Over the last week the team has been working on finishing the final tasks for 0.49. Included in this work was an extensive code merge from the team in Bratislava, focused on navigation mesh, animal AI, horticulture, and animation system changes. Due to this merge, we’ve decided to push the 0.49 update out by one week (to allow for a strong QA pass before the update)

0.49 represents a large amount of work that will not be immediately visible on the user side, but allows us to start tracking statistics on player data and item spawns, as well as the mentioned work on animal AI, horticulture, melee system redesigns, and the central loot economy.



Experimental branch will be updated this week as we look to expand testing on 0.49 before the stable branch update. Additionally, BattlEye will begin broadcasting a message every hour warning users of the upcoming stable hive reset that comes with the 0.49 update.

As 0.49 will bring persistent storage to all stable branch servers it is important that those who rent DayZ server instances make sure to check out the backup policies of their respective game server providers to ensure an easy recovery in the event of any unforseen issues with your instance.



Starting in September, several new initiatives to increase transparency and accessibility into the development process will be rolled out, including the dev team twitch stream schedule located on devhub.dayz.com. (twitch.tv/dayz)

Peter / Lead Designer

“As I mentioned last week, the initial implementation of horticulture is prepared but using placeholder assets and it will need some attention from the programming team. I personally feel this system can have a lasting change on how many people will approach Chernarus. Imagine being independent of inhabited places with your own grown crops, meat and clothing from hunted animals.

Expanding on that vision there was a lot of talk recently about craftable leather clothing across the dev team and it seems it will became large part of the fashion in DayZ. Possibilities will be broad from crafting plenty of unique items from different hides or to produce tanned leather for more generic looking clothes with optional dyeing them to different colors.

What recently got so much love and I’m very happy with the outcome of that effort is the melee system which was refactored from the base by our programmers. You will be pleased especially with cursor and swing hit detection which are so robust that there’s no way to miss your target unless you are too far away or have something with eyes. We will do our best to plug in the swing detection back as soon as possible so you can finally enjoy melee as it should be. We hope to have this included in the 0.49 update next week.

Also worth mentioning is the advanced weather impact on player character which is very close to be released and has made some great progress on utilizing possibilities of our environment.

So don’t forget to keep yourself warm and dry… see you in Chernarus folks!”

Mirek / Lead Gameplay Programmer

“Our core focus this week has been on server optimizations and improving melee combat hit detection. Both of these issues are currently in internal testing and if everything checks out, we will deploy it on experimental servers this week. We’re also continuing on our new doors system (interacting with doors in a way that makes sense, rather than proximity to the door) and new game controls, but it will take some time to complete both of these changes. I can safely say however that for example interaction with doors is definitely improved. It is now impossible to open doors from higher/lower floors, you now interact with doors by looking directly at them.

A major update came in from the Bratislava team (thanks to Marek Zeman) for pathfinding, so a good amount of issues with zombies clipping through doors have been addressed.”

Chris / Lead Artist

“The Lists of Lists:

Last week, Peter and I met many times to discuss some long-term plans related to many aspects of the game and what art assets would be needed.

I’m getting pretty excited now since we’ve planned out concepts for new zombies, settled on DayZ 1.0’s weapon list (melee and firearms), created a preliminary list of assets needed as vehicle attachments and parts, and began to discuss with Chernarus legend, Ivan Buchta, how we might improve the visuals on the map.

We also had the pleasure of spending a couple of days at the studio’s office in Brno where we met with members of our team in Bratislava to solidify plans for craftable clothing and defined the set input resources, crafting object, and crafting outputs which the art team will be required to make.

As well, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Take on Mars project lead, Martin Melicharek, who gave me a tour of the Enforce engine’s graphics, particle FX, map tools, and art pipelines so that I can understand a bit better what to expect when we switch to the new renderer as well as give us the opportunity to request some improvements or additional features for Enfusion. Its pretty fantastic for this old-school ArmA modder to see.

Character Art

The MASKA-1Sch helmet, balaclava, and firefighter uniform are now done and have been passed to the design team for configing into the game. I would expect they will end up in experimental next week. Work continues on a firefighter helmet and a SPOSN Tortilla-inspired backpack to complete the Eastern-block SPECOPS uniform. It looks great with the SMERSH vest/backpack combo.

Environment

Work continues on the new civilian airport hangar and building models and we have begun to plan out with our map designers, which other types of new buildings and objects we should make a priority.

Weapons

The Rossi R92 is being animated and should be out soon and I received word that the MP133 is also ready to be passed down the assembly line of anims, sounds, and cfg. I realize that the release of new guns is perceived to be quite slow but this is because we generally assign them lower priority compared to other, more important tasks being performed by the multi-disciplinary team required to finalize one.

We’ve also created a few more melee weapons as well as the first art assets related to non-lethal weaponry given to the designers to play with. ”

Standup notes for the week of 25 August 2014



Programming

Reintroduce network optimizations

New melee combat mechanics and fixes

Door reimplementation

New game controls

Central economy

64bit server optimizations

Navmesh update

Code cleaning and optimizations

New basic zombie behavior

Better sound over network

Design

Advanced weather impact on player character

Plugging in new implementation of melee system

Config and scripts for new items/gear

Config and scripts for new animals

Craftable clothing design

Central economy setup

General bug fix

Animation

Throwing animations

Zombie run variations

Player restrained animation extension

Zombie AI/combat/animation design

Digging animations

Art

Balaclava mask

MASKA Helmet

Firefighter Uniform

MP133

Rossi R92

Crafted Clothing art design proposals

Vehicle parts/attachments models

Non-lethal weapons

New Zombie concepts

Firefighter Helmet

SPOSN Backpack