DayZ 1.19 Experimental Update - The Secrets of Livonia

It’s been a busy 3 months but we made it. Allow us to present the first experimental build of upcoming game update 1.19 - live right now on Steam. This update is definitely one of our biggest since we released the Livonia DLC. It was hard to hide our excitement, which you probably noticed during the various teasers and streams we provided in the past few weeks.

It's impossible to cover everything in this announcement, but we will outline the most important parts of the build, along with our intentions behind some of the changes. As usual, if you’re interested in checking out the full list of additions, changes and fixes, head on over to our forums where you can find the patch notes. Here

Let’s start with something everybody will notice immediately: changes to the player’s physical movements:

Our primary focus was on fixing a variety of bugs and issues, some of which were exploited by players to gain an advantage over others (i.e. clipping through terrain and static objects).

We also looked into the issue where falling off the edges was pushing the player far too forward and decreased their speed quite a bit. This means players won’t be falling that far anymore, which will hopefully result in far fewer random deaths from stepping over tree trunks while going downhill in a forest. This will also make jumping more relevant.

We fixed an issue that now allows players to move faster up and down hills, compared to flat terrain. This doesn’t mean we’ve slowed a player down more when they’re walking through rough terrain. While it’s something we’d like to do eventually, it was beyond the scope of this update.

Moving through water was looked into as well. We didn’t really like that somebody could just sprint through water, so we decided to implement a restriction on hip level, making it so players are forced to walk (or jog, if the sprint modifier is used). Lastly, we looked into restricting player movement while they’re in a sprint. We felt it was way too easy to maneuver at such speed, so we increased the inertia of the player’s character. This affects both the time it takes to reach full speed (or stop), as well as changing direction while in a sprint. We understand that such a change may not suit all the communities out there, so we spent some time on implementing parameters into the server-side json configuration, making it possible for server owners to tweak it to their liking (and revert to the previous state, if so desired). Speaking of characters, we added a new (and optional) on-screen bleeding indicator, which should make cuts much more noticeable. It also allows players to learn about the amount of sources and their severity without looking at the HUD. Seen in the Article

Aside from the changes concerning characters, we also implemented the highly anticipated vehicle simulation upgrade. We integrated the latest version of Enfusion’s vehicle simulation into DayZ, thanks to the tremendous help of the Enfusion team. The primary goal was to resolve longstanding stability issues found in vehicle simulation. This is quite a huge change, so vehicles will feel different, and hopefully they’ll be more fun to drive around. Along with the new simulation, we’ve also introduced the ability to have an automatic transmission (with a certain new vehicle ;-) ), a hand brake, and a car horn. The HUD vehicle has also received a much needed update, and now offers drivers more information about the state of their vehicle. Experimental