Since there's been some discussion regarding changes in the character zoom mechanic I decided to jump in and explain what are we trying to achieve. 

We should probably start by asking the question "Why have a characters-eye zoom in the first place?". It's the old problem with emulating a 3D world on insufficient hardware. The human field of vision (fov) is around 190° and the area where the vision cones of both eyes overlap is around 100°.  Unfortunately, most of todays monitors viewed from a regular distance usually tend to cover only 45°of human fov in real life. This means that if you want for target on screen to appear in real-life size you are only able to display around ~1/2 of what you would see in reality, stereoscopically. 

And so as a designer you have to choose - Should I display objects in the distance properly but sacrifice the overall vision or set the fov to 100° but deform the whole picture? The trick of Arma is actually not to choose and instead introduce an "eye zoom" instead. This way you can keep the surrounding awareness by setting the default fov to 100°, but when necessary to perceive a depth of field properly occurs (ie. you are shooting), you can "zoom in" to 45°.


0.57 Unzoomed Eye Vision


0.57 Eye Zoom
 

But is it ok to force fix a fov on players? We thought not. Not only because 100° fov does not feel right to everyone, but some players can't even physically play with it. (Motion sickness, performance of PC, different monitor setup...). So the FOV slider was introduced and with it multiple problems we are ironing out now.
The most important step was to even out players by moving fixed fov to ironsights. This way you can most of the time play with whatever fov you like, but when the fov becomes a matter of life or death (shoot outs) it is set same for everyone to keep the game fair. 

We know that zoomed fov or ironsights must be 45° because it emulates the eye and we stated earlier that 45° is realistic. But what should the unzoomed fov be? It can't be higher than a number the player can set through FOV slider. (This way would going into iron sights actually shows the unzoomed picture which is definitely not something you would desire). So the fov of ironsights should be also the the smallest fov we allow players to set by the fov slider. 

We decided to set range of fov slider from 60° to 90°.


0.58 Eye Zoom

It's important to keep in mind, that double pressing + or - extends it to 45° or 105°, so the range is not so small as it might appears. It also doesn't matter what is your current fov - double pressing + key will always set it to 45°. This means you can quickly switch between observing surroundings and focusing on objects "modes", while being able to play with your prefered fov for most of the time. I belive this descision helps equalize players and reduce fov slider abuse. 

Greetings Survivors,

While development keeps moving along as usual, a lot of you have patiently been waiting for info on the new renderer, and for this week's Status Report Lead Producer Brian Hicks touches upon that very subject. Also, Senior Designer Jan Tomasik gives us some input on the ingame FOV; the theory and thought process behind the design solutions as well as decisions for the current iteration of FOV.

For this week we also present you with a link to the DayZ Trello board where Lead Artist Chris Torchia provides us with a small peek at environment updates, and lastly, we have a small feature on one of DayZ's content creators - Super Dan.

Contents This Week

• Development Board Spotlight
• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Jan
• Community Spotlight: Super Dan

Development Board Spotlight

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

This week we'll touch on two topics. We'll start off discussing the work ongoing with the new renderer for Enfusion, and then wrap up discussing the current behaviour and mechanics behind sprinting, holding breath, and so on.

Players who have been actively following the development of DayZ are aware of the large task the engine team undertook to separate the legacy RV renderer from the simulation, and replace it with a more modular and updated version. The task itself of creating a new renderer is not huge, the length and weight of the task is related primarily to:

- Separating the legacy renderer from the simulation
    - Ensuring the separation is complete, as the RV engine and its functions tied to it are extensive

Once the above was complete, the new renderer itself was broken into three primary modules. (Bear with us, this can be moderately technical)

* Pipeline module (1)
    * the pipeline of objects rendering is new (defines the "way" how the objects are moving from entity in world to set of rendering commands)
    * is responsible to prepare meshes to be rendered
    * is multi-threaded
    * filling of pipeline will be also multi-threaded, in phase of testing and debugging

* Material system module (2)
    * objects are rendered using new material system, old one is still present to have the comparison
    * each mesh has assigned a material (not rvmat) with material class which is responsible for it's rendering
    * setting of material is editable in workbench editor and you see real-time the changes in render
    * each material class was written from scratch, visualisation currently as much similar as possible to old render but now we can add simply new features (like PBR)
    * huge simplification for filling GPU command buffers, can be easily sorted to minimize changes in command buffers
    * all renderable game objects have now representation in material class
  
* High level rendering API module (3)
    * GPU API is DX11 for now (With DX 12 supporting coming later)
    * implementation of GPU API now hidden behind rendering API, no one is allowed to use direct GPU API commands
        * it allows us to add new GPU API like DX12, XBOX one, PS4...much easier
    * Initial implementation done, currently in testing and bug fixing phase (optimization still in progress but looks promising)

 
  
In addition:    

* GUI manager  
    * GUI pipeline and rendering system is completely new    and different from the one in original RV engine
    * GUI layouts will be defined in workbench using graphic editor not by config system (huge improvement for designers)
    * rendering works, currently debugging and working on the editor
    * In a future experimental build it'll be possible to try it using command line switch (startup switch)
  
* other notes  
    * postprocesses were completely rewritten into new system of effects
    * more worlds can be renderered in one frame, it allows to create independent scenes
        * needed for workbench
        * usable also in game to create e.g. mirrors, cameras...

As work on the new renderer continues and we look at our plans for the eventual push to experimental we have several goals:

- Testing partnerships with Intel, AMD, and nVidia to ensure compatability with market leader and average hardware configurations
- Marked performance for gameplay in large cities (Elektro, Cherno, Novod, Severograd, Berezino, etc)
      
Next up - There has been a good deal of discussion, and questions on exactly how hold breath, lung capacity, and dispersion when characters are tired. Below we have a few example videos with debug data on screen so you can see the specific values.

In the first video you see the user start out stationary - not tired, and begin to hold his breath. With the inaccuracy value falling sharply upon holding his breath, as the character continues to hold his breath and his lung capacity drains - the inaccuracy slowly starts climbing.

With the second video, we have a character who starts off tired (has been sprinting for an extended duration - 90 to 120 seconds of solid sprinting) who takes a knee (supported firing position) as his tired value decreases, his lung capacity increases - and he begins to hold his breath.
Mind you, this is only how it performs now (on 0.57 stable) and this is prior to the implementation of weight and character stamina. That said, we would love to hear your thoughts on the current behavior of the mechanic. Please make sure to head over to the Official DayZ forums and discuss this in the latest Status Report discussion thread! 

Can I run DayZ standalone on this old PC?

Can I run DayZ standalone on this old PC?

Can I run DayZ standalone? What are the technical specifications for DayZ standalone?
Can an old computer run DayZ standalone? Can a laptop run DayZ standalone?

I've had quite a lot of people ask me what computer is needed to run DayZ standalone.
I made a video showing it running on quite an average PC and many people have commented
asking if it will run on their computer. So I'm making this article to help people answer this
question for themselves.

Before I start, I have to emphasise that DayZ does not run like other games. Most games these
days heavily rely on the graphics card to do most of the work, but DayZ mostly uses the processor
and gets very little benefit from the graphics card. It's been like this with all the ArmA games and
DayZ standalone uses the game engine from Take on Helicopters - the Real Virtuality 3 engine - which
is an updated version of the engine used in ArmA 2 and Operation Arrowhead. It's because of this that
DayZ very much relies on the processor to do all the work. So if your processor isn't up to the job,
you won't be able to run DayZ standalone well.

What processor do you need to run DayZ?

Well, you need one with at least two cores. The more cores the better. Bohemia specify an Intel
 Dual-Core 2.4 GHz or AMD Dual-Core Athlon 2.5 GHz. Bear in mind that these are minimum
specs and will run the game at the lowest graphics settings. If you've got two cores, you need
 2.4GHz of clock speed, if you've got four cores or more, then clock speed doesn't really matter.

Also remember that laptop CPUs tend to be a bit weaker than their desktop counterparts.
 Due to lack of space, laptops don't have big heatsinks and fans for their processors,
 so they need one that runs cooler and uses less power. So a dual core laptop CPU
 running at 2.4 GHz is going to be a little weaker than a desktop dual core CPU at the
 same clock speed.

In the video, I'm using an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 running at 3 GHz and it runs the game
acceptably. You can use this tool from CPU Boss to compare any processor with that one.
Halfway down the right side of the page, you can enter your CPU model and it'll show you
a comparison. The main stat to look at is the one marked Performance
(Benchmark performance using all cores) as that shows you the overall performance level
of the CPU. If you've got better performance than the E8400, your processor is up to the task
of running DayZ.

http://cpuboss.com/cpu/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400

What processor do I have?

Surprisingly, a lot of people don't seem to know what CPU is in their PC. It's quite easy
to find out by using the System information display in the Control Panel. 

If you don't know how to find and bring up this window, here's how to do it in Windows 7.

http://pc.net/helpcenter/answers/view-system-properties-windows-7

How much RAM do I need?

Bohemia say you need 2 GB as a minimum, but I really would recommend 4 GB. 2 GB will run it,
 but it leaves almost no slack. You need to close absolutely everything that is not essential to
 keeping your PC running and I would recommend a fresh boot beforehand just to maximise the
 amount of available memory. If Windows runs out of RAM, it will start using virtual memory - to
 make space in the RAM, Windows will copy some of its contents to the hard disk and copy it back
 again when it needs it. This can lead to serious thrashing of the hard disk and slow down the game.
 RAM is about a thousand times faster than a hard disk, so you really want to avoid any virtual
 memory activity when playing DayZ.

4 GB is a lot more suitable for running DayZ. Although the game will only use about 1.5 GB of RAM,
 Windows always needs some memory for background tasks and keeping the PC running.
 4 GB is enough for all that with a bit left over.

Also, some built-in graphics don't have their own memory and use system RAM further cutting
 into the memory you need to run the game.

What graphics card do I need?

Oddly, it doesn't matter very much. I've tried a variety of graphics cards with DayZ and it barely
 uses any of them. DayZ does need a certain level of card because it uses features that aren't
 present on every card. Bohemia say you need an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT or
 AMD Radeon HD 3830 or Intel HD Graphics 4000 with 512 MB VRAM. I have actually
 managed to get the game running on Intel HD graphics 3000, so Bohemia are being a little
 pessimistic.

It's very difficult to understand which graphics cards are more powerful than others, so I would
 suggest that you consult this list of relative performances:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

It doesn't list every graphics card and the results are approximate, but you'll be able to see
 roughly where your card stacks up. If your card falls below the minimum, realise that you
 probably will not be able to run DayZ. It barely uses the card, but it relies on certain features
 to be able to run. For instance, if you try to run it on Intel HD Graphics or Intel HD Graphics 2000,
 you'll get an error about the shader mode not being supported and the game will refuse to run.
 You can't negotiate your way past this - if it doesn't support the shader mode, it doesn't support
 the shader mode and the game cannot run at all.

Almost every game relies on the graphics card to do a lot of the work, but the DayZ standalone
 does not. It will barely use any of your graphics card's power as thigns stand at the moment.

What graphics card do I have?

Again, it's surprising how many people don't know what graphics card is in their PC. You can find
 out what it is by using the guide in this article:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406120,00.asp

What graphics settings should I use?

This is a subjective thing. Setting the right level of graphics is a trade-off between framerate and
 prettiness. The game will run at a higher framerate in open areas than it will in the middle of a big
 town like Cherno or Electro. Experiment with all the graphics settings in order to get the best
 level of performance for yourself. Here's a list of all the settings:

This is the main video settings window. Select Custom for overall quality and you'll be able to
 change all the settings individually.

The Rendering Resolution should always be set to 100%. DayZ allows you to change the
 resolution that 3D objects are rendered at. What this means is that it keeps the same screen
 resolution and renders objects at a lower resolution and scales them up. Depending on your
 graphics card, this can cause extra work for your computer and may make things even slower
 than if you use 100%. So keep this at 100% unless you have tried everything else - it will make
 your game look ugly and it probably won't help.

Tearing - click to view full size

VSync is much misunderstood. What it does is synchronises the game's framerate to that of your
 monitor. A lot of people like to boast that their computer can run a game at 200fps or something
 like that. It's pretty pointless as almost all monitors can only display 60fps. So vsync just locks the
 framerate to match your monitor. If you let a game run higher or lower than the monitor's
 framerate, then you can get 'tearing' - this is where the graphics card is only halfway through
 drawing a frame before it's time to draw the next one. See the image above for an example.

So vsync is a good thing? Mostly, yes. But vsync needs your computer to do a little extra work to
 check when the time is right to draw the next frame, so vsync will slow down your computer
 a little. And if you're getting less than 60fps, it not only won't help, but it can drop your framerate
 a little lower. So turn it off unless you're running way above 60fps.

The Quality settings are mostly obvious. The settings for Objects, Terrain and Shadows do
 just what you'd think and control the level of detail used in the polygon meshes for those things;
 the lower they are, the faster the game runs. The setting for Clouds is worth looking at as they
 do seem to have a disproportionate effect on framerate. In the tests I've run, it seems that
 clouds affect lighting, so turning them off can lead to surprising jumps in framerate.

The Textures settings affect how things look in the game. Video Memory should be set to Auto
 by default and you should keep it at that. It's possible that DayZ will not correctly measure your
 graphics card memory, but I haven't seen it get it wrong yet. So don't touch this.

Texture Detail and Texture Filtering are settings that can have a profound effect on how the
 game runs. Some graphics cards have the ability to handle texture filtering themselves and some
 don't. Those that don't are passing that work to the processor and, with DayZ already getting
 the processor to do just about everything, this can really slow down your game. Set both of these
 as low as you can put up with and revise them upwards until it starts to affect your framerate.

The Rendering settings affect how the game looks and how it runs. A lot of them are unnecessary.
 I recommend turning offpostprocessing and rotation blur (motion blur) - they may look pretty,
 but they really disrupt your ability to see. A lot of the time, you're going to be identifying potential
 enemies from a couple of pixels, so anything that blurs these can lead to you missing a guy
 who's going to shoot you in the face. With HDR, antialiasing, etc it's mostly personal choice,
 but they all have an impact on framerate, so try turning them on and off and see what you're
 happy with.

How do I improve framerate?

The short answer is that you can't. Changing the settings will help but, if you're already running
 at the lowest settings, there's nothing you can do to improve things. Yeah, there are loads of videos
on YouTube that claim to be able to provide miraculous boosts to performance if you just change
 a few settings in a confirguration file, but they're all bullshit. By mucking around with the config
 files (changing the number of rendered frames ahead, etc) you might at best be able to get an
 extra frame or two per second, but you'll get nothing like the performance boosts that the video
 creators claim. Those YouTubers are just making videos that will attract a lot of views in order
 to earn themselves advertising money. Notice that they don't reply to the hundreds of comments
 below their videos saying that nothing helped.

If you have more than one graphics card, I would suggest that you try disabling all but one. DayZ
 doesn't seem to like SLI or Crossfire very much and it seems to actually run slower with two
 cards than with one. This situation might be improved with future updates
 (Rocket has said that he'd like to use graphics cards a bit more) but right now it's worth
 trying to run on one card to see if it helps. Using some Nvidia 660 Ti cards in SLI, I found
 that they ran 50% slower than with just one card on its own.

Help! I still don't know if I can run the game

If you'd like to leave me a comment below, I'll do my best to reply to you. Please leave as much
 information as you can. At a minimum, I need to know what processor you have
 (and be specific - just saying "3GHz dual core" isn't much help), how much RAM you've got
 and what graphics card or built-in graphics chipset you have.

Please do try to go through the article to check if your graphics card and processor are up to
running the game. I get up to a hundred emails a day about DayZ (I have an installation guide
 for the mod and many articles and videos about running the single player mods that my
 programming team put together), so I would prefer it if you can answer your own question.
 But if you're stuck, leave a comment and I will get back to you.

Work continues on experimental branch as the team keeps hammering away at the next Stable build candidate. It's been a tough wait, we understand, but major issues encountered during development required fixing before the push to Stable branch. This week, Lead Producer Brian Hicks will be dishing out some handy information regarding the Central Loot Economy - what it is, how it's supposed to work, as well as the thought process behind the design choices for the CLE. Also, Lead Designer Peter Nespesny will be telling us about future updates to the vehicles found throughout Chernarus. Peter will go over subjects such as operation, maintenance, as well as the design choices behind these upcoming updates.

Lastly, we have a couple of links to the DayZ Trello board and DayZ forums discussion thread related to the new bus animations, and at the end of our Status Report, we have a small feature on one of DayZ's content creators - Barely Infected.

Contents This Week

• Development Board Spotlight
• Dev Update/Hicks
• Dev Update/Peter
• Community Video: Barely Infected

Development Board Spotlight

Back to Contents

Dev Update/Hicks

With 0.57 on the horizon, this week I'd like to take time to talk a bit about player progression across Chernarus, the Central Loot Economy (and its impact on this), and the challenges DayZ faces compared to the Arma 2 Mod experience.

First lets go over exactly what the Central Loot Economy is, and what it offers DayZ.

- Migration of control over what items spawn from legacy method (script) into a more easily and rapidly updated system
- This means the dev team can rapidly (and without requiring an update to the game) completely change / update the amount of items that spawn
- This is done on both a global, and a per server level - in the future allowing custom server operators fine control over their server and its item spawn quantities without requiring any base modification to the game
- Control over item lifetimes (speed of decay / time to item cleanup)
- Control over how many of each item time is supposed to be present in the world (Min / Max / Nominal)
- Control over item cost (rarity vs spawning methods)

Why is the Central Loot Economy critical to DayZ's design - versus the original prototype placeholder loot spawning script? Simply put - the original method was a very rough prototype, designed to start populating the initial memory points for each structure. In order for the design and environment teams to be fully free to create a comprehensive, living breathing world - we first needed to begin to have fine and robust control that can be rapidly pushed to all servers. The original prototype method was very time resource heavy for updating, limited our options to traditional DayZ Mod style building definitions only, and in short pidgeon-holed the team into very limited control.


Photo Credit: Arma2Base.De (DayZ Mod Player Movement / Heatmap)

One of the images that has been circulating the DayZ Community over the last week is a map covering player progression across Arma 2's original Chernarus map. The layout of the original Chernarus, as well as the very limited amount of enterable structures, and thus very limited amount of potential spawn points for items meant an inherent flow of player movement across the map. It required very little work on the design side - High end military loot spawned mostly entirely at Barracks structures, Basic Supplies / Weapons at Firestations, Grocery Stores, Barns, and so on, and Medical supplies at Hospitals. The structure of *how* items spawned within the original Chernarus just -fit- the limited scope of that map perfectly.
Moving into DayZ as a standalone project, one of the first tasks undertaken was the decentralization of core resource (points of interest) buildings - and the expansion of Chernarus into a more robust and living world. Nearly every structure was made enter-able, and thus nearly every single building on the map was a potential (or group of potential) points for items to spawn. At first this might not seem like it should have a major impact on the design, and flow of player progression across the map - but when you look at the statistics, it is rather telling.

- In DayZ Mod, with vanilla Chernarus - Potential item spawn points number in the thousands (Sub 10k)
- In DayZ Chernarus + the potential locations for items to spawn exceeds 1 Million. 

While the intent with DayZ as a finalized product is a higher player count (100+) than originally supported in DayZ Mod, the original spawning prototype system has several major glaring flaws compared against this intent. With basic control, we cannot effectively lay out a path of player progression across the world (without limiting the environment team to the placement of certain structure models *only* in certain regions). This is where the Central Economy Control comes into play - and will enable us to begin moving towards a path of progression that more resembles DayZ Mod - while still embracing the fleshing out of the world, and decentralization of points of interest.

While this system right now only controls the details listed above - the future iterations are aimed at allowing us the "next step" in the Central Loot Economy:

- Per building quantity controls (Min / Max / Nominal) allowing us to ensure an event spread across Chernarus, as well as to prioritize point-of-interest structures such as the Grocery Store, Medical Center, and so on
- Region control (Restricting item rarity levels to certain regions of the map)


Previsualization of intended initial region support - NOT FINAL

Breaking Chernarus + into defined regions based upon item rarity and classification type is the first and most critical step into allowing us to layout a natural path of progression for players across the map - and begin to move us closer to that familiar and well known flow across DayZ Mod.

Lastly - as development with 0.57 wraps up, the current iteration of the Central Loot Economy will have loot persistence (the saving of spawned and dropped loot, as well as tents) disabled - while the programming team resolves the blocking issues with item cleanup, and rolls out support for per-building quantity controls to ensure an even spread of loot across the world (slaying those pesky loot splosions). This means that when servers restart, fresh loot will be respawned to ensure an enjoyable experience on stable branch.
That said - the following persistence options are unaffected and will remain enabled:

- Vehicle Persistence
- Server Time Persistence (The saving of server time on restart)

I hope this helps you all understand the intent of the Central Loot Economy, where it is now - and where we want it to be in the coming months.

Curious about this report? Want to discuss anything contained in it with the developers? Head over to the Developer Discussion Forums and let your voice be heard!

See you all in Chernarus!
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

Back to Contents

Dev Update/Peter

Let me talk a bit about vehicles and their functionality. Of course any functional vehicle by itself is an amazing piece for the gameplay but what will they be without their parts? They will become just an instant object used by survivors to traverse the long distances and that's about it. I believe that without any depth to the maintenance of vehicles, nobody will create any kind of relationship with exactly that truck they are driving for a few days across the land of Chernarus. On the other side, with plenty of different vehicle parts your approach to a vehicle will be different every time you encounter one.

I want to see many vehicles across the map in different states, so you can run into a vehicle which just needs the spark plugs to be added in or a nearly completely stripped one but with a last wheel you need to put on yours. I favor such possibilities which offer strong emergent gameplay based on player choices and consequences they bring. One can try to find missing parts alone or group up with friends or strangers to get all the remaining parts for that fabulous bus and run a bus line together. It will spruce up the planning, imagination and strengthen interactions with both players and environment.

Implementation of such advanced mechanics of vehicles that use different vital and optional parts has been ongoing for some time now. In the current state we have some of the vital parts functional already; without spark plugs or a battery you simply can't start the engine at all. However more interesting are wheels themselves. Wheels can be detached or destroyed while on the vehicle and physics simulation is responding properly in such situations by inclination of the given vehicle to the side of the missing wheel and adaptively changing the simulated wheel radius and friction. Such dramatic changes, of course, have direct impact on the handling of the vehicle.  But, nothing is lost in such case as the spare wheels can be mounted back on the wheel hub and get controlling of the vehicle back on track. From the optional parts there is detachable/interchangeable hood and doors now that while obviously don't affect the vehicle behavior at all add variety to its visual representation. I'm looking forward to see such advance features finally in game providing more unique perception of vehicles and their involvement in the gameplay.

As the team continues pushing development of DayZ, we have Brian, Chris, and Viktor providing us with a peek at what is on the plate for the team. For this week, Lead Producer Brian Hicks will discuss development going forwards in regards to the DayZ audio module, while Lead Artist Chris Torchia will discuss the decision making behind the firearms design, and Lead Animator Viktor Kostik will discuss the development of transitioning the player character across to the new animation system.

Like always, we have a couple of links to our DayZ Trello board, and towards the end of this weeks' Status Report we showcase a video showing an interesting game session springing forth from a Vybor spawn.

Contents This Week

• Development Board Spotlight
• Dev Update/Hicks
• E3 - DayZ PC Gaming Show 2015
• Dev Update/Chris
• Dev Update/Viktor
• Community Video: "Long Story Short - I Got a Vybor Spawn"

Development Board Spotlight

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

Its been a hectic few weeks, with 0.57 release and E3 - but I'd like to take some time out this week to discuss pending changes to the Audio side of the Enfusion engine, as well as some critical audio bugs plaguing DayZ Early Access players.

We've talked about replacing the existing Audio system in DayZ with a new Audio module better suited to DayZ's needs, but we haven't really outlined what some of that means. As many players may know, the inherited audio technology from the Real Virtuality (TKOH / Arma 2) side of the family has its strengths, but it also has quite a few weaknesses. As we began looking at the time and resources required to update this portion of our base engine, we looked at several key areas we wanted to improve:

- 3D Positional Ambient Sound: Supporting true 3D Positional Ambient sounds is integral to proper immersion within Chernarus. As well, once we support this - the roar of the coast, and the confusing positional ambient noises should be a thing of the past.

- More complex configuration options for vehicles, weapons, etc: Current technology supports a very basic methodology for potential sounds and triggering events for weapons, vehicles and the likes. Moving to the new Audio module will begin to allow the design and audio teams to implement more complex audio configurations for items and vehicles in game.

As development on this portion of the engine continues, we'll be looking at other features existing internal projects offer (such as Arma 3's tech) to ensure that the support the Enfusion engine offers is as comprehensive as we can allow.

In addition to this, work has continued internally on slaying the ever illusive audio bug beast known as "Ghost sounds" - Potential headway was revealed during a conference between key members of the Arma, and DayZ teams. Potential related causes of the issue, as well as fixes implemented on the Arma side of the company are hopefully going to be implemented. We'll be testing this out on experimental hopefully with 0.59 - I'll be speaking with people about this on the official DayZ forums when we begin testing, and anyone encountering the issue at that point is strongly encouraged to utilize the Feedback Tracker.

See you all in Chernarus!
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer

E3 - DayZ PC Gaming Show 2015

Also, we have a little bit of info in regards to modding and the singleplayer part of DayZ in the following video featuring Brian Hicks at this year's E3 convention. Thanks and props go out to the fine people of DayZ Underground for providing the video!

Dev Update/Chris

From the beginning of the project, Dean and I worked closely on the initial design of firearms in DayZ, including which kinds of attachments they should be able to use as well as which specific firearms would best fit the environment.

The requirements from Dean for creating the final list of firearms included:

- 50/50 mixture of 'Western' and 'Eastern' firearms.
- Bias towards civilian models.
- Expansion of the weapon set should occur with minimum expansion of calibers and attachments
- Emphasis on short and intermediate range firearms

Peter also required that each firearm should be as visually distinct as possible from one another and that we should add some of our more unique items.

To figure out which sort of guns we should add, I took several trips to zbraně a střelivo obchod (gun and ammo stores) in Prague as well as investigated the websites of local gun ranges for firearms for sale and rent and was shocked at the massive spectrum available to civilians.

Here are some items I found in Prague. See if any of them are familiar:

-Mosin Nagant
-Modded AR15s
-AR10s
-VZ58 (by the way, I'd love to buy one and export back home to the US  )
-SVT40
-Tiger rifles (civilian SVD)
-Various bolt action rifles of every make and kind -Ruger 10/22
-Derringer pistol
-Single action revolvers
-Kimber 1911
-P38 Pistol
-Civilianized AK clones of multiple origins
-Various pump action 12 gauge shotguns

The list goes on...

In addition, we wanted to remain faithful to the lore of DayZ's roots in Arma2 so involvement of NATO and Russian forces and their equipment. This meant our options were wide open to consider some more exotic items like the AK74M, VSS, UMP45, etc...

We hope this approach would provide a large variety of experiences for our players as your strategy must sometimes change, depending on what kind of firearms you end up with in your journey.

- Chris Torchia / Lead Artist

Dev Update/Viktor

In the last weeks all animators were focused mainly on the new animation system since all animations need to be reexported and adjusted for the new skeleton.
Our initial goal is to reproduce the character as we know and then focus on the improvements which new system will allow us to do.

Player already has all movement animations, can reload all guns, climb ladders, enter and drive vehicle and do other things as old character.

The big chunk of work is done although some major things still need to be implemented like most of the user actions.

Some animations were improved on the go. So now we have new climbing ladders anims, falling and landing, picking up and carrying heavy items, some additional gestures and other polishings. The reload animations at the moment work the same way but we just started on advanced behaviour where chambering and loading rounds will get it's own animations for each gun.

In the Phase 2 of transition player character to the new animation system we will do some major improvements regarding animations.
There will by synchronized walks and runs which will enable us later to do some fancy stuff with upcoming wounded character and stamina.

On to do list is also improvement of animations for first person view, improved IK for feets and hands, detailed animations of guns, and more.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

Community Video: "Long Story Short - I Got a Vybor Spawn"

For this week, we have a small gem created by "Dog the Bandit Hunter". This video popped up in the sea of DayZ content while looking for a bit of entertainment one weekend. From the tumbnail it looked like it was a video dedicated to depicting the Vybor spawn bug itself, so I thought I'd have a look see. Very quickly did I find out though that it was a bit more than that. Instead, the video turned out to be a somewhat hectic documentation of Dog's experiences, as a result of the Vybor spawn, during a gaming session.

In short, many lols were had that afternoon while watching (and re-watching) Dog's video.

Unfortunately, it seems like "Dog the Bandit Hunter" have hung up his spurs in regards to editing and uploading gaming videos on YT, but luckily there's still quite an archive of entertainment goodness on his channel. If interested in more, please feel free to have a look: Dog the Bandit Hunter

As always, if you have a nice video containing DayZ footage you'd like to share, or if you have come across some DayZ footage from other content creators, just post it in the Gallery section of the DayZ forums and we'll happily have a look.

May is long gone, and again we are extremely grateful to see how many bugs we received from players. A quick look at the Feedback Tracker tells us that  Darcion did very well in terms of finding new bugs, so for the month of may, Darcion is the top bug hunter! As mentioned before, we'll keep track of this in the background, and those of you guys that make the extra effort to help out the team in terms of filing them bugs will be mentioned in the Special Thanks section on the rolling credits for DayZ.

Bug Fixing progresses

This week most of the team has been focusing on key bugs, and some of the team have started our first new feature scrum.

New Team Members

We are inducting a large number of new people to the team, effectively doubling the whole project. Here are a few screenshots, and a short rundown on some of the key activity for the week.

Development of Cooking System Starts

This week we started on a cooking system. Heavily inspired by the outstanding cooking system in Project Zomboid, this will be part of a wider push in March to focus on Survival aspects of the game in general. You will turn your cooking device on (fireplace/stove) and then place the items in it.

The items will slowly heat up, and when at the required heat for the required period of time, they will become “cooked” and/or turn into something else (such as soup). Items can become overcooked, and items can also become cold via some process (this will be looked at later).

We’re very excited by the possibilities for this system.

Animation Progress

In the past week animation team was mainly focused to bring all two handed melee animation in game. We have added gestures for two handed tree, evades and other missing animations. Our next goal is to polish those and finalize them all. At the same time we have created new reloads for Ruger MKII, added stab attack with hay fork and worked a bit on new zombie animations which we would like to introduce somewhere in march. There was couple of bugs fixed, some glitches and animation graph improvements.

Emissive material and masks

Our graphics programmer spent some time redoing the way emissive materials work, this will allow us to better support the new fireplace mechanics that are being worked on.

Guaranteed Network Messages

We now have a new system we are testing internally for sending guaranteed updates across the network. This is very important as we believe this will reduce the problems for those who are experiencing severe desync. We are still testing this internally, and it will be sent out to experimental for more testing next week.