Dev Update/Hicks
Greetings Survivors,
Hey guys, its that time again - Status Report day. I know you all wanted to hear some crazy hype tastic reveal like - FREE OCULUS RIFT HEADSETS UNDER EACH OF YOUR COMPUTER DESKS OMG YAY (but more specific to our upcoming .60 experimental push) but I'm afraid I don't have that for you today, and we don't do hype like that anyways. While we've made strides in client side performance functionality, we're still chipping away at blocking issues in the following areas:
Inventory UI
With the move to Direct X 11, we'll no longer be able to support the legacy user interface. Thus, functional parity with the legacy UI -has- to be achieved on the new UI. The design team are currently working on resolving the last few bugs blocking us from having that parity.
Reload mechanics
The move in .60 to involving manual bolt cycling, as well as misfire and jamming management via the charging handle on weapons such as the M4 has an impact on every firearm in the game. We're currently working to resolve some functional hiccups in the switching between magazines, and the need to chamber twice before firing from a new magazine.
Character Loading/Saving
A very large volume of unneeded traffic was discovered when investigating issues with character loading - a rewrite of the methods used to save and load from the central hive. Once we restore proper functionality, this area will no longer be a blocker.
Tasks Completed:
- .60 Build Optimization Pass (Performance in cities increased by 50% from initial build - optimization is ONGOING however)
- Cleared Rendering Test Pass list of visual/rendering based bugs
- Renderer settings UI
Current Focus:
- MSAA Hardware Multisampling Support
- Alpha to Coverage GPU Feature (Which will increase quality of vegetation rendering)
- Finalization of In-Game UI Features
We've heard a lot of feedback wanting some changes to how we're communicating development information over the last year - and we started steps a few months back towards adjusting to try and meet some of these requests. We've expanded the community team and put processes in to ensure that regardless of development tasks, the Status Reports will come out on schedule (Tuesdays, BiWeekly). In addition, we've begun using our YouTube channel more - to show upcoming changes to DayZ as they are developed. (Status Reports talk about development progress, and what changes are planned in the future - where as the YouTube channel should show what is coming in the next build - when it is functional enough to demonstrate)
We'll also be trying a team Q&A type video where folks can ask questions about what its like to work on DayZ, work at Bohemia, and such - our first video on this from our Quality Assurance team should be coming shortly. Our Community Manager Smo55 is ramping up his presence on our subreddit and official forums, our new Brand Manager DHawkz is working with Bohemia Interactive publishing to expand the options for DayZ merchandise on the BI Store, and a redesign of DayZ.com, as well as working with our hardware partners to create opportunities for raising awareness of DayZ as it moves towards our Beta, and Release goals.
I'll be discussing some of the systems and pending changes tied to the new animation system and player controller over on the official forums later this week, and next up for the YouTube channel we're working on our next Dev Log video on .60 covering performance comparisons between Direct X 9, and Direct X 11 rendering.
Once .60 hits experimental branch, we'll start putting together our first "Whats new with .60" video - where DHawkz, Smo55, and I go over the changes in .60 and what to expect gameplay wise - for our YouTube channel.
Lastly - as .60's time on experimental starts to draw to a close - we'll be bringing back the official DayZ survival gaming e-sport, The Survivor GameZ. The Survivor GameZ VII Qualifiers will be a fantastic way for us to stress test .60 before it hits stable, and to see how the new inventory, and reloading/chambering mechanics work in a high stress situation. Keep an eye on the official Survivor GameZ and DayZ twitter accounts for more info on this - twitter.com/survivor_gamez and twitter.com/dayzdevteam
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer
Dev Update/Mirek
Last two weeks, we spent our time mostly on bug fixing of some critical issues like client/server crashing or issues with weapon reloading, because we want that first release of 0.60 experimental will be in the best state as possible.
Designers have started to use new damage system, so we have few requests on improvements, but they aren't blockers.
A lot of issues were fixed in loot distribution and some new features were added. For example random loot spawning in world containers. This new feature is now moved to designers, so they can set it properly. We have also prepared new Infected/Animal spawner, but this won't be ready in 0.60 as we need to do some work in AI simulation. We will talk about this new system in next status report.
Maybe the most interesting thing is that we've started to rewrite some core parts of network code, which should improve desync issues and server performance. I hope that we will be able to show these improvements in 0.60, but I don't want to give any promises, because it's possible, that first iteration will break the game even more.
- Mirek Mañena / Lead Gameplay Programmer
Dev Update/Viktor
The ongoing work on weapon animations is still far from finishing. As there are more ways in which state gun can be when player will initiate the reload the proper animation has to be created to provide a corresponding reload action. Some reloads are being replaced with more polished ones and many new animations are being created to support possibility to load a chamber with single ammo. The animation sets for each gun now have magazine reload animations, manipulation with weapon mechanism, chambering animations and more is still to come.
The main player graph now contains most of important functionalities but we are constantly going through existing animations and filling out some missing ones or replacing with more polished versions. Also the wounded character now has some sets implemented as a prototype (some walks and runs) but we will have to wait for all the animations until we fully introduce it.
The previously mentioned improvements to pulling out and hiding of weapons was slightly polished in past week. We have achieved what we were aiming for. While standing still you can start arming a gun, begin walking and meanwhile change stance to crouch - it will just work, oh and of course you can stop while doing that anytime. This of course means a lot to other player actions like for instance gestures or eating as can be seen in the video capture from our animation editor preview.