Status Report - 4 April 2017

Good evening survivors! This week, Viktor shares the second part of his animation Q&A video, Eugen is expanding upon his recent talk on a game dev conference here in Prague, Peter provides an example of the new car damage visualization for BETA and we've talked Adam into making some new comparison images of the new forests! Additionally, we have Mirek talking about another important milestone we';ve currently reached with our technology and Baty (among other things!) looks back at a pretty cool April Fools joke from one of our community members.

Contents This Week

• Dev Update/Eugen

• Dev Update/Viktor

• Dev Update/Peter

• Dev Update/Mirek

• Dev Update/Adam

• Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

I don't usually contribute to Status Reports, but since Brian is out of office this week, I'd like to change that and touch upon a topic of DayZ development and Early Access development in general. Brace yourselves, as this will be a bit of a long read (but there's also a video embedded below). For the start, I understand that a lot of you have concerns about DayZ development. I also do believe there have been some inherent issues with what is, and what is not viable for Early Access development phase, as this is something that was not tried a lot before, and most of it is pioneered (process-wise) as things evolve. Early Access is a dynamic environment that is quite different from the traditional closed door development. I’m gonna get quite technical, so for those who do not feel like reading a wall of text, I had a presentation at White Nights Prague conference that takes on the subject of this Status Report contribution with less detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZgMjWXuEpg That said, I do stand by the development decisions we made as a team, but also see major flaws in how one can present changes in games’ underlying technology, where most of these changes are actually the base building blocks which, in time, will be able to provide a significant change of the overall player experience. All these engine changes are, in the case of DayZ, developed with the aim to keep the game moddable at all levels, with expanded scope. The engine changes for DayZ include

• Renderer

• Networking system

• Controls

• Script

• Sounds

• Physics

• Tools

• Server-Client architecture (in most systems!)

• Consoles

• Animations

• All gameplay systems written inscript (to a certain degree)

We need to work on all that while we create data and iterate, while we’re slowly trickling some systems into the live game (the public Experimental/Stable branches of DayZ) to test them. That creates a certain lack of visible progress as things are in motion and need time to settle down. These days, many of the base systems are in-game internally, and we are spending a significant amount of time removing a lot of old systems, while interconnecting the new ones. Let's compare that vision we have for DayZ with the live game that’s out there right now, just so that you have an idea of what it all means in practice. Live game runs old physics system, where collisions are a giant hog on server performance. To replace that, you basically need to replace everything else, as many of these old systems were hard-coded to a large degree. You need to make an originally monolithic application into a modular one, where all these old systems are interconnected. You almost, almost start from scratch. And as small as it sounds, server