DayZ

I would like to thank you for the amazing participation during the weekend Stress Test. It has helped us to identify a number of new issues that we are investigating as I write this. Let's take a closer look at some of those issues.

Crashes and general game stability issues

There have been about 200 crashes altogether over the period of two days with a couple of different causes. Some of them are new, but most are known. Hopefully, the amount of data generated will identify the pattern to replicating these issues internally and getting them fixed.

Character locked in database

Besides the stability issues, we are still tracking situations where a player character gets locked in a database. Although happening less often than previously, this is still a major problem that is most likely tied to a server/client crash/freeze not closing the connection gracefully, and not unlocking the character as intended. We have a possible fix for these outlier issues and crashes in our internal main Development Branch of the game and should roll these out in next few Stress Tests.

Basic Central Economy balance

There is an investigation ongoing into Central Economy loot distribution. Specifically, we're looking at cases where the intended gameplay loop is not properly supported by items presented/spawned to players exploring even the most remote corners of Chernarus.

It's important to note that the Stress Tests are our first real opportunity to really see how the Central Economy behaves in 0.63, as we're just not able to internally reproduce the behavior of large amount of players in the game. That ultimately puts us at the very beginning of all the balancing. During Stress Tests, we are extracting economy states over periods of time to understand the players movement and their interactions. This in turn helps us understand where our priorities should be within the spawning system.

Additionally, we will (as previously suggested) also play around with the overall player numbers per server, and we will need to see how to scale the Central Economy with the player numbers going up, possibly all the way to a 100 players per server.

With Stress Tests, we are trying to gather data on specific problems that require a high-stress environment with tons of players coming in and out of the server, pushing all gameplay systems to their limits. That is specifically the case with loot distribution and all player interactions tied to it.

Stabilizing these interactions and making them somewhat consistent with a decent amount of variety is our primary goal. We want you to experience that feeling of discovery when you find what you need at a certain moment. Especially if it's a rare item. Looting is a big part of the DayZ gameplay, we know how much this can affect the enjoyment from fighting for your life in Chernarus, so with each Stress Test, we set a goal and a particular combination of data that we want to gather within a specific gameplay element or system. Then, we add extra logging to these interactions, helping us to decide on the next action we should be taking.

Weapon switching animations

As is pretty obvious, the animations for swapping items from the inventory to the hand slot are missing. Especially with weapons, this creates a gameplay problem, as a lack of visual communication turns a harmless disarmed character into a threat in a split second.

Currently we are implementing these item switch animations and, along with them, we are changing one important thing - shoulder slots will be no longer be dedicated. That means you will be able to carry two long firearms or two melee weapons as needed. As we progress with 0.63, a slot for a belt will also be added, opening possibilities for an additional pistol holster, knife sheet, or quiver. A slot for the bow is considered as well, but there needs to be a bow implemented first to see how it will work with non-dedicated shoulders.

Hit feedback

Another part missing is animation feedback of a target being hit with a projectile, as we turned that specific feature off for the Stress Test. We ran into a problem where even additive impact affected the aim of a firearm. Such an authentic affair quickly becomes a very unpleasant mechanic, preventing a reaction by putting you in a disadvantage after being hit - the only chance was that the shooter will miss or have to reload so your aim can recover in the meantime. We will have to address this issue as we would like to have animated feedback following a projectile hit.

Bleeding

On a different issue, bleeding and its treatment are basic DayZ mechanics. Unfortunately, without the new parent-child hierarchy, which is being implemented as we speak, we cannot pin particle emitters to the character properly and animate them with it. We've decided to postpone the visual representation of bleeding particles as well. Admittedly, this is a bad timing, as in 0.63 you have to treat every bleeding source individually. With slightly unresponsive progress arrows of the blood stat icon (more about indicators later) and no way to tell if there are some bleeding wounds left, it’s hard to say how many times you should bandage.

Overall balance

Apart from that, please be aware that many elements you see in the game right now have not been not through a basic balance pass just yet. From digestion, regeneration speeds and stamina, through damages of melee and projectiles to the weight of items, their sizes, and cargo spaces... it’s safe to say that basically everything will be adjusted more or less and it is connected to some degree with the lack of features, mechanics, and content, which will be added down the road during the 0.63 Experimental phase.

The animation team is now focused on several parts of the player character. We are now in the phase of improving and finalizing the prone system. Animations for crawling in prone on the back, which have been missing until now, are being added. The cameras and some poses are not final yet as well. And of course, after the animations are finished, we will have to do a couple of rounds of bugfixing for prone on the back before we tick it off as done.

Another important part that is in progress, is overcoming obstacles. We now have a working prototype for jumping, but we are still in the process of adding missing animations. Meanwhile, there has been some work done on climbing over higher obstacles. These are divided into multiple levels, and different animations will be played depending on the height of the obstacle.

Close combat will see some changes as well. As we want to have more variation to the combat, we are adding new animations for the baseball bat. These should better reflect the item. In the future, we want to continue with this and add more item specific attack animations.

Last but not least, there is ongoing work on firearms, vehicles, user actions, infected and also tons of general bugfixing. All of these areas are a longer term task, but you should see constant improvements in the game with everything related during Experimental.

the Experimental release is behind us, but the work does not stop here. We kept both of the branches active to make sure we don't break Experimental too often and have features coming into it with more polish. While 0.63 is heavy on new technology, we know it's quite light on content. But you will be able to enjoy a lot of the new stuff in the upcoming weeks.

The issues that take longest to iron out are related to the stability of client and server, and problems that would end up interrupting your play sessions for various reasons. From locked characters, to server kicks or just unexpected crashes to desktop. Things are getting better, but there is more to be done in this regard and we continue to monitor the situation and apply fixes to make sure we eliminate this as soon as possible. We know its not there yet and its our top priority.

We should also talk about our plan to make the Experimental servers available to server owners currently running their communities. Sadly this had to be slightly postponed due to changes necessary for GDPR and memory leaks wreaking havoc on stability and performance. These seem to be fixed as of today, so very soon you will be able to switch over and enjoy the updated version with your fellow community members on your own terms.

In terms of development, we are currently moving along quite nicely with only small delays in features planned out internally. The benefits of the new technology are already showing themselves in the pace of implementation. We are also looking into possible solutions to issues that currently cause these delays and make sure we deliver. Let's go over the current state of development and features themselves.

We can consider finished for Experimental phase:

Hidden stash
CPR
Gestures
Repairing
UI Main Menu
Soft Skills
Environmental Exposure
Goat - Animal

Last week we have moved/continue to the review/bug fixing of:

Character Unconsciousness
Chambering Loop
Fireplace
Jump
UI Server Browser
Cooking
Weapon/Item Swap Action/Animation
Compass
Gathering Ambient Loot
Gathering Actions
Vehicles - Open/Close doors
Vehicles - Attach/Detach vehicle parts
Injured Animations

This week is dedicated to the internal implementation of:

Climbing
Weapon dispersion
Weapon zeroing
Weapons - Double Barrel
Diseases
Scopes
Enfusion Hierarchy
New Input System
Action Animations
Collisions during melee

So you might be asking yourself when these things hit Stress Test and Experimental branches. We plan to switch over a bunch of these very soon, and you can expect to have these available in batches over the coming weeks. However, we want to aim for at least unconscious state to be finished in different edge cases. As of now, there are still small issues with ladder/water unconscious state interactions that are not ready for the Stress Test, but this week we should see them fixed and as such moved to the Stress Test branch alongside many other new features and content.

At the moment, we are revisiting some of the animations and improving them, or replacing them with better ones. This includes melee combat and its attacks. There have been some animation changes to better represent which item is the player attacking with, like a new sprint-attack with the baseball bat. Also, a lot of work has been put into finger poses so that the character is holding various items the best way it can. Some of the recent animation additions include the new IZH43 animation set, and some gestures like nodding head, shrug, and "OK".

One of the more significant improvements to player locomotion is the ability to jump over obstacles. The feature is still work-in-progress, as well as the animations, but the character is now able to overcome small objects that are in his way by jumping over them. We are now in the process of adding all the animation variations for different directions and items in hands. At the same time, our programmer is working on the climbing for players and soon, we will start implementing animations for it.

As we also started tidying up some animations and features, there is an ongoing work on player actions. This includes polishing of existing animations, some graph tweaks, but also some new animations to better visualize what the character is doing.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work revamping, tweaking, and creating animations for many various actions. User actions are the backbone of the game, and as such, they require thought out implementation; what items can they be done with? What stances are they realistic in? Should the character be able to move during the action? All of these play a huge role in their realization, concept, and execution.

I’ve implemented animations for on back actions (mainly important ones; drinking, eating, etc), tweaked some action animations to be faster or slower and cutting out unnecessary parts, depending on which type of action. I’ve also created and implemented animations for placing heavy items (barrels, generators, etc) and smaller items (bear traps, mines, etc), and I’ve also revamped the horticulture action animations, such as cutting down a tree with a two-handed axe, or one-handed hatchet, cutting down bushes, and getting bark from trees with knives or machetes. As a part of these actions, I also implemented some smaller QoL (quality of life) representative action animations for viewing compass and viewing the map to properly convey what the player is currently doing.

In our Status Report from 22 November 2016, we shared our plans to upgrade SimulWeather/TrueSky - a 3rd party library used to render volumetric clouds in DayZ. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, we had to ultimately cancel this plan and rather focus our attention on the current implementation that is present in DayZ since the beginning of Early Access. This has not only allowed us to make necessary performance adjustments but also to take a closer look at the visuals of clouds and what could be improved within the limits of the current implementation. Here is a short summary of what has been changed:

Regarding performance improvements we have reached a point, where we have decided to remove the ability to disable volumetric clouds on the client side - this change will take an effect once revamp of graphical options is finalized. There have been major changes in the cloud configuration, which are mainly aimed to make the clouds more visible and distinct from the skybox background. We improved the interaction of fog (in distance and height) and volumetric clouds, so that clouds should blend better with the horizon when it is foggy.

The silver lining effect of clouds has been greatly boosted during the early to late sunrises and sunsets. The movement speed of clouds during windy conditions has been reduced and we've brought additional improvements to the skybox background textures (overcast-dependent) along with some minor tweaks to the global lighting config to support the changes in the skybox and volumetric clouds.

In addition to the changes of clouds, we have also taken a look again at the visuals of rain. These new changes include:

Closeup raindrops are much more visible now.
Re-added effect that tries to visualize light refraction on raindrops.
Fogginess parameter has been tweaked so the rain blends better with the background.
Closeup rain drops are more visible during the night-time around light sources.
Rain speed has been increased.

Both clouds and rain changes should be available to test once the next major Stress Test branch update happens.

The latest sound feature we started to work on are voice sounds for the character. So far we've implemented breathing when the character runs out of stamina, the sounds for holding breath while aiming in iron sight mode. and hit reactions when the character takes damage. We plan to add more sounds to create a more immersive character representation. Some of the sounds will be connected to animations, like grunts while jumping, or picking up heavy items, or sounds to emphasize melee combat. Others should be connected to character states, like the feeling of hunger or representation of disease.

So far, all sounds are placeholders and in some cases, only male sounds are played.

Dear Survivors,
it's about time to talk about the content update that's coming to Stress Test branch very soon and will get rolled over to the Experimental servers after making sure everything works as intended. We will try and batch the content updates in this way so we can stabilize and make sure the content works properly.

AI Sensors/Audibility/Visibility

With this change you will see your stealth options getting expanded by quite a bit: Besides stances, the colours and weight of items will affect your ability to avoid zombies and confuse their perception.

Hidden Stash

With this feature, you'll be able to hide your loot underground and put containers to use. The shovel will be spawning alongside the new containers ready to use. Same goes for corpses.

Character - Unconsciousness

Shock stat and weapon hits that increase it can cause the character to fall unconscious to be possibly saved by friends in your group. With the unconsciousness state, you'll be seeing more options to disable players and interact with them in combat.

CPR

The ability to CPR people with high shock values.

Gestures

The new radial menu alongside the newly added gestures will now be available for even more interactions and videos you may create.

Repairing

Items like the Sewing kit, Weapon Cleaning kit, Duct tape and more are seeing a comeback as durability matters again. Weapons don't jam yet but that's something you'll definitely see in a future content update.

New weapons

Yes, there are new weapons coming to the game and it's two classics that everybody loves. M4A1 and Mosin. Yay!

Scopes

There is no definite list of scopes coming yet in the first content update, but, based on the weapons currently in the game, we will deliver a meaningful selection.

Soft skills

The Soft skills are getting in, so you'll see the basic specializations working and your crafts bringing better results faster.

Environmental Exposure

The temperature system will start working without any repercussions first to gather more information on how harsh we want to get.

Jumping

We have started working on a huge animation set for jumps and climbing this year. So with the upcoming update, the first part of this package is gonna get in and give you the ability to cross some basic obstacles improving your manoeuvrability throughout Chernarus.

Diseases

Diseases and associated effects (coughing, sneezing and more) are returning as well as items that resolve possible negatives, such as purification tablets. This includes the possibility of diseases transfer from player to player and items.

Compass

The first part of the navigation system in DayZ besides the new map is the compass. Hopefully, it will help you to learn more about Chernarus and its intricacies.

Ambient Loot

One of the core features that we want to use to solve a possible lack of loot is a set of items that spawn not centrally but based on the player position and interactions. This might need a lot more tweaks, so expect its values to change even during testing.

Voice Communication

The whole Voice Communication system along with radios, public radios, megaphone etc. is coming to the game to give you objectives on the map as well as new options to communicate and meet with other survivors in the game.

So, how soon this is going to happen? The features listed here are undergoing testing as of now and the content has been branched away from the internal development version with many more fixes and improvements to stability, security and server performance.

On a side note, since in the internal version of this patch, we resolved the GDPR issues blocking the ability to switch to the experimental version, with its introduction we will enable this option for server owners.

The content patch -while delayed- is shaping up nicely. During the extra weeks spent on the stabilization of its features, we have solved quite a large number of issues, while the main three that were blocking the release are confirmed to be fixed as well.

Three main reasons that the patch has not been released sooner are :

1. Client Freezes (Happening in random intervals causing 10+ seconds of no response whatsoever)

The issue manifested itself in specific situations and actions of multiple players in a single bubble. We have found the cause and were able to confirm last week that it's no longer happening.

2. Stability issues (Crashes, VME and asserts on the branch)

While important, these are definitely considered less damaging on the whole gameplay experience. However, we should be good to go!

3. Scopes

During the implementation we have come across a large number of issues from animations, clipping, shaking and more that needed to be solved.

Now that we have talked about these, I wanted to confirm that the content patch is getting released on the Stress Test branch tomorrow and that it will be focused on Player vs Player interaction. During this period we might try to raise the player numbers per shard and see where the additional optimizations can take us. After the Stress Test period is over, we will port the patch over to Experimental and enable the switch to do the same for server owners.

While all this was happening the team was working on the BETA features. We're running several work groups focused on important parts of DayZ, specifically weapons, infected, vehicles and actions. As of now, the general production is running two weeks behind and we are ready to get back on track.

DayZ on Xbox - The road to Xbox Game Preview begins!

The rumors are right! Our guys in Bratislava and Prague have managed to get the first series of builds through the Xbox certification process, and have already made them available for preliminary testing to a closed group of players enlisted in the Xbox Insider Program.

Current State of DayZ on Xbox

The first important thing to say is that the build that some of the Xbox Insiders are playing is pretty much on par with our current 0.63 build for PC, and shares the same features and content. The way our development pipelines are set allows for most of the progress with PC development to beimmediately used in the Xbox build, and since we've recently done quite a lot on that front, the Xbox version is already well playable. This will only get better as soon as the 0.63 content patch goes out on the Stress Test Branch. Of course, if it was all sunshine and roses, we'd probably just release the thing already, so unsurprisingly, there's a catch. A few of them, actually:

we're still applying some minor changes to the controls scheme
we're getting our server infrastructure ready
we're awaiting fixes for some Xbox specific issues (UI, some user actions missing etc.)

Despite these issues, the progress with PC builds, and some platform specific optimisations already bring a good enough gameplay to Xbox, along with a generally very good client and server performance, so as soon as we get ahead of the listed issues (and as long as there aren't new ones appearing), we will proceed to the next step!

Closed Preview

Ultimately, that's where we'll get together a bunch of the most excited Xbox Survivors among you, and give you a chance to secure access to pre-release builds of DayZ.

In return, we'll ask you to provide us with feedback on your experience, and we'll also use the traffic created on our servers to further evaluate the performance there.

Even in the Closed Preview phase, we're probably not going to be ready for any large scale testing, so we'll pick our first bunch of Survivors very carefully, and try to involve some content creators at Mixer and Twitch to spread the excitement for others waiting to get their hands on DayZ.

Game Preview

We're probably a bit further away from the last step - releasing DayZ for everyone in the "Xbox Early Access program", the Xbox Game Preview. As we've been saying at press events over the past months, we'd like to bring DayZ to Xbox Game Preview at the end of this summer, and currently, it looks like we should be able to deliver. For the final confirmation though, we still need things to settle down a bit more, so your best bet is to wait for Gamescom (starting August 21, more on that below!) - by then, things should be more clear, and it's also a good opportunity for any release date announcements.

As with any Game Preview title on Xbox, there will be a trial version available that'll help you decide whether DayZ is already a fun game to you in its current state. We're considering the trial to be limited to one hour of gameplay.

Up until now, we've been counting on releasing the Xbox Game Preview shortly after DayZ hits BETA on PC. Since we're able to come up with Xbox version of our PC content rather quickly, and we're also enjoying tremendous support from Microsoft. If things keep going well, we may see an Xbox Game Preview release happening before the PC BETA.

Even in Game Preview, and later on on PS4, DayZ will remain a hardcore, authentic survival game.

We're going to Gamescom (and maybe, just maybe to PAX West and Australia)

Brief update on upcoming events: we'll be at Gamescom again, yay! Gamescom is taking place between August 21 - 25, and we're bringing a much bigger team this year, with all the usual suspects (Baty, Eugen, Peter, Dan), and a very welcome addition of our Senior Map Designer Adam! Altogether, there will be 11 DayZ developers at the event (including our new Community Managers - Tim and Bestius), ready to meet you all and show you the game on all three platforms - PC, Xbox One AND PlayStation 4 (yes, that would be a premiere!).

We're also doing our best to answer the many invitations (yes, that's you too, Boydy! (big grin)) and arrange at least a brief visit of PAX West in Seattle, and PAX Australia in Melbourne. We'll keep you updated!

when it comes to firearms we are focused mainly on the scopes right now. In the following GIF you can see the new PSO 1 scope in action together with the new post processes. Aiming down the sights uses depth of field to blur the firearm while keeping the front sight focused. The scoped-in view is using a circular mask to blur the surroundings and creates spherical distortion to make the magnification effect more prominent.

The next GIF shows how the combination of ADS and scope is operated in a case where such possibility of firearm and scope allows it. The last mode used for precise aiming (sights or scope) is remembered and the next time the aiming action is called it switches right into it.

Regarding point shooting (not precise aiming, in other words hipfire from raise), there was sway applied from the very first implementation. However, it used the same strength as in ADS which isn’t enough for such a situation. It lead to the belief that the projectiles are always landing in the exact center of the screen. Now, we have a multiplier for sway implemented, to make it harder to hit targets further away.

By the way, due to the controversy revolving around "Aimgate", it’s also a common belief now, that the projectile direction when fired while point shooting is drastically bend, which isn’t the case. The angle is getting smaller with larger distances. You can see two lines on the following screenshot, the white line is the direction from the camera, the orange line shows the actual direction at which the projectile was fired. Using the 3PP camera, which has the largest offset from the axis of the weapon barrel and with the target in a distance of 10 meters, the angle between the direction of the gun barrel and the fired projectile is around 2 degrees. And to display even this minimal change in projectile direction to the players, we plan to have the weapon visually realigned towards the center of the screen.

alongside with the implementation of the pump-action shotgun in the new weapon system, we found what was wrong with buckshots all the time. After a rewrite, buckshots are now spawning the set amount of independent projectiles which are getting dispersed with distance and can penetrate materials.

I’m excited this change will make shotguns finally valuable and deadly - exactly how you would expect.

In the past two weeks our animators have been working on:

vehicles: steering wheel poses so the character can steer the wheel nicely. This includes animations like starting the vehicle, adjustments of enter/exit animations and idles.

surrender/restrained: implementation and missing animations
hit reactions for crouch and prone for when player character gets hit
bugfixing related to firearms

Just a very brief update from the audio team:

new reload sounds for the MP133
new sounds for falling trees and bushes (after hack tree and bush action)
shooting controller for ambient sounds. Birds and insects go quiet for a while after shooting
Coast ambience is positional now. You hear the ambience from the direction where the coast is.
Sound Occlusion for gun shots. Gun shots are attenuated if there is any obstacle (like wall or structure) between the shooter and listener

The Content Update has hit the Experimental Branch today, and that means we're also making it available to community server owners currently hosting with one of our Game Server Providers (GSPs). Please expect slight delays as GSPs will cope with the number of switch requests, but I'm happy to see things finally move along to the Experimental phase after most of the critical issues were fixed in our Stress Tests. We have implemented a large number of optimizations in our network code while trying to identify an issue that in the end was caused by specific server hardware problems.

We've decided to release the DayZ 0.63 Server Files before BETA, and currently, we'd like to make them available to all DayZ players within the next week. Everyone will be able to download the Server Files for free on Steam under the tools section, and from that moment, everyone will be able to host a DayZ server on their own. while the full modding tool-set won’t be available before BETA

Last but not least, our goal with the next Content Update (that we might already call an Experimental BETA patch since we will be stabilizing the internal version of the game on the Stress Test machines) is to have a release in as soon as the next couple of weeks. This update will, again,introduce a variety of new things, with vehicles getting in a bit later after the initial release of this next Content Update. Just to pick one example, the new restraining system

The Xbox version of the game will see major game updates getting in soon after they hit the PC Experimental branch. While we won't be Stress Testing as of now on the Xbox platform, we will keep churning out updates with bug fixes and stability fixes to this version as they manifest themselves. Even today, we have pushed a game update with lots of fixes for bugs that we have seen in the PC version, and most importantly, we're fixing some of the specific inventory issues and controller related bugs that will make DayZ a better, more enjoyable experience on Xbox.

For the last couple of weeks we were releasing new Stress Test builds almost every day with the goal to improve server performance and to finally solve the BattlEye mass kicking. And we solved it!

Q: Are you working with BattlEye developers to try and resolve the issues?
A: We do have a direct communication open with BattlEye developers, and the first thing we've made was that we asked them for some input on what could be wrong. In any case, the kicking issue was there even when we disabled BattlEye, so logically, we started looking for an issue on our end.

Q: What do you think is causing the kicking? In technical terms.
So we knew that the issue is on our side, we were sure it must be somewhere in the low level part of our networking - we were thinking that the issue must have something to do with packet ordering or re-sending of lost packets, or even with serial numbers of packets. Now we know it was caused by packet fragmentation - in some rare cases, some packets were dropped and it broke down the entire server.

Q: Why are you finding it particularly difficult to resolve kicks and lag? Are the kicks and lag a result of lots of bugs that you're slowly working through, or are you still trying to identify where problems are?
The source of the kicks was just one mistake in the code, but it was hard to find it, since we weren't able to reproduce it internally. The 0.63 branch was created almost 2 years ago and a lot of changes have been made during this time period. Two weeks ago, we started to revert these changes, because it was probably the fastest way (but not the easiest one) how to find the source of the issue. We have reverted one or two improvements every day, made a build and released it on the Stress Test servers, so basically we went back in time every day (the curiosity here is that this bug has been in the build since May 2016). When we've identified the source of the issue, we started putting the reverted and working stuff back into the branch, and released it in Stress Test #46.

Lags are closely connected to the server performance, so different parts of the code may cause them. We were profiling the servers every day to find out the source of performance drops, or what exactly takes most of the CPU time. Every day, we've made some improvements, which were merged into the Stress Test branch for play-testing. It's important to test these optimizations because optimizations can often break things that were previously working fine. One optimization helped us to find out that there is an issue with the firearm damage sanity check, which caused bad hit registration. This bug was there the whole time, but after the optimization, it happened more often.

Q: Why does performance seem to vary between region?
The deployment team along with Eugen has tracked this issue down to be a problem with a hardware configuration of the servers, and we're now seeing consistently decent server performance across regions.

For the last two weeks, I have been working on looking through optics, surrender and restrained states.

Optics

The current implementation of looking through a detached optic in the latest public build had a lot of problems with it... The accuracy of mouse-to-screen is sub-par at best, and you can't accurately follow a target without moving your mouse a couple of meters. We discussed various ways to implement a solution, but I was mainly worried about the character not accurately displaying where someone is looking. If we were to ignore the player animation accuracy and just set the camera to be 1:1 with the mouse, other players could think that they haven't been discovered all while the player who's looking through his binoculars could be tracking them.

I solved this by not allowing you to move while looking through binoculars or scopes, and by doing this, I eliminated any external factors that could mess with the accuracy of the animation; because really, what kind of crazy person would be moving while looking through a pair of binoculars?

Surrender and restrained

At first glance, it would look like it's just another gesture; but under the hood it holds a bunch of complexities. You can't access your inventory when you're in surrendering. You also have new stance rules where you can only walk while standing and only turn in standing and crouched. Lastly, but not least, it also has a bunch of surrender-specific stance changing animations. With these things in mind, we had to approach the surrender mechanic with a bit more caution, as a half-assed approach would probably come back to bite us later down the line.

We have solved it by essentially handling it like a gesture state on the script side, but on the animation side, it would be considered an "item" of sorts. The reason behind this solution is that when a player puts an item in his hands, his character will switch to the corresponding animation set (picking up a rifle will start playing the rifle animations, pistols for pistols, and so on) with all of their specific animations for turning, changing stances, etc. By putting this "ghost item" into the character's hands, the surrender animation set is enabled, and the specific movement rules that that animation set has attached to it. In addition, we have opened up avenues for ourselves where we can have a bunch of surrender-specific animations; such as deaths, gestures, actions, etc, etc.

Maybe down the line, you'd be able to drink face-first from ponds even while restrained to keep yourself hydrated while running from your captors. Who knows!