Status Report - 13 June 2017

Good Tuesday Survivors, While all the players' attention is now turned to E3 in Los Angeles, we are at the office working hard on further updates. Brian will outline our decisions about the distribution of servers for the future, Mirek will show you how close-range combat and camera collision look in 0.63, and Victor is talking about gun animations. Let's have a look!

Contents This Week

• Dev Update/Hicks

• Dev Update/Eugen

• Dev Update/Peter

• Dev Update/Mirek

• Dev Update/Viktor

• Dev Update/Adam

• Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors, I thought this Status Report would be a perfect time to clarify some things with the hive, and the server browser for those that may have missed me speaking about it in 2016. I'm sure some of you may have noticed that the production team recently made the move to separate the Official DayZ servers into their own section of the hive, independent from the community hosted public servers. (Albeit with some difficulty on the game server provider side of properly configuring those community rented publics). One of the things Peter and I sat down and talked about when we looked at how we wanted the server browser to look moving into Beta and beyond, was making it crystal clear for new and existing users what servers were official, and what were user run (as well as modded, of course). Tied into this was a need to divide progression made on user hosted servers from progression on the official DayZ experience. Allowing folks to rent servers introduced a good deal of potential methods to exploit how localized server storage operates, which in turn can flood the public hive with ill-gotten gear. Trying to tackle this by limiting what can be done on the hosting side in the end just limits more and more what those server operators can do, and puts an unneeded responsibility on the limited support resources that are available. For me (and I think I can safely say for Peter as well) we needed to be certain what the initial experience a new user to DayZ would be experiencing. From a design perspective, it is very hard to be certain exactly what new users are encountering if we aren't clearly presenting them with a straight path to an official experience the first time they play the game. Sure, naming conventions for official servers worked okay for a bit - but at a certain point it just turns into tribal knowledge. The users who have been around for a while, or those who came from the mod understand, but new users can find it daunting. This is why when putting together the first mockups of the new server browser we made sure to earmark a few things:

• Separating Official, Community, and Modded servers into their own tabs

• Splitting the Official Servers off from the rest of the public hive to be certain the experience in them comes from them alone

• Maintaining the public hive on rented servers to continue that tradition of a shared character across many DayZ servers

When the new server browser finally gets to the point in which these tabs are in and functional, the whole layout will make much more sense to existing and new users. The first thing they (new users) should experience is DayZ exactly as the developers had intended it. Obviously, if said new user has friends on a community or modded server he/she can navigate there easily. I know it seems like a small thing