Status Report - Week of 27 Oct 14

Over the next few weeks you will hopefully begin to see some small (but effective) changes to how the Status Reports, Dev Streams, and DayZ website are laid out. In order to facilitate this, the traditional format of our dev streams will change and the Status Report will begin to focus more on the tech side of DayZ, as well as the existing discipline soap boxes, and stand up notes. The DayZ website will soon feature an "Early Access" calendar covering our intended experimental and stable branch updates, play sessions, dev talks, special events, and consumer show attendance. That aside, this week hopefully sees the release of 0.50 to Stable Branch on steam. Paired with the recent support of private shards for consumer rented DayZ server instances and the ongoing drive for server performance enhancements we hope to finish off the first year of development on DayZ with a strong support for player communities. Persistent storage stability, as well as transportation, and A.I. redesign are goals we aim to be able to begin implementing into our steam branches before the Christmas holiday. As always, we will discuss the progress of these goals in our status reports and external communication moving forward. UPDATE: As mentioned via the DayZ Dev Twitter (@dayzdevteam) we are currently working to address issues encountered during pre release testing for 0.50 to stable branch. Current goals are aimed at a release during next weeks regularly scheduled maintenance, however we will keep you all updated as to the progress. In the mean time, experimental branch is updated with the latest 0.50 build - for volume and stress testing prior to next weeks maintenance window. Make sure to check the DayZ dev hub weekly, and keep an eye out for the changes to DayZ.com - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer Peter / Lead Game Designer"The end of the month is around the corner and that means only one thing: After the three experimental releases in a row it's a time to deliver the latest stable branch update to DayZ. The Last few days we were fixing the last few issues here and there and polishing current state of the internal dev branch version so it can be distributed to stable branch and shine there for another month. As well I can tell you that you will have plenty of stuff to try and do. Let me recap quickly the features and content added to the game this month for you. With proper tools you are able now to plow the soil in the greenhouses and plant the seeds which will grow into plants and produce crops which can be picked. For this initial iteration of horticulture we went with tomato plants and with the fixed placement, in the near future we will add more plants and planting spots will become arbitrary. After doors were re-implemented in the engine we were able to add opening/closing sound effects to them as well as locking/unlocking their locks with lock picks which is the very first basic iteration of barricading. Doors can be also unlocked with brute force so don't worry that someone will lock you up and leave you for dead. Taking care of your character was also extended with shoes degradation which is dependent on shoes durability, surface roughness they are used on, movement speed and distance walked. Character exposure to weather, temperature and wetness was tweaked and with addition of heat packs even snipers must not fear they will freeze out during their camping.