Status Report - 2 May 2017

Contents This Week

• Dev Update/Hicks

• Dev Update/Eugen

• Dev Update/Peter

• Dev Update/Mirek

• Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors, As Eugen is covering what the current tasks are, that frees me up to talk about some of the mechanics and systems that we (Peter, myself, the development team as a whole) are looking forward to improving upon in beta and the milestones past that. Given that after checking the various communities centered around DayZ, I noticed a group of posts doing their best impression of the World War 3 style courtroom audience summoned by the Q entity in Star Trek's Encounter at Farpoint when discussing the current state of vehicles, I figured now is as good a time as any to clear up some things when it comes to them, in DayZ. (The vehicles, not Q's apparitions) ]While I personally love the work Peter and the design team did on manual transmissions in DayZ, vehicle handling and mechanics as a whole are far from where we want them to be. The biggest culprit of this, obviously, is physics, and their handling on terrain. We did show some of the changes being worked on for that area of the vehicles, but many may have missed it.

It's fair to say that vehicles in DayZ's Alpha phase of Early Access have received the least amount of user visible love. Part of that is due to the complex physics situation in DayZ, as we still currently operate two completely separate physics systems. Another part of that is due to so much of the focus being on technology, and getting it in place to support DayZ as we want it to be. I'm looking forward to that, as from my perspective, vehicles are a critical component of mid-to-late game DayZ gameplay - and quite honestly, without them in a satisfying state, you tend to just end up with a walking simulator ;) Let me give you guys a look at some of the areas we will be looking at improving into and throughout Beta.

• Terrain handling / acceleration

• SFX (Engines / Transmission)

• UI (Specifically in the toggle-able HUD that we have shown before - so that 3PP players can see the same critical info 1PP can)

• Feedback on vehicle damage state (Aside from damage materials, and doors falling off - think smoke from a damaged engine, engine stumble/diesel when running out of fuel)

• Proper destruction of vehicle when it has been destroyed (rather than the current state of the vehicle just not turning on)

Don't think for a moment anyone on the dev team looks at vehicles the way they are now and says ]"Y'know what - that's perfect, ship it" - far from it. All of us are just as antsy and eager to see DayZ's systems start to flesh out and polish as we all want them to be - we just have to knuckle down and understand that the technology to support our vision needs to be ready for us to start implementing this. This exact reason, and so much more is why all of us are so focused on, and excited to enter the BETA phase of DayZ's Early Access.