Central Economy. One of the terms most people are still a bit confused by. The Central Economy is DayZ’s backend control over the quantity, type, location, and region of the item or “loot” spawning system. Work continued on this throughout the entirety of Q1, and the first implementation was seen later in the Quarter on Experimental branch – pushing towards the 0.55 release at the end of the quarter. Moving into Q2 – this system is also tied into server side persistence, item cleanup, and proper item respawning and will be iterated upon frequently.

As we push this system from experimental branch and on to stable, it will allow us fine control over the in game economy, and thus how the flow from the coast to the north progresses. As well as allow us to push players more towards alternative food gathering resources such as horticulture, cooking, and hunting.

New Renderer

One of the longest duration core engine tasks for Enfusion, the base engine technology being developed in tandem with DayZ – is the seperation of the existing legacy renderer from the engine side simulation, and the creation of a brand new rendering module. Critical for the flexibility and life of the Enfusion engine – this task is arguably one of the most paramount technology upgrades for DayZ moving forward, and was much more of a task than we initially expected (having been pushed beyond its intended experimental branch date several times). As Q1 draws to a close we are within weeks of the completion of the module itself, and the analysis of time required to implement the currently used DirectX 9 tech was undertaken.

Internal review has shown that the additional time spent to hook DirectX 9 into the new rendering module is near identical to the time that would be required to add in DirectX 11 support. As the original intent to support DirectX 9 in tandem with DirectX 12 gave way to increased DirectX 12 support within the industry,  the decision was made to ditch DirectX 9 support for the new rendering module and move directly into supporting DirectX 11. As supporting three seperate platforms (DirectX 9, DirectX 11, and DirectX 12) is not feesible, DirectX 11 was the clear winner for the “mainstream” platform target.