DayZ Developers release update on the 0.63 switch & server management tools

A few weeks ago the developers announced an e-Mail list sign-up for server owners. This is the first update, shared August 15th.

“Dear DayZ server owners, welcome to the first newsletter and thank you for signing up. First and foremost, we would like to thank you for your continuous support – private servers are the backbone of the DayZ community and all of you are playing an important role in the overall DayZ experience. While moving towards Beta and 1.0, we want to increase our communication with you to ensure a smooth transition of your servers across the new updates. With the first content update (which is currently on the Stress Test branch) coming to Experimental Branch, we want to enable community servers to switch to this branch.”

This will mean two things: Dealing with the unstable state of EXP builds until BETA and getting used to changes in server management tools

“This will mean two different challenges: 1. Dealing with the unstable state of Experimental builds until BETA (0.63 Stable) hits 2. Getting used to changes in server management tools.
Now our 0.63 content update has been delayed severely over the last few weeks, and we do realize that this has been causing further hits to the player traffic on your servers. If we saw options to proceed with the switch before this content update, we’d go for them – sadly that was not the case, but we’re getting closer now.”

What’s to come?

“Despite the challenges of Experimental builds, we want to make the transition as easy as possible. Additionally, considering the changes coming with GDPR policies, we have to be careful in many ways. Tools that many of you have been using to manage servers, or even the options available for server management, will be changing.

We want to expand the server logging capabilities

We want to expand the logging capabilities and make sure they can be turned on and off as there is always an overhead in terms of performance that needs to be dealt with. Usage of max-ping, white listing and black listing players. Basically giving you more control over the experience that your players have both short-term and long-term.”

This is a topic our server admin and security team are concerned about. To secure the DUG servers, we use custom-built tools that give us strong capabilities to analyse and act upon server logs. Today, we have no idea to what extent our tools have to be changed and if we can achieve feature parity once 0.63 is released to community servers. We hope the developers will provide more information.

The developers will add an in-game report function

“As an example, let us mention an in-game reporting option that any player can utilize to send more information directly into the server log with a timestamp and text. That way, you as a server owner will have easier time keeping things going. There are lots of improvements like this that we have either implemented or are working on as of now.”

The next update

“In the next newsletter, we will cover things that will not work yet and things that have already been improved. Running a server will further get a lot more easier once we enable modding and release the server files. In the meantime we will use this newsletter to communicate directly and help you grow your communities with more direct approach.

As of now, we are in preparation of a guide on what to expect after the switch over to 0.63, as well as what are our goals going to be in terms of tools, options, modding and more. So expect more detailed information soon. See you on your 0.63 community servers, Survivors! DayZ Development Team”

Conclusions

• The developers want to improve their communication with server owners and communities
• Server management tools and capabilities will change, some features are currently missing
• The next newsletter will go into more details
• A guide and overview of the 0.63 release are currently WIP
• There is no release date for 0.63 community servers yet