This month was mostly dedicated to play-testing, bug-fixing and balancing. One of the most important bug fixes was an oversight I had in the CE configuration, which was (to be precise) blocking the infected from re-spawning. I knew something was not right with the infected, but could not quite point a finger on it until I have discovered this simple oversight. This meant that Namalsk finally started truly revealing how the actual game-play loop could look like.

Infected are big part of Namalsk and they generally do tend to slow down the overall game-play a lot (assuming you want to live of course). And when I talk about overall speed of the game-play, I have to mention the cold survival (like almost every status update), the always present silent killer on Namalsk. Lot of experiments were conducted this month to the “enviro” tick (part of code ticking on each player and calculating all the temperature related things) to verify what certainly does not work and what may work. Situation is complicated, because many of the base systems in the game are still pending re-balance and other changes/additions. So in order to make a progress on the cold survival on Namalsk, I had to make number of temporal changes/additions to selected vanilla systems. To give few examples:

Your body will keep warmth for a certain period and then slowly dissipates after leaving a source of heat (fireplace) or eating warm food (temporal implementation as there is no such feature in vanilla DayZ yet).

Heat from items is not accounted into heat-comfort (to counter an issue with items not loosing attributes such as temperature over time).

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Obviously, I still do need to keep in mind that certain things will be changed or implemented properly in the future. Overall, there are lot of strings from which you can pull and every-time you change / tweak something, you got to jump into the game and test it how it feels. Like I mentioned in earlier status updates, this is one of the biggest parts of Namalsk and unfortunately also probably the most challenging and time-consuming to deal with. But the good thing is that now, I am finally starting to see bits and pieces of how the game-play actually may look like and with the already mentioned temporal changes, I can somewhat react and make adjustments to the variables affecting the cold survival.

Lot of changes done to the CE setup – mostly in terms of balancing min and nominal values, but also by making a space for some cool things coming your way in 1.03. In addition to that, I have also looked at the recently finished event system and balanced out some lengths of events (more about event system in March status update). As requested by you guys, I have also added an option (in the init.c of a mission) to tweak the duration between the events and a on/off switch (in case someone would find it un-fitting to their server).