New DayZ Status Report showcases the State of Development, new Animations, Weather Changes and new Audio
Hello everyone! We’re back with the latest DayZ Status Report highlights. This time the developers have shared an update on the state of development, the latest news from the animation team, changes to the weather system and some insights into the audio progress. Today’s community spotlight also had some content from the DUG community!
Eugen – Features coming to Experimental
The first 0.63 Experimental build is now released and brought us a lot of exciting improvements. It is however very light on content. The developers hope to add new content and features in regular bundles.
The issues taking up most time are related to client and server stability. From locked characters, to server kicks or just unexpected crashes to desktop. The Stress Test changelogs show that things are looking better but are not yet stable enough to deploy the patch to community servers. The recent progress gives us faith that we will be able to offer you the 0.63 Experimental patch on DUG soon.
Developers are working on client and server stability to deploy the Experimental patch to community servers soon.
Meanwhile, feature development is coming along nicely and the benefits of the new engine are already showing in the pace of the implementation.
Eugen has prepared an overview of the current state of some of the features:
Recently considered finished for Experimental phase:
- Hidden stash
- CPR
- Gestures
- Repairing
- UI Main Menu
- Soft Skills
- Environmental Exposure
- Goat – Animal
Last week they have bug-fixed and reviewed:
- Character Unconsciousness
- Chambering Loop
- Fireplace
- Jump
- UI Server Browser
- Cooking
- Weapon/Item Swap Action/Animation
- Compass
- Gathering Ambient Loot
- Gathering Actions
- Vehicles – Open/Close doors
- Vehicles – Attach/Detach vehicle parts
- Injured Animations
This week is dedicated to the internal implementation of:
- Climbing
- Weapon dispersion
- Weapon zeroing
- Weapons – Double Barrel
- Diseases
- Scopes
- Enfusion Hierarchy
- New Input System
- Action Animations
- Collisions during melee
A bunch of these features will be released to Experimental over the coming weeks with more following.
Viktor and Adam- Melee, Climbing and Polishing Animations
The animation team continues to improve the player character and animations. At the moment they are revisiting and improving old animations or replacing them with better ones. This includes melee combat and attack animations for weapons such as the baseball bat.
#DayZ News:
New Animation for baseball bat attack by @24VictorKane. More melee weapons will get custom animations in the future. pic.twitter.com/AI1UYcv4jY
— DayzUnderground (@DayzUnderground) June 19, 2018
Further improvements to the animation system include:
- Better finger poses while holding items.
- IZH43 Shotgun animation set.
- New gestures such as nodding, shrug and “OK”.
- Ability to jump over obstacles and climb over larger ones.
- Tweaking of animations while the player is on their back.
- Adjusted speed of animations.
- Animations for placing small and large items.
- Revamped the horticulture animations.
- New animations when viewing the compass or map.
The animation team is working in full steam ahead. Every week new actions or improvements are done. We’re excited to try them in-game!
Adam – Improved Rain, Clouds and Weather Effects
Technical difficulties prevented a switch of the cloud rendering to the SimulWeather TrueSky 3rd part library. The developers are now focusing on improving the current volumetric implementation instead.
Clouds will be more visible and distinct from the skybox background. Their interaction with distance and height fog are improved and they now blend better.
In addition to the changes of clouds, the visuals of rain will also improve:
- Close-up raindrops are much more visible now.
- Re-added effect that tries to visualize light refraction on raindrops.
- Fogginess parameter has been tweaked so the rain blends better with the background.
- Close-up raindrops are more visible during the night-time around light sources.
- Rain speed has been increased.
Both the cloud and rain improvement should be available for testing in the next major Stress Test update.
Filip – Character Sounds
Currently the sound team is working on character voice sounds.
Implemented so far are:
- Breathing when out of stamina.
- Holding breath while aiming down the sight.
- Hit reactions when the character takes damage.
Next up, they plan to add more sounds to create an immersive character representation. Some of those sounds will be connected to animations, such as slight grunts while jumping, picking up heavy items or sounds that emphasize melee combat. Others are connected to the character states like hunger or diseases.
So far, all sounds are placeholders and in some cases, only male sounds are played.
DUG Content in the Community Spotlight
4K Wallpaper
Time for a new wallpaper? Merlin from the DUG team made two unique designs in 4K resolution with the help of DrDesync’s screenshots.
Are you friendly? This guy probably isn’t!
“Finger on the trigger, time to draw the final stroke”
The idea behind this artwork was to hide a grim situation behind bright colors in a stylized edit that looks flashy and clean, and not “typical DayZ” at first sight. It shows a survivor wearing a mask who is about to kill himself because he can’t live anymore with what he’s done, which visibly corroded and destroyed him.
#TwitterplaysDayZ
#Twitter plays #DayZ – Can they survive?
An interactive DayZ story within Twitter. Decide and vote in the poll to continue.
DayZ Experimental just released and we're going to do something truly new! This will be an interactive screenshot story. Everyone decides what happens. pic.twitter.com/70fpdebrm7
— DayzUnderground (@DayzUnderground) June 14, 2018