is moving back home to take care of his family) for overseeing the creation of new weapons sounds, environment sounds, and making sure we are expanding upon the options available.

My thanks also go to our Environment Designer Senchi for making Chernarus exciting again, for his passion, for thinking outside the box and for trying new things.

At the same time, I would like to introduce Filip Čenžák, who will be taking over the DayZ responsibilities in our Audio Department, and will be sharing what's coming here in Status Reports :). Good luck, Filip!

Even though we've said a couple of good-byes early this year, the work hasn't stopped and we have progressed significantly. So let me go over the updates that we have seen on our internal build - there are some exciting things we have been working on:

Prone Combat

We've had a prone review meeting last week in order to look over what's next for the feature, and we have started tweaking the turn animations and bugs with collisions in different parts of the prone animation.

Ladder climbing

Right now, we're working on a script implementation to make ladders available ingame, as most of the stuff is almost ready. We will definitively come back and check the data and overall ladder setup again once this part of the game becomes testable.

Melee Combat

Another iteration of melee combat is now available in-game, with new heavy and light attack modes, new evades, bug fixes for targeting, and animations for melee with ranged weapons - those are ready to get into the animation graph for quick tests.

Dynamic Spawning

We are trying to unify the spawning in-game to use one spawn function, and we're refactoring dynamic ambient spawning system for specific situations around the player. Peter shares more about this in his part.

Vehicles

Work has again started on vehicles, as the Enfusion Engine hierarchy for entities gets further in its development. Our focus is on the refactor with creation of locals pace, and real player character being in the vehicle rather than a dummy character. If you remember, there were issues like entering a vehicle and crashing, which would teleport you back to where you entered the vehicle, simply because the system didn't really allow for something being inside of a vehicle - it was all dummy characters and lot of improvised hacks.

Camera

The camera has progressed further through several bug fixes, and we are starting to go through ingame data and collisions to fix objects with wrong collisions, which of course benefits more features than the camera itself.

The Infected

We have finally started again the work on the infected, as the player character features are getting in better shape. Mirek has started a refactor on sensory mechanics, jumping, and combat, and we are going to have a longer discussion on our expectations tomorrow.

Besides the specifics above, the weapon team is getting through the expected list of weapons for experimental at a steady pace, implementing the new features for every weapon, adding all the animations and making sure everything works as intended. At the same time, we have people tackling issues of the last inventory implementation or looking into the server browser back-end.

And I'm going to shut up now and get back to work! ;)

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Search for apples, now something of an iconic user action is gone forever. The same goes for every other search action present in the old DayZ!

As you know, search actions were added as a placeholder to broaden the possibilities of survivalism, and promoting the hermit playstyle in terms of gathering food and other useful nature resources - may it be rocks, sticks or feathers. Driven by a random number generator, which I’m really not a fan of, it was nearly impossible to balance the outcome of these actions. They were open to abuse by limitations of the old animation system, and they also didn’t make sense from a visual point of view.

Now, the part of Central Economy which deals with dynamic spawning is able to also spawn such ambient loot as apples, rocks or mushrooms. Dynamically spawned ambient resources are linked with static objects in the map, for example apples are linked with apple trees and rocks with stone paths or bigger rocks.





As mentioned these items are spawned dynamically around players, and they are capped from the side of a linked object, as well as by a total maximum amount available of that specific loot type (e.g. max 3 apples per tree, 100 apples total). Once a player leaves the area, ambient loot is despawned when its lifetime ends. Of course, as it’s part of Central Economy, it’s all properly synced, and all players will see the same ambient loot in any given area. Our solution is also friendly to server performance.

I’m really happy that we were able to finally add such feature as it puts emphasis on our physical approach to design, and provides a more authentic feel to the overall experience.

When you see it, you can take it... see you in Chernarus, folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
Hello survivors, not much has changed since the last Status Report. We're still dealing with pretty much the same tasks as last time, there's just one little change. We've started the work on improving the infected a little bit earlier. Currently, we're focused mostly on improving stealth mechanics, which means adding some new features for AI sensors and tweaking their parameters. Together with AI sensors, we're adding some new animations for movement. Here's a small teaser of three new movement variations. You can see that the movement is still not ideal, especially when the infected is making sharp turns, but rest assured, we will improve this - the animations are already prepared, we just need to spend time on the implementation.







- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Programmer


 
Hi all, Filip here! As Eugen already mentioned, I'll be taking over most of the audio-related tasks from Andrej - and that includes writing the Status Reports for you!

The sound department is focused on character sounds now. We could finally implement footstep sounds with the animation system as we intended. That meant creating a new animation event for every footstep in all animations. It took a while, but now we can synchronize footstep sounds with animations with much better accuracy. There are still some technical issues that have to be solved, so we hope that the programmers will find some time for us in their busy schedule.

The second major feature we are working on now is attachment sounds. That means cloth rustle, backpack or weapon sounds when the character is moving. We have a working prototype, which will allow us to have different foley sounds for different types of clothes or other things you can wear. For example, it will allow us to have different cloth rustle sounds for shirt and leather jacket. In the final mix, the sonic differences will be small, but still noticeable and should create bigger immersion for players.

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer


 
Hello Survivors,

You are important to us and we are glad to see all your content. We don't want to keep it just for ourselves, so let's share it!

Do you know BIBIX? He is a streamer from France and a true DayZ fan. He decided to visit the real Chernarus this week and to come greet us in Prague on the way. He took a photo with Peter Nespesny and visited Stary Sobor. We hope you enjoyed your trip, BIBIX!







 

When I visited the DayZ Steam community, I have found this nice artwork by Mr. Boogie. Simple and beautiful.

Check out more of his work here.





 

Eiemoja is a loyal DayZ fan with more than 2900 hours in the game and is also an enthusiastic artworker. If you are interested in his work, here is his Steam collection.



 

This picture by M.J.D. shows the last moments in the life of the owner of a village pub from Chernarus. I like hidden stories like this one.



 

And when we are talking about stories, I fell in love with this one. It is romantic and sad at the same time. Good work!

"Close to retirement, an older couple, Archeologist and Chemist, traveled to Chernarus to look for out-of-place artifacts when they are hit with the outbreak. They stop at nothing to remain together through it all."

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

I know we had M1NDR here last time, but this is one really entertaining video! He met Jessica the medic. But he didn't know how much she loves blood…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtsSfkZ3NPM

 

We can see a lot of Snapchat filters on DayZ characters lately. There is a Reddit thread dedicated to it and people are adding their creations.



Snap face is really freaky ...



 

Let's solve the riddle.

The answer to the last question was "Kumyrna". It is an old, abandoned town on a mountain plateau directly south of Guglovo.

The wall of fame:

• Spaggie
• Bryce
• Johnny K
• CryDoXz
• Jake
• JoK3R
• Habu
• BigRig
• Johnny Bravo
• goof3y
• KalleK
• Tyler
• TheReverned

 

Question of this Status Report:

Near which town is this place located? Send me your answer to our official Twitter account!



 

Thank you for your amazing work everyone and see you in two weeks!

Header image by ZANDER.

 

- Baty / Community Manager


 

We're keeping it short, but sweet this week - we've got some changes in the team, and so along with his regular dev update, Eugen is taking the time to thank some of his team members and to say goodbye. Since we're at saying good byes, Peter is finally done with having apple tree and stone texture spamming in the game, and hints at our new dynamic ambient loot spawning. Finishing off the dev part, we have Mirek teasing bits about the infected movement, and our Audio Designer Filip sharing his latest and greatest. As always, Baty adds your awesome community content, and the ever famous Status Report riddle! let's get to it, survivors.

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

 
When something ends, something else begins. As I mentioned in the Year in Review video, it's always hard losing team members, but it's a necessary part of the development cycle. Lots of people have joined the team over the last four years, growing from a strong core into a large, two-studio production with almost 80 developers full time. Some are moving on to new challenges, and I wanted to thank them for their contribution to what DayZ should be. A monumental undertaking that all these people were part of.

My thanks go specifically (but not exclusively) to Andrej Sinkević (who is moving back home to take care of his family) for overseeing the creation of new weapons sounds, environment sounds, and making sure we are expanding upon the options available.

My thanks also go to our Environment Designer Senchi for making Chernarus exciting again, for his passion, for thinking outside the box and for trying new things.

At the same time, I would like to introduce Filip Čenžák, who will be taking over the DayZ responsibilities in our Audio Department, and will be sharing what's coming here in Status Reports :). Good luck, Filip!

Even though we've said a couple of good-byes early this year, the work hasn't stopped and we have progressed significantly. So let me go over the updates that we have seen on our internal build - there are some exciting things we have been working on:

Prone Combat

We've had a prone review meeting last week in order to look over what's next for the feature, and we have started tweaking the turn animations and bugs with collisions in different parts of the prone animation.

Ladder climbing

Right now, we're working on a script implementation to make ladders available ingame, as most of the stuff is almost ready. We will definitively come back and check the data and overall ladder setup again once this part of the game becomes testable.

Melee Combat

Another iteration of melee combat is now available in-game, with new heavy and light attack modes, new evades, bug fixes for targeting, and animations for melee with ranged weapons - those are ready to get into the animation graph for quick tests.

Dynamic Spawning

We are trying to unify the spawning in-game to use one spawn function, and we're refactoring dynamic ambient spawning system for specific situations around the player. Peter shares more about this in his part.

Vehicles

Work has again started on vehicles, as the Enfusion Engine hierarchy for entities gets further in its development. Our focus is on the refactor with creation of locals pace, and real player character being in the vehicle rather than a dummy character. If you remember, there were issues like entering a vehicle and crashing, which would teleport you back to where you entered the vehicle, simply because the system didn't really allow for something being inside of a vehicle - it was all dummy characters and lot of improvised hacks.

Camera

The camera has progressed further through several bug fixes, and we are starting to go through ingame data and collisions to fix objects with wrong collisions, which of course benefits more features than the camera itself.

The Infected

We have finally started again the work on the infected, as the player character features are getting in better shape. Mirek has started a refactor on sensory mechanics, jumping, and combat, and we are going to have a longer discussion on our expectations tomorrow.

Besides the specifics above, the weapon team is getting through the expected list of weapons for experimental at a steady pace, implementing the new features for every weapon, adding all the animations and making sure everything works as intended. At the same time, we have people tackling issues of the last inventory implementation or looking into the server browser back-end.

And I'm going to shut up now and get back to work! ;)

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
Search for apples, now something of an iconic user action is gone forever. The same goes for every other search action present in the old DayZ!

As you know, search actions were added as a placeholder to broaden the possibilities of survivalism, and promoting the hermit playstyle in terms of gathering food and other useful nature resources - may it be rocks, sticks or feathers. Driven by a random number generator, which I’m really not a fan of, it was nearly impossible to balance the outcome of these actions. They were open to abuse by limitations of the old animation system, and they also didn’t make sense from a visual point of view.

Now, the part of Central Economy which deals with dynamic spawning is able to also spawn such ambient loot as apples, rocks or mushrooms. Dynamically spawned ambient resources are linked with static objects in the map, for example apples are linked with apple trees and rocks with stone paths or bigger rocks.





As mentioned these items are spawned dynamically around players, and they are capped from the side of a linked object, as well as by a total maximum amount available of that specific loot type (e.g. max 3 apples per tree, 100 apples total). Once a player leaves the area, ambient loot is despawned when its lifetime ends. Of course, as it’s part of Central Economy, it’s all properly synced, and all players will see the same ambient loot in any given area. Our solution is also friendly to server performance.

I’m really happy that we were able to finally add such feature as it puts emphasis on our physical approach to design, and provides a more authentic feel to the overall experience.

When you see it, you can take it... see you in Chernarus, folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
Hello survivors, not much has changed since the last Status Report. We're still dealing with pretty much the same tasks as last time, there's just one little change. We've started the work on improving the infected a little bit earlier. Currently, we're focused mostly on improving stealth mechanics, which means adding some new features for AI sensors and tweaking their parameters. Together with AI sensors, we're adding some new animations for movement. Here's a small teaser of three new movement variations. You can see that the movement is still not ideal, especially when the infected is making sharp turns, but rest assured, we will improve this - the animations are already prepared, we just need to spend time on the implementation.







- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Programmer


 
Hi all, Filip here! As Eugen already mentioned, I'll be taking over most of the audio-related tasks from Andrej - and that includes writing the Status Reports for you!

The sound department is focused on character sounds now. We could finally implement footstep sounds with the animation system as we intended. That meant creating a new animation event for every footstep in all animations. It took a while, but now we can synchronize footstep sounds with animations with much better accuracy. There are still some technical issues that have to be solved, so we hope that the programmers will find some time for us in their busy schedule.

The second major feature we are working on now is attachment sounds. That means cloth rustle, backpack or weapon sounds when the character is moving. We have a working prototype, which will allow us to have different foley sounds for different types of clothes or other things you can wear. For example, it will allow us to have different cloth rustle sounds for shirt and leather jacket. In the final mix, the sonic differences will be small, but still noticeable and should create bigger immersion for players.

- Filip Čenžák / Sound Designer


 
Hello Survivors,

You are important to us and we are glad to see all your content. We don't want to keep it just for ourselves, so let's share it!

Do you know BIBIX? He is a streamer from France and a true DayZ fan. He decided to visit the real Chernarus this week and to come greet us in Prague on the way. He took a photo with Peter Nespesny and visited Stary Sobor. We hope you enjoyed your trip, BIBIX!







 

When I visited the DayZ Steam community, I have found this nice artwork by Mr. Boogie. Simple and beautiful.

Check out more of his work here.





 

Eiemoja is a loyal DayZ fan with more than 2900 hours in the game and is also an enthusiastic artworker. If you are interested in his work, here is his Steam collection.



 

This picture by M.J.D. shows the last moments in the life of the owner of a village pub from Chernarus. I like hidden stories like this one.



 

And when we are talking about stories, I fell in love with this one. It is romantic and sad at the same time. Good work!

"Close to retirement, an older couple, Archeologist and Chemist, traveled to Chernarus to look for out-of-place artifacts when they are hit with the outbreak. They stop at nothing to remain together through it all."

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

I know we had M1NDR here last time, but this is one really entertaining video! He met Jessica the medic. But he didn't know how much she loves blood…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtsSfkZ3NPM

 

We can see a lot of Snapchat filters on DayZ characters lately. There is a Reddit thread dedicated to it and people are adding their creations.



Snap face is really freaky ...



 

Let's solve the riddle.

The answer to the last question was "Kumyrna". It is an old, abandoned town on a mountain plateau directly south of Guglovo.

The wall of fame:

• Spaggie
• Bryce
• Johnny K
• CryDoXz
• Jake
• JoK3R
• Habu
• BigRig
• Johnny Bravo
• goof3y
• KalleK
• Tyler
• TheReverned

 

Question of this Status Report:

Near which town is this place located? Send me your answer to our official Twitter account!



 

Thank you for your amazing work everyone and see you in two weeks!

Header image by ZANDER.

 

- Baty / Community Manager


 

It's been only a bit over two weeks in 2018, but we're already seeing some nice progress in DayZ Development! Eugen is providing a quick summary of our current production, Mirek and Viktor detail their ongoing work on the new player character (among other things), and Adam opens up 2018 in style with a major update regarding watercourses on Chernarus! As always, Baty closes with your community content - this time rather unsurprisingly focused on the bygone holiday season! There's also one song included, though. Let's go, it's the first Status Report of the year!

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

 
The year of DayZ is here, and the first two weeks of it are behind us. I'll be looking over the decision making and work happening during the recent ramp up, with the entire team fully focused on 0.63 Experimental build delivery. We looked over the state of the game more energised after the holiday break, and came up with a selected subset of experimental features that will get us to a playable game state as soon as possible.

Even with this goal of fast implementation in mind, we understand how critical it is to, after all the time with legacy builds, get the game out in a good state. Making sure that the long standing issues that bother us all the most get fixed for once: performance, stability, cheating prevention, and functional gameplay mechanics.

We are aiming for a good balance of polish and progress, but don't get me wrong: 0.63 Experimental and BETA are still going to represent an Early Access game, sothere will be issues. On the other hand, we will also work with a faster iteration speed to fix the remaining issues, to implement remaining content and features from our BETA/Experimental goals, and to go through all your valuable feedback.

The past two weeks were spent on actionable items mostly within the player character feature set. I'll try and explain in more detail what are we dealing with right now:

• Polishing prone mechanics
  • Besides waiting on polished animations and player prone turns, we still need to deal with limitations of weapon movement and ground collision. It's slick as hell though
• Tweaking the new melee combat prototype
  • Moving to last iteration should bring us closer to final state and give us time to balance things out - damage and speed-wise 
  • There were some changes to control scheme and targeting options
• Implementation of Inverse Kinematics on player's legs
  • Huge step towards a right balance of player turns
  • Functional system that prevents extreme zig-zagging and visual fidelity of movement
• Cleaning up error logs
  • Also looking into slimming the data and getting more order into current state of things
  • We do come back regularly to clean up the mess in logs and error messages in order to keep them in a readable state 
• Ladder climbing
  • The nearest major step in the new player movement implementation
  • Still needs more work on code, but script implementation is already waiting to be switched on
• Camera
  • More details in Mirek's part

There is a lot more work that has been done in these two weeks, but some of it is just at its very beginning. After we're done with the new player character, you'll see more stuff done on the infected side of things. The same goes for vehicles and helicopters - once they are working and we have them in some presentable state on 0.63, you'll be the first to know!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
Hello survivors, I'm afraid I don't have much to show you visually today, because a large amount of our work is still in progress. In any way, I will at least compile a short list of what we're currently working on in the programming team:

• Client side prediction of inventory actions
  • this ultimately means preventing network lags when players manage their inventory
  • the implementation is now done, we're fixing bugs that this change introduced in the game
• Player Character - Inverse kinematics for legs
  • the implementation is almost ready
• Player Character - Movement on ladders
  • work is in progress, we're hoping to show some visuals in the next Status Report
• Central Economy -  Dynamic spawn of items around players
  • a system that can spawn items like stones, sticks or mushrooms around the player
  • this is in a prototype stage
  • we need to review the prototype with our game designers
• 3rd person camera collisions
  • improvements in camera collisions prediction
  • we're happy with the implementation now, but there's more tweaking to be done during BETA

I hope you're not too disappointed for now, but I believe we're getting pretty close to showing you you more visual content in the following Status Reports, as we're making progress towards connecting new animations for the infected, as well as character's animations related to vehicle interaction. These will keep us busy in February.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer

 
Hi there! The animation department is currently focused on a couple of player character features. Last week, there was a small motion capture session where we recorded a bunch of missing animations for prone, combat, ladders, as well as first batch of unconscious state animations.

Do you remember the prone GIF from the previous status report? Well, we have progressed with the prototype of this new prone behavior a bit. At the moment, the player character is able to turn on his back freely with every item, as well as aim and shoot with weapons. We have only the placeholder animations implemented at this point, so it's an ideal time to start replacing them with polished ones.

The melee combat has seen some iterations and on the last week's mocap session - we have captured some new animations for this part of the game as well. Among others, we recorded butt-stock, bayonet, pistol and other melee attacks with firearms. We will work on these in the upcoming weeks.

Our next focus will be ladders. We have adjusted the animation graph and prepared some enter/exit animations for that over the past couple of weeks. Of course, we also continue on weapon animations, as well as adjusting existing vehicle animations. The player character movement has received some love as well. The rework of turns is progressing well, with great results as you can see in the attached GIF.



We are now looking forward to the inverse kinematics on feet, which is being worked on at the moment by programmers. This will provide us with an additional set of improvements, and will take care of unwanted sliding that is still present during movement. 



- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

 
If you have seen my Q&A video (Part 1, Part 2), you may remember that I touched upon the commonly asked subject of having actual flowing water in our environment. In our everlasting effort to have one of the most immersive game worlds ever created, I am proud to announce that at last, we've made significant progress towards having proper watercourses! Unless something goes wrong, this will be available for all of you to check out in 0.63:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IClZBVQ2lo0

Watercourses are really important to the landscape - simply because they add a sense to what we are trying to recreate. In real life, it is completely normal to go down into the valley and find at least a small stream or some kind of wet area. And like a power-line, a road, a railway or even a tourist trail, finding a watercourse can help you navigate within the game world. Will you go up against the flow, or down? The choice is yours.



The days of the legacy renderer and the limitations we had to deal with when creating other-than-ocean water are long gone, and with the recent engine improvements made, namely:

• Ability to have multiple water materials per map
• Ability to define wave animation using the flow-map
• Ability to have a floating water moss

we can now improve the visual quality of our static water bodies, and also implement watercourses. We can now visually distinguish different water bodies on Chernarus (some can be dirtier than others) while still having multiple materials for watercourses.

Our current implementation considers two types of a watercourse:

STREAM

• Narrow and shallow watercourse
• Used mostly inside small valleys
• They either connect to another stream or into small river

SMALL RIVER

• Wide and shallow watercourse
• Used in major valleys
• They form multiple streams and connect to the sea
• They have a name :)

Since our game world is spread across 225 square kilometers, we have decided that our implementation has to be something we can recreate within such large scale. The approach is quite straightforward - we first prepare a stream/river bed by simply carving out the terrain where needed, and then we use different stream/river model parts (similarly to railways, roads) to fill the river bed with it.

Some stream/river parts even have several variants with rocks and custom flow-map to simulate the flow of water around the obstacles, but we of course also focus on adding additional details around the watercourse when we feel it still lacks something. Stream/river beds also have a gravel ground texture (the same surface you have on the coast and is commonly used to collect stones).

This implementation, however, has its downside to it as well - our terrain resolution of 7.5 meters makes some stream/river beds weird looking due to jagged edges. We try our best to mask it out whenever we can, but it is not an easy task. You may say, why not increase the resolution? While we would probably find a way how to make the 3.75 meter resolution working (performance wise), at this point in development, such detailed grid would end up not being used on most of the map anyway - terrain resolution often defines the way you design things within your environment (mainly when it come to hilly areas). We can't just go and rework everything again (just to utilize the existing option), so I feel like increased terrain grid would mostly be nothing more than an FPS sinkhole at this point.

Also, I would like to mention the fact that there are no physical currents, dropping an item won't make it float downhill and given the shallow stream/river beds, do not expect an ability to traverse the map using some kind of a boat either. Most of the stream/river beds were designed in a way that you can traverse them without swimming, so it is up to you whether you cross (and get wet) or invest some time and find a bridge or a rock to take you to the other bank.



We are in the process of evaluating the impact of watercourses on the navmesh (AI navigation), and it is also important to note here that at this point in time, the new player implementation is missing interactions with any water (sea, lake, streams...), so exact behaviour will have to be tested, but it is good that the watercourse solution is ready in data and environment, so it is something we can work with while implementing the interactions of player character and water bodies within the environment.

We are also looking into further visual improvements to the way water flows/collides, and we're also adding local particle effects for smaller waterfalls, including some kind of audio samples to stream/river model parts.

So, you may ask - when can we expect watercourses on Chernarus? Our progress in this whopping landscape task can be divided into four stages:

 

• Analysis and prototyping of the watercourse solution
• Adding watercourses to the western areas of Chernarus
• Rework of existing old stream-like ponds network
• Adding new watercourses and connecting reworked streams (from 3rd point)

 

As I have already mentioned in my Q&A, western areas that have been reworked in the update 0.62 already have stream and river beds prepared (I am sure many of you noticed that already). This was really convenient for us, as we could use them to prototype best shapes for stream/river model parts. And it did not end just at the prototyping stage - I am happy to announce that 17 kilometers of watercourses have been already implemented there, and will be available for all of you to check out in 0.63.

But what about the other points? We, unfortunately, cannot give you any ETA for that as of now. We do have quite extensive watercourse network planned and obviously, we would like to implement it over the whole landscape, but it unfortunately is not a simple task, and it's something to work on even after the 1.0 release. We will keep you updated on the progress though.

These are really exciting times, thanks for reading and see you in Chernarus!

- Adam Franců / Senior map designer

 
Hello Survivors!

I am really glad for the amazing feedback we got from the Christmas update. You sent us tons of screenshots and videos with Christmas themes and I saw them all (at least I hope!). We decided we will keep the Christmas boxes until at least the end of January, because we know you like them a lot!

Santa Joshua was in Chernarus and he had a bodyguard with him, just in case. Chernarus isn't a safe place to bring presents, you know:



 

Another Santa BrianM sends greetings from his travels through the post-apocalyptic world:



 

And Miklós Tóth probably killed the Santa and took all his presents just for himself:


 

We've found some beautiful New Year greetings on our social networks:

This one is from Reddit user Wargasm011 -  a New Year greetings card in Chernarus style!



 

Another one is from the French server The Team Onu. What a beautiful artwork!


 

And here are two videos from your in-game Christmas adventures by BarelyInfectedand SepticFalcon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiqycvcA5yE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC0z05owRwo


But Christmas is gone now, so let's check some of your best moments in DayZ.

The Nomad Gaming is known in the community as a professional long sharp-stick killer. He put his best funny moments into one video, where you can see his skill, funny bugs, or how he trolls other players: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTVve2z75w

TopeRec made a best-of video from his stream again. He tried some role-play as Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead and it is pretty funny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6cXFUWJQXo
 
Streamer M1nder became a hostage and someone tried to save him… but it didn’t go as he planned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs7HuH7zS2k


What about some real life things?

Partypomcer has shown to all people from Reddit that he lives in a landscape similar to Chernarus (Northern Arkansas). Look at the barn in the distance! 


 

Tikacika sent us a new decoration he created on his wall. It is a vinyl DayZ logo and he made it by himself! Good job!


 

And the last content from the community is a song! I love DayZ songs so bad, I have a list of them in my phone and I listen to them almost every day.

This new one is called Hotel Chernarus, it was made by WiseManLofty and it is pretty cool, but we'll never forgive you the part about Adam and trees… ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVT15AnqeXU
 

Riddle time!

The answer to the last question was "The house is between Stary Sobor and Rogovo."

The fastest responses were from these survivors:

• Jakon72
• Claire (Eclaire)‏
• GriZz
• Daniel
• Leon Spencer
• R. A. Raygor
• Go Up
• Uncle Zettie
• HumbleAtomicBohemian
• BigBANGtheory‏
• Bryce
• TheReverned
• Frank the Tank
• Sqeezor
• Rustycaddy
• lexx
• 1 eyed gamer
• Hanno Spitteler
• Uncuepa
• Goran Buntic
• Volern
• JoK3R
• JAMMIELAD
• Sniperllama
• Ze-Krush
• REEMOTE

Good job!
 

The question of this Status Report is:

What is the name of this place?



 Send me your answers to our official Twitter account and your name can be here next time!

That is all from me today, have a nice game and see you in two weeks!

Header image by Anki.

- Baty / Community Manager

It's been only a bit over two weeks in 2018, but we're already seeing some nice progress in DayZ Development! Eugen is providing a quick summary of our current production, Mirek and Viktor detail their ongoing work on the new player character (among other things), and Adam opens up 2018 in style with a major update regarding watercourses on Chernarus! As always, Baty closes with your community content - this time rather unsurprisingly focused on the bygone holiday season! There's also one song included, though. Let's go, it's the first Status Report of the year!

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

 
The year of DayZ is here, and the first two weeks of it are behind us. I'll be looking over the decision making and work happening during the recent ramp up, with the entire team fully focused on 0.63 Experimental build delivery. We looked over the state of the game more energised after the holiday break, and came up with a selected subset of experimental features that will get us to a playable game state as soon as possible.

Even with this goal of fast implementation in mind, we understand how critical it is to, after all the time with legacy builds, get the game out in a good state. Making sure that the long standing issues that bother us all the most get fixed for once: performance, stability, cheating prevention, and functional gameplay mechanics.

We are aiming for a good balance of polish and progress, but don't get me wrong: 0.63 Experimental and BETA are still going to represent an Early Access game, sothere will be issues. On the other hand, we will also work with a faster iteration speed to fix the remaining issues, to implement remaining content and features from our BETA/Experimental goals, and to go through all your valuable feedback.

The past two weeks were spent on actionable items mostly within the player character feature set. I'll try and explain in more detail what are we dealing with right now:

• Polishing prone mechanics
  • Besides waiting on polished animations and player prone turns, we still need to deal with limitations of weapon movement and ground collision. It's slick as hell though
• Tweaking the new melee combat prototype
  • Moving to last iteration should bring us closer to final state and give us time to balance things out - damage and speed-wise 
  • There were some changes to control scheme and targeting options
• Implementation of Inverse Kinematics on player's legs
  • Huge step towards a right balance of player turns
  • Functional system that prevents extreme zig-zagging and visual fidelity of movement
• Cleaning up error logs
  • Also looking into slimming the data and getting more order into current state of things
  • We do come back regularly to clean up the mess in logs and error messages in order to keep them in a readable state 
• Ladder climbing
  • The nearest major step in the new player movement implementation
  • Still needs more work on code, but script implementation is already waiting to be switched on
• Camera
  • More details in Mirek's part

There is a lot more work that has been done in these two weeks, but some of it is just at its very beginning. After we're done with the new player character, you'll see more stuff done on the infected side of things. The same goes for vehicles and helicopters - once they are working and we have them in some presentable state on 0.63, you'll be the first to know!

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

 
Hello survivors, I'm afraid I don't have much to show you visually today, because a large amount of our work is still in progress. In any way, I will at least compile a short list of what we're currently working on in the programming team:

• Client side prediction of inventory actions
  • this ultimately means preventing network lags when players manage their inventory
  • the implementation is now done, we're fixing bugs that this change introduced in the game
• Player Character - Inverse kinematics for legs
  • the implementation is almost ready
• Player Character - Movement on ladders
  • work is in progress, we're hoping to show some visuals in the next Status Report
• Central Economy -  Dynamic spawn of items around players
  • a system that can spawn items like stones, sticks or mushrooms around the player
  • this is in a prototype stage
  • we need to review the prototype with our game designers
• 3rd person camera collisions
  • improvements in camera collisions prediction
  • we're happy with the implementation now, but there's more tweaking to be done during BETA

I hope you're not too disappointed for now, but I believe we're getting pretty close to showing you you more visual content in the following Status Reports, as we're making progress towards connecting new animations for the infected, as well as character's animations related to vehicle interaction. These will keep us busy in February.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer

 
Hi there! The animation department is currently focused on a couple of player character features. Last week, there was a small motion capture session where we recorded a bunch of missing animations for prone, combat, ladders, as well as first batch of unconscious state animations.

Do you remember the prone GIF from the previous status report? Well, we have progressed with the prototype of this new prone behavior a bit. At the moment, the player character is able to turn on his back freely with every item, as well as aim and shoot with weapons. We have only the placeholder animations implemented at this point, so it's an ideal time to start replacing them with polished ones.

The melee combat has seen some iterations and on the last week's mocap session - we have captured some new animations for this part of the game as well. Among others, we recorded butt-stock, bayonet, pistol and other melee attacks with firearms. We will work on these in the upcoming weeks.

Our next focus will be ladders. We have adjusted the animation graph and prepared some enter/exit animations for that over the past couple of weeks. Of course, we also continue on weapon animations, as well as adjusting existing vehicle animations. The player character movement has received some love as well. The rework of turns is progressing well, with great results as you can see in the attached GIF.



We are now looking forward to the inverse kinematics on feet, which is being worked on at the moment by programmers. This will provide us with an additional set of improvements, and will take care of unwanted sliding that is still present during movement. 



- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

 
If you have seen my Q&A video (Part 1, Part 2), you may remember that I touched upon the commonly asked subject of having actual flowing water in our environment. In our everlasting effort to have one of the most immersive game worlds ever created, I am proud to announce that at last, we've made significant progress towards having proper watercourses! Unless something goes wrong, this will be available for all of you to check out in 0.63:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IClZBVQ2lo0

Watercourses are really important to the landscape - simply because they add a sense to what we are trying to recreate. In real life, it is completely normal to go down into the valley and find at least a small stream or some kind of wet area. And like a power-line, a road, a railway or even a tourist trail, finding a watercourse can help you navigate within the game world. Will you go up against the flow, or down? The choice is yours.



The days of the legacy renderer and the limitations we had to deal with when creating other-than-ocean water are long gone, and with the recent engine improvements made, namely:

• Ability to have multiple water materials per map
• Ability to define wave animation using the flow-map
• Ability to have a floating water moss

we can now improve the visual quality of our static water bodies, and also implement watercourses. We can now visually distinguish different water bodies on Chernarus (some can be dirtier than others) while still having multiple materials for watercourses.

Our current implementation considers two types of a watercourse:

STREAM

• Narrow and shallow watercourse
• Used mostly inside small valleys
• They either connect to another stream or into small river

SMALL RIVER

• Wide and shallow watercourse
• Used in major valleys
• They form multiple streams and connect to the sea
• They have a name :)

Since our game world is spread across 225 square kilometers, we have decided that our implementation has to be something we can recreate within such large scale. The approach is quite straightforward - we first prepare a stream/river bed by simply carving out the terrain where needed, and then we use different stream/river model parts (similarly to railways, roads) to fill the river bed with it.

Some stream/river parts even have several variants with rocks and custom flow-map to simulate the flow of water around the obstacles, but we of course also focus on adding additional details around the watercourse when we feel it still lacks something. Stream/river beds also have a gravel ground texture (the same surface you have on the coast and is commonly used to collect stones).

This implementation, however, has its downside to it as well - our terrain resolution of 7.5 meters makes some stream/river beds weird looking due to jagged edges. We try our best to mask it out whenever we can, but it is not an easy task. You may say, why not increase the resolution? While we would probably find a way how to make the 3.75 meter resolution working (performance wise), at this point in development, such detailed grid would end up not being used on most of the map anyway - terrain resolution often defines the way you design things within your environment (mainly when it come to hilly areas). We can't just go and rework everything again (just to utilize the existing option), so I feel like increased terrain grid would mostly be nothing more than an FPS sinkhole at this point.

Also, I would like to mention the fact that there are no physical currents, dropping an item won't make it float downhill and given the shallow stream/river beds, do not expect an ability to traverse the map using some kind of a boat either. Most of the stream/river beds were designed in a way that you can traverse them without swimming, so it is up to you whether you cross (and get wet) or invest some time and find a bridge or a rock to take you to the other bank.



We are in the process of evaluating the impact of watercourses on the navmesh (AI navigation), and it is also important to note here that at this point in time, the new player implementation is missing interactions with any water (sea, lake, streams...), so exact behaviour will have to be tested, but it is good that the watercourse solution is ready in data and environment, so it is something we can work with while implementing the interactions of player character and water bodies within the environment.

We are also looking into further visual improvements to the way water flows/collides, and we're also adding local particle effects for smaller waterfalls, including some kind of audio samples to stream/river model parts.

So, you may ask - when can we expect watercourses on Chernarus? Our progress in this whopping landscape task can be divided into four stages:

 

• Analysis and prototyping of the watercourse solution
• Adding watercourses to the western areas of Chernarus
• Rework of existing old stream-like ponds network
• Adding new watercourses and connecting reworked streams (from 3rd point)

 

As I have already mentioned in my Q&A, western areas that have been reworked in the update 0.62 already have stream and river beds prepared (I am sure many of you noticed that already). This was really convenient for us, as we could use them to prototype best shapes for stream/river model parts. And it did not end just at the prototyping stage - I am happy to announce that 17 kilometers of watercourses have been already implemented there, and will be available for all of you to check out in 0.63.

But what about the other points? We, unfortunately, cannot give you any ETA for that as of now. We do have quite extensive watercourse network planned and obviously, we would like to implement it over the whole landscape, but it unfortunately is not a simple task, and it's something to work on even after the 1.0 release. We will keep you updated on the progress though.

These are really exciting times, thanks for reading and see you in Chernarus!

- Adam Franců / Senior map designer

 
Hello Survivors!

I am really glad for the amazing feedback we got from the Christmas update. You sent us tons of screenshots and videos with Christmas themes and I saw them all (at least I hope!). We decided we will keep the Christmas boxes until at least the end of January, because we know you like them a lot!

Santa Joshua was in Chernarus and he had a bodyguard with him, just in case. Chernarus isn't a safe place to bring presents, you know:



 

Another Santa BrianM sends greetings from his travels through the post-apocalyptic world:



 

And Miklós Tóth probably killed the Santa and took all his presents just for himself:


 

We've found some beautiful New Year greetings on our social networks:

This one is from Reddit user Wargasm011 -  a New Year greetings card in Chernarus style!



 

Another one is from the French server The Team Onu. What a beautiful artwork!


 

And here are two videos from your in-game Christmas adventures by BarelyInfectedand SepticFalcon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiqycvcA5yE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC0z05owRwo


But Christmas is gone now, so let's check some of your best moments in DayZ.

The Nomad Gaming is known in the community as a professional long sharp-stick killer. He put his best funny moments into one video, where you can see his skill, funny bugs, or how he trolls other players: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTVve2z75w

TopeRec made a best-of video from his stream again. He tried some role-play as Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead and it is pretty funny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6cXFUWJQXo
 
Streamer M1nder became a hostage and someone tried to save him… but it didn’t go as he planned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs7HuH7zS2k


What about some real life things?

Partypomcer has shown to all people from Reddit that he lives in a landscape similar to Chernarus (Northern Arkansas). Look at the barn in the distance! 


 

Tikacika sent us a new decoration he created on his wall. It is a vinyl DayZ logo and he made it by himself! Good job!


 

And the last content from the community is a song! I love DayZ songs so bad, I have a list of them in my phone and I listen to them almost every day.

This new one is called Hotel Chernarus, it was made by WiseManLofty and it is pretty cool, but we'll never forgive you the part about Adam and trees… ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVT15AnqeXU
 

Riddle time!

The answer to the last question was "The house is between Stary Sobor and Rogovo."

The fastest responses were from these survivors:

• Jakon72
• Claire (Eclaire)‏
• GriZz
• Daniel
• Leon Spencer
• R. A. Raygor
• Go Up
• Uncle Zettie
• HumbleAtomicBohemian
• BigBANGtheory‏
• Bryce
• TheReverned
• Frank the Tank
• Sqeezor
• Rustycaddy
• lexx
• 1 eyed gamer
• Hanno Spitteler
• Uncuepa
• Goran Buntic
• Volern
• JoK3R
• JAMMIELAD
• Sniperllama
• Ze-Krush
• REEMOTE

Good job!
 

The question of this Status Report is:

What is the name of this place?



 Send me your answers to our official Twitter account and your name can be here next time!

That is all from me today, have a nice game and see you in two weeks!

Header image by Anki.

- Baty / Community Manager

We're taking one last look at the challenging, but fruitful year of 2017, talking about both our achievements, and failures

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

A massive thanks to all of you who participated in development and everyone in the community who played DayZ this year - your support keeps us going, and we'll have some exciting things ready for you in 2018!

Happy Holidays! We'll be back in January

We're taking one last look at the challenging, but fruitful year of 2017, talking about both our achievements, and failures

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

A massive thanks to all of you who participated in development and everyone in the community who played DayZ this year - your support keeps us going, and we'll have some exciting things ready for you in 2018!

Happy Holidays! We'll be back in January

We're entering the last two business weeks of 2017, and before we let the holiday spirit take over our offices on 23rd, it's time for one more update from our teams - today, Eugen is recapping some of the recently made bullet-point style progress across departments, Peter takes a look at ladders, climbing and the melee combat of 0.63, Adam teases the NWAF changes along with tourist trails, and Viktor has two sexy GIFs, one of which teases a feature that will change DayZ combat in a totally unexpected way. After a pause, we also have Baty back, with loads of your amazing community content <3. Let's read, it's good for you!

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

 
Dear players.

First, I would like to thank you for all the critical feedback on the last status report, it was a hard one. Expectation were high, and we chose a road littered with risks going for the new engine, for the larger benefit in the long run. The team knew this wasn't going to be easy, but almost all major uncertainties are resolved and we are looking at brighter future for both you the players, and the team here.  We also understand and agree the call for a more visual representation of this years' progress and there is an end of the year video in the works right now.

Many of you were asking about the console version of DayZ and the team working on it. Our goal has always been to release a PC version of DayZ first before we turn to players on PS4 or Xbox. That hasn't changed. There is only one person working on each of these ports at the moment, keeping things intact so we have an easier time adapting the experience when the team is done with the PC version. We will be happy to share more details once we are in a better state of things with the PC version.

There is more to enjoy visually in the rest of the Status Report, and there is no reason to repeat myself more, so let's take a quick look at some of the work that has been done over the past month / is in progress - and then we are just going to get back to work, and get more shit done :).

• Network optimisations - bit stream implementation, network traffic optimisations for AI and players
• Weapon & inventory bugfixing
• Movement tweaking of character controller for better gameplay experience
• Character's prone state
• New offline database
• Hive refactorization for 0.63
• Login system bugfixing
• Damage system - new texture switching of damaged entities
• Bugfixing and optimizations of central loot economy
• AI - Animals:
  
  • Threat state behaviour and actions
    
  • Animals freeze in random intervals fixed
    
• Various crash fixes
• External launcher - adding local mods
  

• Items for Christmas event configuration and setup for Central Economy for 0.62 version
• Melee combat refactor of targeting and implementation of it's second check at hit event
• Connected item quantities to Central Economy
• Optimalization of UI client/server middle layer
• Notifiers code clean up
• Localization support
• Options screens refactor
• Stamina system refactor
• Firearms unjamming refactor
• Implementing state machines for AKM and SVD
• Implemented new network synchronization for electricity, traps, fireplace, cooking, placing, life span, user actions
• Implemented sounds for bear trap, landmine, defibrillator
• Parts of HUD can be toggled on/off by pressing or holding [~]
• Implemented prototype particle for AKM, UMP and CZ61
• Animated perimeter for a land mine
• Identification of blood type in inspect menu after blood test
  

• AKM, SVD reload animations implemented
• Polishing for prone 360 aimspace poses
• Player turns improvements
• Animations for Hatchback reworked due to vehicle scale changes
• Animals herding behavior: the most of the progress has been done on new herding behavior for domesting animals. Although it doesn't require massive support from animation side we found usefull to change some poses and especially lookat mechanic to bring as natural feeling on close distance as possible. Most of the work has been done in new AI tools on animal configuration side. Anyway we already have functional prototype of a herd that can be shepherd through the map. 
• Animals animations: Sheep animation pack is progressing. Goat animation pack has been finished
  

• NWAF assets
  
  • Radar tower rework
    
  • 2-floor barracks
    
  • Fuel tanks
    
  • Reworked Pile of tyres
    
  • Reworked Blast covers
    
    
• Weapons rework
• Abandoned Chernarus – harvester header
• Reworked male heads
• Decayed textures
• Christmas items
• Animal damage zones
• Bugfixing
  
  • doors
    
  • firegeometry
    
  • geometry
    
  • visual issues
    
  • foliage issues
    

• Chernarus tourist trails
  
  • We have finished 200km network along with tweaks to the satellite and surface mask and final checks and polish
    
  • Tourist trails are now ready for survivors in 0.63, the only thing that is left to solve is the map stand that is located at several key trail crossings, but that on itself does not block / prevent people from using the trails as there are 93 detailed directional signs to help them where they want to go
    
• NWAF overhaul
  
  • Improved satellite and surface mask within the whole NWAF area
    
  • Object layout improvements and fixes
    
  • Coal power plant prototype done (last missing object)
    
• Tentapocalypse
  
  • We have prepared varied interiors for two of the mostly used military tents to make such important object more interesting for players and more suitable for central economy to spawn items
    
  • All instances of military tents on Chernarus were replaced with these new variants
    

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
As the new character also have to traverse vertical differences in structures, we've started with new implementation of ladders. You don't need much to observe that the behaviour of old character on ladders in 0.62 (and older) is quite unpleasant visually and partially lacking also from the functional point of view.

Transition animations for getting on off a ladder will be added for several situations, even from/to water, as well as to sides when there isn’t any free space available behind the ladder. As we unified dimensions of ladders thorough all structures, the positioning of character hands and feet will match that of ladder steps.

It’s still valid that getting on a ladder is done through interact action (same as manipulating with doors) and getting off will be automatic at the end of the ladder. We would also like to add proper continuous ladders going through more floors, on which character can optionally get off the ladder, and where it won’t be necessary to ‘pixel hunt’ for proper interact action to get on the ladder and continue in desired direction. However, this has a lower priority as we need to solve simple ladders first.

As climbing the ladder is exposing you in situations that can be relatively dangerous, we are adding the possibility to quickly scale up the ladder, or to fast slide down the ladder. I would like to also see jumping off the ladder as it could be useful in some critical situations - in trade off for a higher risk of injury after landing. But again, this is lower on priority list for the ladders implementation.

When I mentioned jumping, let me make it clear: we will be adding jumping, alongside with climbing over obstacles later, after ladders are done, as smooth traversing through environment is very crucial for DayZ gameplay.

Ongoing work is being done on a melee combat system to make it skill based with clear rules.

Blocking and evades are implemented and functional, awaiting a polishing run. We are trying different control schemes for melee combat iteratively to achieve intuitive controls. Same goes for timing animations and their cancellation, as we want to have combat flow as seamless and fluid as possible to avoid clunkiness.



Knockdowns to the ground and finishing attacks on laying character are still on the TO DO list.

These are directly related to melee combat in prone, which was just a step away, as we had a request for absolute freedom of aiming firearm in prone in 360 degrees, which is done thru smooth and continuous turn of character from belly to back and vice versa.

After knockdown during melee combat to the ground on back position (or in case of turning character to back from belly) you can use push kick to push opponent back, may it be survivor or infected, to avoid being hit with his finishing attacks which can be potentially devastating. Similarly, I would also like to see push kicks from stand with raised hands as well (applicable for firearms too), which will add really nice flavour and together with attacks, blocking and evades adds depth and open possibilities for tactics in melee combat (and additionally allows us things like kicking doors and others).

Anyway, I would like to thank you for your support during the tough year 2017. DayZ has the best community and it’s amazing to have you around. Thank you all!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
Hi everyone. Today, I'm going to provide you with a short update on what is happening in the animation team. Our priorities are pretty clear - main focus is still on the player character animations. That includes finishing turning animations, improving locomotion and adjusting the player graph.

At the same time, we have been working on some exciting stuff recently. Our player character now has a much wider range of motion while in prone. You can now fluently turn on your back, aim and shoot. This gives better control over the character and I am sure it will lead to many interesting situations in game. We have a basic prototype working and now we are starting to polish the animations, poses and camera behaviour. This will also require small motion capture session where we will record necessary transition animations.





In addition to that, we have also recently re-done enter/exit animations for some vehicles, so that player can enter and exit vehicles much faster. Recently implemented weapons in 0.63 include SVD, AKM and there is an ongoing work on the Mosin.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator


 
It has been quite a long time since my last contribution to Status Report, but do not worry, it is just that we have been working very hard pushing towards our 0.63 goals. But before we talk about that - given the fact that is a last status report of 2017 - let me first dive a bit into the things that happened in 2017.

In 2017, Chernarus has gone through what probably is the biggest change since its inception in Arma 2. We have introduced a complete overhaul of forests aimed at bringing much needed variety to the landscape of Chernarus. This overhaul essentially doubled the object count (1.4 million to 2.8 mil., but with .63 changes, we are nearing 3 mil.), an increase that was only possible with the introduction of the Enfusion renderer (update 0.60).

In addition to this overhaul, update 0.62 also introduced phase 1 of a big western border rework (the last area that remained basically untouched since Arma 2 days). We have also overhauled the entire railway network and made global changes to the satellite texture. Vegetation model swap and the re-generated forests areas introduced quite a lot of issues with object placement (objects misplaced or clipping) and we will work hard to eliminate as much of these issues as possible prior to the stable 0.63 release to make sure the first BETA build is a step towards a more polished experience from your travels on Chernarus.

Now you may ask, what else can you expect from the map in 0.63?

• Completely re-done North West Airfield (NWAF) along with surrounding landscape
• 200 kilometres of tourist trails
• New locations on the western border of Chernarus
• New points of interest across the map
• New models for bushes and rocks
• New textures for roads and road damage decals

We will cover these points in better detail in future Status Reports. For now, we would like to thank you for joining us on our journey towards one of the most immersive game environments ever created. Very excited to show you what we have in store for 0.63 and beyond!

Merry xmas and happy new year!

- Adam Franců / Senior map designer


 
It's nice to be back with another Status Report - it's been 4 weeks already and I have a lot of community content that I need to show you. So sit down comfortably, this will be long.

Life doesn’t always bring only good things, and that is what I want to talk about today.

The first sad thing that happened is Wobo's leave. One of our big and longtime supporters is leaving the content creators’ scene, because he needs to take care of his mother who has cancer. He did his last stream to raise funds to help his mother and the DayZ community surprised him a lot. He had 4000+ people on the stream and raised over 35 000 dollars to help him with taking care of his mother. You can see here how amazing the DayZ community is!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/203744097

Wobo's mum underwent a 9-hour surgery and she will stay in the hospital for the next two weeks.

Everyone from DayZ Dev team wishes Wobo's mum good luck! Stay strong Wobo!

 

The second sad message arrived to our team from Tim, Max, Nils, Dominik, Vincent and Jonas.

These guys are a group of DayZ players who lost their friend Phil in a tragic accident this year. They are reminiscing about their first meeting:

"We met him at the very beginning of the DayZ standalone near the Rify in that old helicopter crash site (one of these that did not spawn randomly). It was a pretty hilarious situation as me and him did’nt see each other until the moment we both went inside the helicopter. We both panic so hard :D Even thought most of the players shot on sight at this time, we did not and 2 minutes later we both laught so hard together in his teamspeak, it was the beginning of the best friendship in my whole life. There are so much more great memories we shared together because of DayZ. Me and my whole squad really want to thank you for this memories!"

They sent us this message because it was Phil's birthday and they asked us to commemorate him in the game on the spot where they first met.

So we decided to place a memorial at this place in a form of a small cross. This cross will be in game since 0.63 and if you come across it, just remember it belongs to Phil, one of the players.



 

When we are talking about a group of players, Ferosso shared with us this amazing ugly-Christmas-sweater DayZ party photo and it looks so cool, I want to jump into it and join them! And look at the Chernarus map on the wall! Just wow.



 

I want to show you some nice edit by Spuddy0108, who turns a DayZ screenshot into The Long Dark's style. I really like it!



 

One more screenshot for you - Adam sent us a really creative picture of tents with chemlights inside and it looks awesome!



 

And how about an event this week? A lot is happening this Saturday 16th! You can choose from plenty of events:

• Noobs server is organizing The Hostage event where you need to take out the captors and successfully retrieve the hostage. More information here:

 

• DayZ UK Alliance invites you to The Genocide Run IV - a battle royale style event in teams of two. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lixfnqRiPp8

• Or you can join Christmas RP event in the Green Dragon tavern on The DayZ Village

 

Let’s check out some videos now.

• I don't like long videos. But this movie by gekofish is awesome and I can't stop watching! You should check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8LN5dnJRY

• If you like stories, you should watch this video by PolishedGuy, whose channel is full of interesting videos with good editing.

https://youtu.be/_Q8LN5dnJRY

• Another movie by Tickle - Ghost is telling us the story of a retired nurse, Ashley Gradham, discovering the complexities of the zombie apocalypse through a budding friendship with Richard Maxwell, a daring and quiet man with a difficult childhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZQW0qsItoI

• What about a cinematic? This is by Aschmad and he is challenging viewers to dive deep into the video and tell him what the character lost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyZrWXlxW-w

• The last video is just a preview of a movie randmanq is working on. I am looking forward to the full movie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kl2B00qn5c
 

Let's talk about Christmas. You will have your Christmas in Chernarus, we didn't forget, don't worry! There will be Christmas trees, and maybe a little smomething more, but that's still a secret. Watch our Twitter feed for more information!


 

We are almost at the end, but there is one more thing - the riddle! These guys answered correctly last time, good job:

• Skunkey‏
• Uncuepa‏
• JammieD96
• KalleKBerlin
• Waffels
• Alejandro Miranda‏
• Vetovote

And this is the riddle for this Status Report. Between which towns can you find this house? It is not that hard, so I expect a lot of correct answers on our official Twitter account.



 
That is all from me, have a nice holiday and see you in 2018!

Header image by Kwaakt

- Baty / Community Manager

We're entering the last two business weeks of 2017, and before we let the holiday spirit take over our offices on 23rd, it's time for one more update from our teams - today, Eugen is recapping some of the recently made bullet-point style progress across departments, Peter takes a look at ladders, climbing and the melee combat of 0.63, Adam teases the NWAF changes along with tourist trails, and Viktor has two sexy GIFs, one of which teases a feature that will change DayZ combat in a totally unexpected way. After a pause, we also have Baty back, with loads of your amazing community content <3. Let's read, it's good for you!

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

 
Dear players.

First, I would like to thank you for all the critical feedback on the last status report, it was a hard one. Expectation were high, and we chose a road littered with risks going for the new engine, for the larger benefit in the long run. The team knew this wasn't going to be easy, but almost all major uncertainties are resolved and we are looking at brighter future for both you the players, and the team here.  We also understand and agree the call for a more visual representation of this years' progress and there is an end of the year video in the works right now.

Many of you were asking about the console version of DayZ and the team working on it. Our goal has always been to release a PC version of DayZ first before we turn to players on PS4 or Xbox. That hasn't changed. There is only one person working on each of these ports at the moment, keeping things intact so we have an easier time adapting the experience when the team is done with the PC version. We will be happy to share more details once we are in a better state of things with the PC version.

There is more to enjoy visually in the rest of the Status Report, and there is no reason to repeat myself more, so let's take a quick look at some of the work that has been done over the past month / is in progress - and then we are just going to get back to work, and get more shit done :).

• Network optimisations - bit stream implementation, network traffic optimisations for AI and players
• Weapon & inventory bugfixing
• Movement tweaking of character controller for better gameplay experience
• Character's prone state
• New offline database
• Hive refactorization for 0.63
• Login system bugfixing
• Damage system - new texture switching of damaged entities
• Bugfixing and optimizations of central loot economy
• AI - Animals:
  
  • Threat state behaviour and actions
    
  • Animals freeze in random intervals fixed
    
• Various crash fixes
• External launcher - adding local mods
  

• Items for Christmas event configuration and setup for Central Economy for 0.62 version
• Melee combat refactor of targeting and implementation of it's second check at hit event
• Connected item quantities to Central Economy
• Optimalization of UI client/server middle layer
• Notifiers code clean up
• Localization support
• Options screens refactor
• Stamina system refactor
• Firearms unjamming refactor
• Implementing state machines for AKM and SVD
• Implemented new network synchronization for electricity, traps, fireplace, cooking, placing, life span, user actions
• Implemented sounds for bear trap, landmine, defibrillator
• Parts of HUD can be toggled on/off by pressing or holding [~]
• Implemented prototype particle for AKM, UMP and CZ61
• Animated perimeter for a land mine
• Identification of blood type in inspect menu after blood test
  

• AKM, SVD reload animations implemented
• Polishing for prone 360 aimspace poses
• Player turns improvements
• Animations for Hatchback reworked due to vehicle scale changes
• Animals herding behavior: the most of the progress has been done on new herding behavior for domesting animals. Although it doesn't require massive support from animation side we found usefull to change some poses and especially lookat mechanic to bring as natural feeling on close distance as possible. Most of the work has been done in new AI tools on animal configuration side. Anyway we already have functional prototype of a herd that can be shepherd through the map. 
• Animals animations: Sheep animation pack is progressing. Goat animation pack has been finished
  

• NWAF assets
  
  • Radar tower rework
    
  • 2-floor barracks
    
  • Fuel tanks
    
  • Reworked Pile of tyres
    
  • Reworked Blast covers
    
    
• Weapons rework
• Abandoned Chernarus – harvester header
• Reworked male heads
• Decayed textures
• Christmas items
• Animal damage zones
• Bugfixing
  
  • doors
    
  • firegeometry
    
  • geometry
    
  • visual issues
    
  • foliage issues
    

• Chernarus tourist trails
  
  • We have finished 200km network along with tweaks to the satellite and surface mask and final checks and polish
    
  • Tourist trails are now ready for survivors in 0.63, the only thing that is left to solve is the map stand that is located at several key trail crossings, but that on itself does not block / prevent people from using the trails as there are 93 detailed directional signs to help them where they want to go
    
• NWAF overhaul
  
  • Improved satellite and surface mask within the whole NWAF area
    
  • Object layout improvements and fixes
    
  • Coal power plant prototype done (last missing object)
    
• Tentapocalypse
  
  • We have prepared varied interiors for two of the mostly used military tents to make such important object more interesting for players and more suitable for central economy to spawn items
    
  • All instances of military tents on Chernarus were replaced with these new variants
    

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer


 
As the new character also have to traverse vertical differences in structures, we've started with new implementation of ladders. You don't need much to observe that the behaviour of old character on ladders in 0.62 (and older) is quite unpleasant visually and partially lacking also from the functional point of view.

Transition animations for getting on off a ladder will be added for several situations, even from/to water, as well as to sides when there isn’t any free space available behind the ladder. As we unified dimensions of ladders thorough all structures, the positioning of character hands and feet will match that of ladder steps.

It’s still valid that getting on a ladder is done through interact action (same as manipulating with doors) and getting off will be automatic at the end of the ladder. We would also like to add proper continuous ladders going through more floors, on which character can optionally get off the ladder, and where it won’t be necessary to ‘pixel hunt’ for proper interact action to get on the ladder and continue in desired direction. However, this has a lower priority as we need to solve simple ladders first.

As climbing the ladder is exposing you in situations that can be relatively dangerous, we are adding the possibility to quickly scale up the ladder, or to fast slide down the ladder. I would like to also see jumping off the ladder as it could be useful in some critical situations - in trade off for a higher risk of injury after landing. But again, this is lower on priority list for the ladders implementation.

When I mentioned jumping, let me make it clear: we will be adding jumping, alongside with climbing over obstacles later, after ladders are done, as smooth traversing through environment is very crucial for DayZ gameplay.

Ongoing work is being done on a melee combat system to make it skill based with clear rules.

Blocking and evades are implemented and functional, awaiting a polishing run. We are trying different control schemes for melee combat iteratively to achieve intuitive controls. Same goes for timing animations and their cancellation, as we want to have combat flow as seamless and fluid as possible to avoid clunkiness.



Knockdowns to the ground and finishing attacks on laying character are still on the TO DO list.

These are directly related to melee combat in prone, which was just a step away, as we had a request for absolute freedom of aiming firearm in prone in 360 degrees, which is done thru smooth and continuous turn of character from belly to back and vice versa.

After knockdown during melee combat to the ground on back position (or in case of turning character to back from belly) you can use push kick to push opponent back, may it be survivor or infected, to avoid being hit with his finishing attacks which can be potentially devastating. Similarly, I would also like to see push kicks from stand with raised hands as well (applicable for firearms too), which will add really nice flavour and together with attacks, blocking and evades adds depth and open possibilities for tactics in melee combat (and additionally allows us things like kicking doors and others).

Anyway, I would like to thank you for your support during the tough year 2017. DayZ has the best community and it’s amazing to have you around. Thank you all!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer


 
Hi everyone. Today, I'm going to provide you with a short update on what is happening in the animation team. Our priorities are pretty clear - main focus is still on the player character animations. That includes finishing turning animations, improving locomotion and adjusting the player graph.

At the same time, we have been working on some exciting stuff recently. Our player character now has a much wider range of motion while in prone. You can now fluently turn on your back, aim and shoot. This gives better control over the character and I am sure it will lead to many interesting situations in game. We have a basic prototype working and now we are starting to polish the animations, poses and camera behaviour. This will also require small motion capture session where we will record necessary transition animations.





In addition to that, we have also recently re-done enter/exit animations for some vehicles, so that player can enter and exit vehicles much faster. Recently implemented weapons in 0.63 include SVD, AKM and there is an ongoing work on the Mosin.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator


 
It has been quite a long time since my last contribution to Status Report, but do not worry, it is just that we have been working very hard pushing towards our 0.63 goals. But before we talk about that - given the fact that is a last status report of 2017 - let me first dive a bit into the things that happened in 2017.

In 2017, Chernarus has gone through what probably is the biggest change since its inception in Arma 2. We have introduced a complete overhaul of forests aimed at bringing much needed variety to the landscape of Chernarus. This overhaul essentially doubled the object count (1.4 million to 2.8 mil., but with .63 changes, we are nearing 3 mil.), an increase that was only possible with the introduction of the Enfusion renderer (update 0.60).

In addition to this overhaul, update 0.62 also introduced phase 1 of a big western border rework (the last area that remained basically untouched since Arma 2 days). We have also overhauled the entire railway network and made global changes to the satellite texture. Vegetation model swap and the re-generated forests areas introduced quite a lot of issues with object placement (objects misplaced or clipping) and we will work hard to eliminate as much of these issues as possible prior to the stable 0.63 release to make sure the first BETA build is a step towards a more polished experience from your travels on Chernarus.

Now you may ask, what else can you expect from the map in 0.63?

• Completely re-done North West Airfield (NWAF) along with surrounding landscape
• 200 kilometres of tourist trails
• New locations on the western border of Chernarus
• New points of interest across the map
• New models for bushes and rocks
• New textures for roads and road damage decals

We will cover these points in better detail in future Status Reports. For now, we would like to thank you for joining us on our journey towards one of the most immersive game environments ever created. Very excited to show you what we have in store for 0.63 and beyond!

Merry xmas and happy new year!

- Adam Franců / Senior map designer


 
It's nice to be back with another Status Report - it's been 4 weeks already and I have a lot of community content that I need to show you. So sit down comfortably, this will be long.

Life doesn’t always bring only good things, and that is what I want to talk about today.

The first sad thing that happened is Wobo's leave. One of our big and longtime supporters is leaving the content creators’ scene, because he needs to take care of his mother who has cancer. He did his last stream to raise funds to help his mother and the DayZ community surprised him a lot. He had 4000+ people on the stream and raised over 35 000 dollars to help him with taking care of his mother. You can see here how amazing the DayZ community is!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/203744097

Wobo's mum underwent a 9-hour surgery and she will stay in the hospital for the next two weeks.

Everyone from DayZ Dev team wishes Wobo's mum good luck! Stay strong Wobo!

 

The second sad message arrived to our team from Tim, Max, Nils, Dominik, Vincent and Jonas.

These guys are a group of DayZ players who lost their friend Phil in a tragic accident this year. They are reminiscing about their first meeting:

"We met him at the very beginning of the DayZ standalone near the Rify in that old helicopter crash site (one of these that did not spawn randomly). It was a pretty hilarious situation as me and him did’nt see each other until the moment we both went inside the helicopter. We both panic so hard :D Even thought most of the players shot on sight at this time, we did not and 2 minutes later we both laught so hard together in his teamspeak, it was the beginning of the best friendship in my whole life. There are so much more great memories we shared together because of DayZ. Me and my whole squad really want to thank you for this memories!"

They sent us this message because it was Phil's birthday and they asked us to commemorate him in the game on the spot where they first met.

So we decided to place a memorial at this place in a form of a small cross. This cross will be in game since 0.63 and if you come across it, just remember it belongs to Phil, one of the players.



 

When we are talking about a group of players, Ferosso shared with us this amazing ugly-Christmas-sweater DayZ party photo and it looks so cool, I want to jump into it and join them! And look at the Chernarus map on the wall! Just wow.



 

I want to show you some nice edit by Spuddy0108, who turns a DayZ screenshot into The Long Dark's style. I really like it!



 

One more screenshot for you - Adam sent us a really creative picture of tents with chemlights inside and it looks awesome!



 

And how about an event this week? A lot is happening this Saturday 16th! You can choose from plenty of events:

• Noobs server is organizing The Hostage event where you need to take out the captors and successfully retrieve the hostage. More information here:

 

• DayZ UK Alliance invites you to The Genocide Run IV - a battle royale style event in teams of two. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lixfnqRiPp8

• Or you can join Christmas RP event in the Green Dragon tavern on The DayZ Village

 

Let’s check out some videos now.

• I don't like long videos. But this movie by gekofish is awesome and I can't stop watching! You should check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8LN5dnJRY

• If you like stories, you should watch this video by PolishedGuy, whose channel is full of interesting videos with good editing.

https://youtu.be/_Q8LN5dnJRY

• Another movie by Tickle - Ghost is telling us the story of a retired nurse, Ashley Gradham, discovering the complexities of the zombie apocalypse through a budding friendship with Richard Maxwell, a daring and quiet man with a difficult childhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZQW0qsItoI

• What about a cinematic? This is by Aschmad and he is challenging viewers to dive deep into the video and tell him what the character lost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyZrWXlxW-w

• The last video is just a preview of a movie randmanq is working on. I am looking forward to the full movie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kl2B00qn5c
 

Let's talk about Christmas. You will have your Christmas in Chernarus, we didn't forget, don't worry! There will be Christmas trees, and maybe a little smomething more, but that's still a secret. Watch our Twitter feed for more information!


 

We are almost at the end, but there is one more thing - the riddle! These guys answered correctly last time, good job:

• Skunkey‏
• Uncuepa‏
• JammieD96
• KalleKBerlin
• Waffels
• Alejandro Miranda‏
• Vetovote

And this is the riddle for this Status Report. Between which towns can you find this house? It is not that hard, so I expect a lot of correct answers on our official Twitter account.



 
That is all from me, have a nice holiday and see you in 2018!

Header image by Kwaakt

- Baty / Community Manager