Advanced Role-Play Systems 

  • [09/13/2016] Status Report

  • DayZ Colony Community Spotlight can be found in our Status Reports
DayZ Colony Community Spotlight can be found in our Status Reports
 #5988  by Weyland
 
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Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

Lets dive right into it and take a look at where we are with our milestone goals. After that we'll talk about some of the current top issues we are working on in prep for 0.61 experimental, and lastly we have a few new things on our Trello for you all.

Fair warning - text wise this is a brief status report - but we tried to also push in some stuff that is being worked on, if not specifically for 0.61.

0.61 Milestone Goals:

- Server Login Queue
Ready for experimental branch testing - no current issues preventing this at this time.

- Merge of New Audio Technology from Arma 3 Eden Update
Technology successfully merged into DayZ branch. Ready for further testing on experimental branch.

- Update of Weapon Sounds for New Audio Technology
All current firearms configured - Audio team is working on completing SFX for future firearms. In addition, this week several issues were encountered with impact noises on some weapons not operating properly, this issue is being addressed by the audio team as of the time of this report.

- Dynamic Spawning of Infected
Gameplay Programmers are still working on fully plugging in animal spawns to this system. While this is ongoing, the design and gameplay programming teams have been discussing ways to evenly distribute dynamic spawns across all vilages and points of interest, and ways to provide a compelling experience without impacting the server performance budget during the lifetime of the server.

- Predators (Wolves)
Still cautiously optimistic here. However at this point it is looking like we *will* be testing wolves on some of the initial 0.61 experimental pushes to see if they behave and operate as expected in a live environment.

Beyond our defined milestone goals, we have several additional changes that are looking to be rolled into 0.61, lets take a quick look at those right now.

- Dynamic Shadows
Programmers from the Enfusion engine team have been working to resolve the last remaining issues encountered in internal testing with this. As of the current build in internal testing right now we still have a few small issues with light in some edge cases ignoring geometry, however this is looking really good for 0.61 experimental. Below you'll see an example of how this is looking right now, both in the Status Report and on our Trello.

- Network Synchronization Improvements
As Miroslav, our Lead Gameplay Programmer discussed in a previous Status Report - he has been working hard on improving our client/server synchronization in an effort to improve quality-of-life and reduce frustrating deaths and poor gameplay experiences due to client/server disagreements.

Things are looking very, very promising. That said, as tends to happen in development, internal testing has encountered several issues that can potentially cause unexpected changes to player position and movement under less than ideal network conditions. As everyone that plays DayZ has different connection conditions, and communities are spread across the globe, ensuring that gameplay and network synchronization works properly under all reasonable pings and connection speeds is critical.

So that said, the gameplay programming team and the quality assurance teams are working hand in hand to resolve this issue for 0.61 experimental.

- New Server Browser
Many players have reported large frame drops and client unresponsiveness in our legacy server browser (currently used in 0.60 stable branch), and due to that we have pushed up the merge of our new server browser to 0.61 in an attempt to address this sooner, rather than later. Keep in mind however, this is only the first iteration of this and some functionality will not be present or working entirely. However, functionality we fully expect the first iteration to be 1:1 with the current 0.60 server browser.

Currently, our QA Lead Ondrej (Andy) is tracking 16 must-fix bugs for 0.61, including but not limited to:

Player Sounds significantly quieter than environment and AI

Client crash after exiting

Player position hitching under less than ideal network conditions (150+ms)

Animation Issues related to swimming

Certain walls and objects not displaying shadows at certain angles

Characters getting stuck when climbing ladders

Player to Player magazine capacity synchronization

Item Duplication Exploit (Thanks to the new security feedback form!)

Client crash related to connecting to server

Characters stuck in weapon raised pose in certain conditions


We've updated our Trello with some new progress shots from the art team, and a preview VIDEO of the current status of dynamic shadows (see below!)

https://trello.com/c/GSZoLFyL/122-dynamic-shadows

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director