DayZ

the production team recently made the move to separate the Official DayZ servers into their own section of the hive, independent from the community hosted public servers. ... One of the things Peter and I sat down and talked about when we looked at how we wanted the server browser to look moving into Beta and beyond, was making it crystal clear for new and existing users what servers were official, and what were user run (as well as modded, of course).

putting together the first mockups of the new server browser we made sure to earmark a few things:

Separating Official, Community, and Modded servers into their own tabs
Splitting the Official Servers off from the rest of the public hive to be certain the experience in them comes from them alone
Maintaining the public hive on rented servers to continue that tradition of a shared character across many DayZ servers

When the new server browser finally gets to the point in which these tabs are in and functional, the whole layout will make much more sense to existing and new users. The first thing they (new users) should experience is DayZ exactly as the developers had intended it. Obviously, if said new user has friends on a community or modded server he/she can navigate there easily.

for 0.62 you can expect a bit more fixes to the most crucial issues that we can reasonably look into, rolling them to experimental and stable over time. Some of the changes I`ve seen today to coloring of the map and vegetation are amazing. I`m very happy with the visuals that guys have been able to produce. Were also looking into server crashes from storage (persistance) corruption, vehicle tweaks and server browser separation as mentioned by Brian. But there are limits to what we can offer in reasonable time for the old client.

The track for BETA has moved forward and keeps its focus on weapons and gunplay.

One of the bigger issues that is bothering us right now is tied to animation of weapons. As the technology changes you have details that can only be built when rest of the modules are in place and testable. Looking at the internal build of the game there are some funny bugs all around the new stuff that one might get a good laugh from but there is no way they can make it live.

While player is animating properly and even uses inverse kinematics in the new modules, configs are getting set up, player turns are tweaked. There are elements on weapons that need to be animated as well. It's one of the older parts of the engine originally and if any of the modders remember. Animating proxies on weapons have been done through configuration files and in text. We're moving away from that, but because how tied it is to some of the not refactored parts we are encountering some interesting things from parts of weapons flying around to being invisible at times. There apparently is still something left that has not been identified properly and we need to solve it as soon as possible. Refactoring something as large as RV engine certainly has its challenges and these things are hard to predict with codebase that old.

On the other hand were also battling the stability of the application itself. As all of you have been plagued by memory crashes, which are very hard to diagnose properly and fix.

Programmers

• UI Inputs bugfixes
• Communication systems optimization
• Weapon handling and aiming
• Vehicle physics refactor
• Vehicle controller refactor
• 3rd person camera collision changes
• FNX basic state machine and script class tweaking
• IZH18 basic state machine and script class tweaking
• Animation events for player
• Physics collision system refactor and optimization
• Melee damage types
• Different damage levels in selections
• Attachments refactor
• Animals spawning
• AI hierarchy refactor
• Tons of crash fixing
• Tons of bug fixes


Animators

• Throwing animations
• Two handed hit reactions
• Player turns for pistols
• Rifle hit reactions
• IZH18 animation tweaks
• Combat player graph



Designers

• Fireplace new particle system implementation
• Traps with grenades
• Drag and drop for final inventory design
• Player action targeting and floating cursor
• Communication systems
• Quantity refactor
• Advanced placing system tweaks
• Construction watchtower
• Animation events for player
• New zombie models
• New player models
• Animation events for player
• Server browser separation
• Area damage
• Crafting framework
• Vehicle tweaks



Audio

• Positional environment audio tweaks
• Infected audio recording preparation
• Player and weapon animation events setup



QA

• Playtesting the 0.62 update
• 0.62 feature testing
• Internal client stabilization



Art

• Old assets rework
• Buildings optimization
• Doors unification
• Weapon tweaks for new gunplay
• Car wrecks
• New rock formations
• Color tweaks for Chernarus

As we want to accent official DayZ experience vs community one in long run, we separated shards for official and community servers with release of the 0.62 version. Now with upcoming update for 0.62 you will see this change reflected in server browser too. Instead of one 'Internet' tab there are now two tabs to make it clear. First 'Official' tab with all servers operated directly by Bohemia Interactive, while second 'Community' tab pools all servers rented by users.

Further work is being made on crafting system. Now, with item in hands, it's possible to initiate crafting and choose between recipes directly looking at another item in the world, or from the quick bar by holding a slot where said item is assigned. Such possibilities for crafting will help to minimize inventory use. On the other side of core features spectrum, we are working hard in close cooperation with animators and programmers on ranged and melee combat. Focus is currently mostly on the aiming model for firearms (weapon handling part is being worked on in parallel of course), which is combination of hands IK, character turns, it ensures that weapon is always pointing what you are looking at, that model also handles sights misalignment, sway which could be modified by character state from modifiers to stamina and hold breath, and recoil modified by weapon's attachments. Light and heavy hit impacts are now connected to hit events and are played character being hit from both types of combat. We would like to add one more hit impact to the mix which is a knockdown to the ground at the end of combo.

Do you remember that injured animation shown in our official DayZ Early Access launch trailer from the end of 2013? We finally plugged in the injured set of animations to the new character and it directly reflects your health state. Additionally, we also added exhausted idle animation which is connected to the stamina system. With these changes, we are getting closer to our ideal state where it should be easy to observe other character to see what they are actually doing and to judge their overall condition.

We have also merged the fix candidate for floating vehicles and very important physics optimization. Currently, physics is consuming most of the CPU resources (at least on servers), so we hope this optimization will significantly improve server performance. These merges will be available on experimental branch today or tomorrow and we will be very happy if there will be enough players, so we will be able to confirm that this optimization is working well.

On 0.63 - we're cooperating closely with designers and animators. The most of work goes into weapon manipulation now. If everything goes right, we will show you how firing, reloading, chambering, unjamming and other mechanics look in the next status report.

Another big part of the game - close range fight - is in progress. You saw some animations before, today I would like to show you how first hit animations are looking.

3rd person camera collisions have received some tweaks last two weeks. We are trying to add some dynamics, when camera is obstructed - so here you can see some work in progress stuff.

The latest additions to the player are improved turns when standing still. For animations, this means improving and redoing turn animations for all items. We are iterating this now in cooperation with our animation programmer to find the best result that looks and feels good.

We have finished all unjamming animations, and we are focusing on implementation. First guns are now animated in the game. We are adding the missing animations like recoil and dry fire for each weapon. At the same time the logic for these firearms is being made so each weapon knows what the character can do with it. Basically, we need to cover all the states the weapon can have and provide animations for it.

We have started implementing hit reactions for the player character. There will be light and heavy animation for each direction, each item and each stance. That is some decent amount of animation data, but we already have a working prototype in the game.

Last but not least, there was small mocap session last week. We have captured some new gestures. Some of them are already implemented and some will be in the upcoming weeks. The gestures menu will now include new signals like Come, Watch, Down, Move, some new taunts and others that were requested by the community.

e plan to include additional tweaks to the color of clutter (grass and other miscellaneous objects in forests) for the version 0.62 in the nearest stable update window. I'm glad to announce our environment designer Mark has prepared the first iteration of these changes and it is available on the experimental branch for you to check out.