Posted 08 July 2015 - 06:18 PM
Greetings Survivors,
Work continues on Experimental Branch where the team is working on reaching a suitable build candidate for the next Stable update. In this week's Status Report we'll see Lead Producer Brian Hicks commenting on upcoming changes to stable as well as a bit on the future plans for 0.59 on Experimental Branch. We'll also see Lead Designer Peter Nespesny commenting on both the current and upcoming state of the scheduler in charge of character updates.
Contents This Week
- Development Board Spotlight
- Dev Update/Hicks
- Dev Update/Peter
- RTX 2015
- Community Spotlight: AUS vs UK - Round 1
Development Board Spotlight
Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings Survivors,
This week I'd like to recap some of the upcoming changes to stable (when 0.58 goes live) for those that are not up to date with Experimental Branch. Once 0.58 goes live, we can start discussing 0.59 plans and intent.
Guardhouse Buildings:
As work is underway on regional control over the central loot economy, in the interim the guardhouse structures spread across the entirety of the map will not be spawning any loot. This is done to preserve the restriction of high end military loot to the military bases and camps inland in Chernarus. The structures themselves remain enter-able, but until regional control is implemented on stable branch - they will remain without spawning loot.
Land_Mil_House
The structure some folks have referred to as the "Camo Building" or the "Jail House" has been problematic for some time. We've issued hotfixes, and addressed several bugs related to it - but the core issue that needs to be addressed is on the player controller. Rather than continue to issue small hotfixes (otherwise known as bandages on a broken leg) the issue needs to be resolved at the cause. To that end, the loot that would normally be spawning within these structures will be redistributed to other military buildings (tents, camps, barracks, etc)
"Ghost Sounds"
Those who have played DayZ throughout its Early Access development are probably no stranger to the notorious "ghost sounds" bug. Splitting ammo, bandaging, opening soda cans, etc being partially played, and well outside of the range of the actual sound effect. Fortunately, during 0.58 development we were able to get some of the gameplay programmers time to look into this issue, and we are now confident that on 0.58 the issue has been finally slain. So be very aware after the next stable update, if you *hear* a sound effect playing - it IS near you. Be careful out there!
Wrecks (Non interactive)
With work on the central loot economy continuing, and the functionality of how it operates being iterated upon - Non interactive wrecks (tanks, destroyed UAZ's, etc) have been removed from the loot spawning tables, and the environment team will begin using them in their "devastation passes" across Chernarus. As with other structures, items that would normally spawn there will be redistributed across Chernarus. Note: This does NOT include interactive wrecks, such as vehicles you can open the trunks/doors/etc on.
Animation Glitching
The gameplay programming team is currently investigating the cause and symptom behind the notorious animation glitching bug. (Weapon swapping constantly) As well as the issues with dropping your weapon when vaulting. The weapon vaulting fix should be coming to experimental soon, and it is the aim of the team internally to also include a fix toward the weapon swapping animation bug.
Photo Credit: DayZTV.com
Loot Respawning / Persistence Enabling
Persistence itself has been functioning for some time, the cause behind it being manually disabled on 0.57 stable servers is tied to an issue with loot respawning. We're aiming to have this issue resolved before we push 0.58 to stable branch, once we've tested this on experimental and are confident in the fix - players will be able to resume making camps, storing gear, and so on.
Similar issues with dynamic event cleanup and respawn were the cause of static dynamic events - and these issues are currently being investigated, and are marked critical for the 0.58 launch.
In addition to these issues, bugs related to severe player position desyncronization are currently being investigated, and flagged as a must fix for 0.59.
I hope this brief list of information pertaining to 0.58 helps update those who may have not kept a close eye on the experimental branch updates.
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer
Dev Update/Peter
With the 0.57 stable version of DayZ many of you experienced weird behaviour on the character side such as freezing core updates for hunger, thirst, bleeding and others which in many cases rendered character temporarily immortal or in worse case killed him instantly after login back to server. Unsurprisingly the root of all these issues was in the scheduler which is handling character updates recently.
During our in house testing we didn't catch some circumstances leading to not clearing character properly from scheduler's array of active characters. This issue was especially triggered by respawning and in some cases by disconnecting from the server.
After some time the scheduler array become partially populated by ghosts and newly connected or respawned players were forced to live outside of it. As scheduler wasn't aware of their existence it didn't processed core updates for them. Fortunately now it's fixed, tested and ready to go so I hope you'll don't experience such issues soon.
With proper updates... see you in Chernarus folks!
- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer
During our in house testing we didn't catch some circumstances leading to not clearing character properly from scheduler's array of active characters. This issue was especially triggered by respawning and in some cases by disconnecting from the server.
After some time the scheduler array become partially populated by ghosts and newly connected or respawned players were forced to live outside of it. As scheduler wasn't aware of their existence it didn't processed core updates for them. Fortunately now it's fixed, tested and ready to go so I hope you'll don't experience such issues soon.
With proper updates... see you in Chernarus folks!
- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer
Lead Producer Brian Hicks will be speaking at RTX 2015 - discussing the plans for apocalyptic Chernarus moving into the end of the year. From expanded base building options, new vehicles, modding support, character soft skills, and upcoming engine changes Brian will discuss and demo some of the upcoming changes to the post apocalyptic survival simulator DayZ. Q&A to follow!
Community Video: "AUS vs UK - Round 1"
This week we have a bit of a team based rumble. Via the Youtube channel TeamLiveAction, I was served a short video depicting the showdown between the "AUS" and "UK" teams. Even though the video only shows a fraction of the event, seeing two large teams like that arranging to have a go at each others was awesome!
Yep, it does look like the guys are going at it again for a second round on July 25th 2015 at 10:00 (UTC + 1). I'm definitely looking forward to the event, and if you have the time as well, I'm sure you would enjoy swinging by to see the two teams duking it out in Chernarus.
