DayZ

Hey guys, its that time again - Status Report day. I know you all wanted to hear some crazy hype tastic reveal like - FREE OCULUS RIFT HEADSETS UNDER EACH OF YOUR COMPUTER DESKS OMG YAY, but I'm afraid I don't have that for you today, and we don't do hype like that anyways. While we've made strides in client side performance functionality, we're still chipping away at blocking issues in the following areas:

Last two weeks, we spent our time mostly on bug fixing of some critical issues like client/server crashing or issues with weapon reloading, because we want that first release of 0.60 experimental will be in the best state as possible.

Designers have started to use new damage system, so we have few requests on improvements, but they aren't blockers.

A lot of issues were fixed in loot distribution and some new features were added. For example random loot spawning in world containers. This new feature is now moved to designers, so they can set it properly. We have also prepared new Infected/Animal spawner, but this won't be ready in 0.60 as we need to do some work in AI simulation. We will talk about this new system in next status report.

Maybe the most interesting thing is that we've started to rewrite some core parts of network code, which should improve desync issues and server performance. I hope that we will be able to show these improvements in 0.60, but I don't want to give any promises, because it's possible, that first iteration will break the game even more.

The animation sets for each gun now have magazine reload animations, manipulation with weapon mechanism, chambering animations and more is still to come.

Also the wounded character now has some sets implemented as a prototype (some walks and runs) but we will have to wait for all the animations until we fully introduce it.

Inventory UI
User controls within the new inventory look to be at parity with the old inventory system. The last few remaining issues are a few nasty blocking bugs on the functional side, such as items missing their icons.

Reload mechanics
The QA team have worked with the design and animation teams to get a firm handle on exactly where the inconsistencies are with the new reload mechanics, and said teams are working on resolving the issue. I think we can all agree that when we push a large change to how weapons reload - they damn better all reload with the same mechanics

Character Loading/Saving
Proper character loading/saving is back, and in the process some nice network optimizations in this area were made!

Renderer based blocking issues
We've cut the list of blocker flagged issues tied to the new Enfusion renderer in half since the last time we talked - and in the time since our last Status Report the Enfusion engine team has made some outstanding optimizations across Chernarus - which you can see the result of in the latest .60 Dev Log video that you see below.
In addition, while the Enfusion engine team was able to commit and test their latest optimizations, the automated performance benchmarking tool briefly discussed in the latest .60 Dev Log video has enabled the environment team to begin to isolate problematic issues with certain areas of the map that would not otherwise be noticed. We're excited to see these fixes give us yet another small bump up in Enfusion's new renderer performance.

.60 is focused on UI, and Renderer - it does not feature the new animation system, player controller, or user actions

We still have plenty of issues ahead of us to tackle, the renderer is but one hurdle on the road to a complete DayZ

Network Optimizations, Server Performance Optimization (This is a big one, standing between us and more players, more infected, more animals), Animation System, Eden Update Audio Tech merge, and more are all ahead of us

We decided to unveil how things work with addition of meaningful assistance especially in the inventory side. You will find ghosts/silhouette placeholders for all possible attachments that can be attached to systems like player character, weapons, vehicles, constructions, fireplaces, etc. Of course it can ignite pursuit for "filling those spots" notably for completionist style players. On the other hand it will help to orientate what is possible and what isn't as in reality you know that you can definitely can put a second rifle around your neck but you can’t in game, so instead of trying by yourself it's better to be told straight that these are the cards to play with instead of trying all the possible combinations to find proper one like in old school point and click adventures (which I love, to be clear). With the possibility to add and remove all attachments within the inventory screen and with the need of securing some of them with tools in mind comes a secured/unsecured icon - think of vehicle wheels which you can attach to the hub but you need to fasten them with lug wrench for proper functionality or they will simply fall off during the drive or nail down the planks to make a fence from simple frame. With this locking of attachments via user actions it comes hand in hand need of the unreachable functionality for attachments, again think of how visually unpleasant it will be to teleport wheels to front hubs of bus standing at very different side or by its back, this will get you to the right spot if you want it to drag and drop it from inventory instead using direct in-game attach user action. To quickly mention some other aids for convenient usage, we plan to introduce lighting bolt icon for electricity system to clearly overview if object it's plugged in/under current or needed amount of some specific item to be able to turn it into desired state like number of planks to barricade the doors.

Crafting is another important part of the game and it is critical to bring it out to the light from the darkness of the inventory screen. Intended plans for field crafting changes is that it always needs to be initiated from the hands with the one of the two required ingredients for said recipe. Combining wooden sticks with rags is a good example. Crafting can be initiated in different ways, solely in inventory by putting let's say rags to hands and drag and drop wooden sticks on them from vicinity or cargo, second possible approach is a bit of a shortcut when you have let's say wooden sticks already in hands and rags set in some quick slot and pressing this quick slot number to invoke the crafting recipe, or the last way is with direct interaction with the item in the world by pointing rags in hands onto sticks gathered from bush. All of these options of crafting initialization let you to choose how you want to craft directly in the world instead of the inventory, in that case a torch, splint or fireplace and by holding the right mouse button craft it the same as you would use a canteen to continuously drink from. Some of the positives of this approach is that it eliminates automatic removal of previous item in hands so you don't suddenly loose your precious double carried item, adding tangibility and actual feel to execution of crafting actions or the possibility to walk during some crafting actions like opening cans or feeding magazines with cartridges. Additionally feeding a magazine will be a continuous action, the same as feeding the internal magazine of a gun which takes some time, one by one cartridge loading as long as you perform that feeding action which leads to a much more believable tension with planning ahead and tactical approach instead of that game where the fastest fingers win the crucial situations. At the end of the day the advantage of magazines lays in how many rounds you can fire with the current set without manipulating too much with the weapon or magazine instead of making nearly endless stream of fire with juggling with just two mags and ammo piles. (Keep in mind, we aren't going for 1:1 realism - obviously in a video game, round by round loading will be a bit faster than in real life).

As in the good tradition of DayZ all new changes will have visual feedback to players like attaching something to gun, picking item from ground, dropping it, feeding the magazine or crafting something. Everything should be readable by other survivors to make it clear what's going on and to be able to react on your performed actions which can offer time windows to take advantage of. All these changes will shift how DayZ is played a bit but I truly believe these they are introduced for a good reason and help to form a higher principle.

We are now focused on adding missing animations for vehicles. For the new animation system we have been adding some offset poses to allow player to look around inside the vehicle and also changing slightly how steering wheel looks to allow animating shift gear in the future.

Obviously never ending work on guns is still in progress. That means we are adding chambering animations for more guns and polishing existing reloading anims. The player graph now containes some new actions like animation for emptying bottle. Some more wounded moves have been created. The bow and pistols now have the same set as rifle - standing walk and run.

I am also planning next mocap session to capture some animations for operating the vehicles like engine repairing or attaching doors and wheels. More wounded anims are also on mocap list so we can continue on this feature.

- Loot Distribution: Current internal builds have an issue we're chasing down that drops globally spawned quantities of items to about 3,000 in certain situations/server states. This is around 17,000 to 18,000 less than the acceptable minimal operating value. This issue is one of the top priorities for the designers currently, as it effectively makes the title near unplayable.

- "Stuck" Magazines: The gameplay programming team are working on an issue that causes magazines during the reload process to become "stuck" within the players inventory, thus causing several cascading failures with players inventories requiring them to disconnect and reconnect to resolve the issue.

- Sliding Players: The QA Team encountered a 100% repro rate series of steps to cause players to become stuck in a sliding state - regardless of laying, prone, or erect. These steps have been provided to the gameplay programming team - and they are working on resolving the issue.

- Playability of New UI Inventory: The design and gameplay programming teams are wrapping up the last of the playability issues moving to the new UI, as functional support for the legacy UI won't be possible moving forward with the new Enfusion renderer.

Looking at what the Engine Programming team have taken on and ahead of them for the Enfusion Renderer:

- MSAA Implementation

- Alpha to Coverage Implementation

- Resolved all issues flagged as "Must Fix" or "Blocker" for .60



Current Focus is on:

- New UI and Renderer Major & Minor severity level issues

personally I'm a bit concerned of the network state of vehicles. With the team focused on the milestone goals for .60 we haven't been able to give the attention to iterating on network synchronization, performance, and physics on our current group of vehicles. I think they're far from where I'd like them to be - but we'll more than likely have to put off improving their state to somewhere more enjoyable for the Early Access playerbase to future builds.

In my last status report, I mentioned that we are rewriting some important parts of network code. Well, the work is finished and first testing showed improvements on server performance and server response time. So, these changes will be available in experimental build from start and if nothing goes wrong, they will hit the stable release too.

Lots of new and horribly ugly looking infected are going to be swarming Chernarus. We have almost finished the new system and tools on area/ spawn rules/ group types definition in order to create believable distribution, doctors will haunt hospitals, police will be most probably found in the stations surrounding areas.

...We're still not sure, if new AI spawner will hit 0.60 (or at least experimental), but we will try our best.

There are new reload anims for M4, for Red9 and CR527. ... weapons guys have been busy with adding missing animations for vehicles, opening and closing doors and hoods with tons of variations to cover all vehicles.

...bring variations for infected locomotions where there will be multiple different idles, walks, runs and sprints so they look a bit different when moving around. Also some extra anims are in progress, like attacking doors. This week there will be already mentioned mocap session so we will get loads of new data for us to work on.

...we still need to have new animation system in first.

- Loot Distribution: The QA, Design, and Gameplay Programming teams have isolated the cause of the issue, specifically tied to stalling of item respawn - while initial server spawn, and server cleanup are functioning properly. The Gameplay Programmers responsible for this are hard at work nailing down a fix to this issue, and a possible solution has been handed to QA - we will run it through the QA department for verification.

- "Stuck Magazines": This issue has been resolved, and the QA Team are no longer able to reproduce it. Strike one more issue from the list.

- Sliding Players: All of the reproducible methods for causing this issue have been flagged and resolved by the gameplay programming team, and have been verified by QA.

- Playability of New UI Inventory - The team has finished all remaining changes needed to be ready for .60 experimental - once the build is in the hands of the experimental userbase, we'll be able to make any required adjustments or improvements based upon how they interact with it.

- FPS Drop / Clouds: Internal Testing discovered a 100% reproducible frame drop to single digit factors on limited hardware configurations. While the issue only appeared on 2 out of 30+ PCs, we're taking it very seriously. That said, the engine programming team has committed a fix and QA are verifying it as of the time of this report.

- Server Crash: We've encountered an issue with unconscious players reconnecting / logging in to a fresh server sometimes causing the server to suffer an unexpected crash. Obviously we'll need to get this resolved before pushing to a large userbase because no one likes playing on servers that are consistently crashing - and we all know there will be plenty of unconscious survivors throughout Chernarus. That said, the gameplay programming team have a solid repro, and all the crashdumps and server logs they could want, and are tracking this issue down as I write this.