Status Report - Week of 10 Nov 14

Now that 0.50 has rolled out to stable branch, the focus of the team shifts to the incremental roll out of 0.51 for November’s monthly stable branch update. As with any monthly stable branch update, this comes with several new features, functional changes to existing systems, and its own unique collection of bugs and general game play issues. Those who encounter any frustrating blockers to their gameplay experience on either stable or experimental branch are encouraged to utilize the DayZ feedback tracker at feedback.dayzgame.com. Looking towards the 0.51 update and the Christmas break, in addition to the obvious feature and functional goals - Server side performance is paramount. Addressing critical issues and blockers in releasing 0.50 on schedule has resulted in reduced server performance and with our end of year feature/functional goals coming up the programming team is focused on ensuring a smooth and solid server side frame rate. Experimental/Unstable servers will be used to profile and test 0.51’s performance throughout the month, so if you are looking to participate in this stress testing - make sure to opt into Experimental branch! On experimental branch this week we’ve pushed out several new security related hotfixes, as well as pushing BattlEye’s upcoming changes. As always with security, working in tandem with our external partners (BattlEye and VAC) as well as observing exploits and behavior on experimental and stable branch servers allow us to iterate, and address via experimental > stable branch update paths. It is important again to understand that during the Early Access Alpha period of DayZ’s development vulnerabilities will be introduced as the engine and systems surrounding it are created. Addressing these vulnerabilities and iterating via the experimental > stable branch update path is a constant tug of war. Through utilizing the DayZ feedback tracker to properly report valid information and issues encountered surrounding these areas, we can more quickly “patch the holes” This Friday (the 14th) we had the first of our “dev play sessions” on experimental branch and the footage captured during this stream will be edited and commentated over in next weeks “dev experimental branch discussion” video to be released in next weeks Status Report. It is our hopes that combining general developer experimental branch gameplay with a “directors style commentary” alternating weekly will allow both the light hearted side of seeing the team play and experiment with systems in development, and the more serious gameplay and design oriented development discussion that the dev experimental branch discussion videos will allow. This paired with the upcoming restructuring of the Dev Hub, as well as moving the Status Reports to Fridays and rolling out “Update Notes” for Wednesday experimental branch releases (via the dev hub) will be the first step towards increasing community/developer interaction moving forward into 2015. Don’t forget about our private shard contest, announced during last weeks Status Report. Submissions are still being accepted! - Brian Hicks / Lead Producer Peter / Lead Game Designer “Not much has changed since the last status report update on our front. Vehicle implementation is still flagged with the highest priority. There are of course some issues down the road which needs to be tackled to some extent so it can be considered ready to go for public testing. We advanced a bit as we were passed the vehicle physics parameters in configuration to set up car behavior correctly which is not an easy task and can take countless hours of tweaking and balancing to get the feeling right and believable. For example we already had iteration where our beloved “V3S” was