[Vlad]

Don’t fret my fiends…I mean friends. DayZ is not dying or some similar term, in fact there is an update to be released very shortly within this month.

Here is the info!
Afternoon Survivors,

Brian, Mirek, and Viktor will be giving us a bit of info this week in regards to subjects such as current blocker issues, work on spawn systems and network code, and the new animation system.

Contents This Week
Dev Update/Hicks
Dev Update/Mirek
Dev Update/Viktor
Community Spotlight: Tom’s Story

Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings Survivors,

Hey guys, its that time again – Status Report day. I know you all wanted to hear some crazy hype tastic reveal like – FREE OCULUS RIFT HEADSETS UNDER EACH OF YOUR COMPUTER DESKS OMG YAY (but more specific to our upcoming .60 experimental push) but I’m afraid I don’t have that for you today, and we don’t do hype like that anyways. While we’ve made strides in client side performance functionality, we’re still chipping away at blocking issues in the following areas:

Inventory UI
With the move to Direct X 11, we’ll no longer be able to support the legacy user interface. Thus, functional parity with the legacy UI -has- to be achieved on the new UI. The design team are currently working on resolving the last few bugs blocking us from having that parity.
Reload mechanics
The move in .60 to involving manual bolt cycling, as well as misfire and jamming management via the charging handle on weapons such as the M4 has an impact on every firearm in the game. We’re currently working to resolve some functional hiccups in the switching between magazines, and the need to chamber twice before firing from a new magazine.
Character Loading/Saving
A very large volume of unneeded traffic was discovered when investigating issues with character loading – a rewrite of the methods used to save and load from the central hive. Once we restore proper functionality, this area will no longer be a blocker.

Tasks Completed:
– .60 Build Optimization Pass (Performance in cities increased by 50% from initial build – optimization is ONGOING however)
– Cleared Rendering Test Pass list of visual/rendering based bugs
– Renderer settings UI

Current Focus:
– MSAA Hardware Multisampling Support
– Alpha to Coverage GPU Feature (Which will increase quality of vegetation rendering)
– Finalization of In-Game UI Features

We’ve heard a lot of feedback wanting some changes to how we’re communicating development information over the last year – and we started steps a few months back towards adjusting to try and meet some of these requests. We’ve expanded the community team and put processes in to ensure that regardless of development tasks, the Status Reports will come out on schedule (Tuesdays, BiWeekly). In addition, we’ve begun using our YouTube channel more – to show upcoming changes to DayZ as they are developed. (Status Reports talk about development progress, and what changes are planned in the future – where as the YouTube channel should show what is coming in the next build – when it is functional enough to demonstrate)

We’ll also be trying a team Q&A type video where folks can ask questions about what its like to work on DayZ, work at Bohemia, and such – our first video on this from our Quality Assurance team should be coming shortly. Our Community Manager Smo55 is ramping up his presence on our subreddit and official forums, our new Brand Manager DHawkz is working with Bohemia Interactive publishing to expand the options for DayZ merchandise on the BI Store, and a redesign of DayZ.com, as well as working with our hardware partners to create opportunities for raising awareness of DayZ as it moves towards our Beta, and Release goals.

I’ll be discussing some of the systems and pending changes tied to the new animation system and player controller over on the official forums later this week, and next up for the YouTube channel we’re working on our next Dev Log video on .60 covering performance comparisons between Direct X 9, and Direct X 11 rendering.
Once .60 hits experimental branch, we’ll start putting together our first “Whats new with .60” video – where DHawkz, Smo55, and I go over the changes in .60 and what to expect gameplay wise – for our YouTube channel.

Lastly – as .60’s time on experimental starts to draw to a close – we’ll be bringing back the official DayZ survival gaming e-sport, The Survivor GameZ. The Survivor GameZ VII Qualifiers will be a fantastic way for us to stress test .60 before it hits stable, and to see how the new inventory, and reloading/chambering mechanics work in a high stress situation. Keep an eye on the official Survivor GameZ and DayZ twitter accounts for more info on this – twitter.com/survivor_gamez and twitter.com/dayzdevteam

– Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

This is very exciting and I can’t wait to see it all unfold! Leave your thoughts in the comments.