Status Report - Week of 06 Oct 14

http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-week-of-06-oct-14 With the experimental branch updates on 0.50 rolling out this week, Raist and Eugen have worked together to deploy additional data tracking methods that should aid fine tracking and design adjustment related to player movement. Previously the team had focused most of our data tracking methods on loot distribution, spawning, and so forth - as we move closer towards the deployment of vehicles, expansion of existing persistent objects, and the central loot economy we will continue to use experimental branch and official stable branch servers to guide the design of gameplay mechanics via player movement, death, and camp analysis. http://i.imgur.com/8YuI2nc.jpg The above image shows the concentration of player deaths within a 12 hour period on one Experimental Branch 0.50 server. As you can see, the expected large amount of player deaths occur along the player spawn points. However, what is increasingly fascinating is the large spread of unique player deaths across the map. From as far out as Kamenka, to Tulga, Skalisty Island, and Devil's Castle. I like to imagine the lone player death at Green Mountain was an epic last stand gun fight, but we may never know. In addition to the obvious value to the data above, analyzing data like this will become increasingly valuable for the development of core gameplay systems, as well as Chernarus Plus over the coming days and months. In addition to the work done on player data tracking, the gameplay programming team has worked hard on increasing server side performance optimization as well as server side security updates related to player position tracking. 0.49 introduced a good deal of server side performance enhancements, and addressed quite a few critical issues with stability. However, with these fixes came several new issues that we hope to see resolved with the stable release at the end of the month. We hope to finish out October with 50 player servers, persistence enabled by standard, and faster server performance across all servers on stable branch. As we progress along our goals in October, the status reports will keep the player base updated on these goals and any potential blockers or delays. - Brian Hicks / Producer Chris / Lead Artist "Tech: Work continues on fixing the graphical bug associated with our 3D camo and it has turned out to be more troublesome than originally thought. While the programmers were tinkering around with the shaders in search of a fix, we were able to have an additional channel added to the shader used for most of the loot items which will allow us to procedurally change the color of objects via config. The designers will evaluate how and when to implement such a feature but I am hopeful it will lead to a lot more color customization options on a lot more items than we currently allow. We also got support for a colorize in the grass shader so that we can vary the color of patches of grass in a large field, adding some visual flare to the environment. Character Art: The first women's clothing item is done: 3/4 length pants. It will be added in the no-so distant future, along with women's shorts and a sweater. The prison uniform, which was paused pending a few high priority tasks, is WIP again. We will have to pause the creation of new zombie types temporarily to work on some tweaks to the skeleton, which were asked for by the programming and animation team, related to new zombie AI/animation triggers. The team in Bratislava is