Dean “Rocket” Hall during his Puja ceremony today, proceeded by a local lama. Flour is spread on each others faces, hopefully signifying the individual reaches old age. Rocket is completing this devblog from Everest Base Camp during his attempt on the summit of Mt Everest.
Devblog from Everest base camp! I’ll start with a huge thank you to the DayZ development team who have continued development at a breakneck pace despite me being off living a lifelong dream to climb Mt Everest. Although the timing is poor for my sabatical, it is not something planned on a whim and involves non-refundable costs of up to $100k.
So here I am, at Everest Base Camp, 5400 meters, writing what I am sure is the highest ever devblog from the ground! This is largely able to occur because of Matt Lightfoot, the youngish looking chap who is our tireless Production Assistant. Both him and others have continued to send me progress updates and approvals, which I am accessing via a satellite connection.
Anyway, the important bit is the game. Ivan is now working a great deal directly on the project, and has been picking up the slack for some of the areas I needed to address which has been a huge help. Those from the community who wanted to get involved in writing are keen to get started, but the response is so massive that we are looking to put a structure in place to ensure community written books pass through some kind of editorial process. This community content, together with copyright expired books, will form the basis of hundreds or thousands of books that can be found and read in the world. There are no set timeframes for this, so please be patient.
Programmer Roundup Ondrej, our lead programmer, continues his work on moving DayZ into a server-client architecture, turing the entire architecture of DayZ into an MMO. Jirka is working on updating some of our steamworks integration, and fixing bugs associated with the massive inventory changes we implemented over the past month.
Radio Implementation Bebul is working on our Radio implementation, allowing players to communicate using a basic radio, similar (but more simple) to the popular ACARS radio mod for ArmA2. Players pick up radios, and they can set a frequency and talk/receive text/voice from other players. The microphone or speaker can be turned on or off to allow players to use radios as a listening device. If the player has not crafted a headset onto the radio, then the output is public (either voice or text). The results are fantastic, and Bebul is now ensuring this all works properly in the all special cases during Multiplayer play.
Animators Our team is working their way through the animation backlog, involving new zombie animations for the new skeleton, test melee moves for our new melee system, new animations for the new animals (such as the deer), and then onto player animations for the new skeleton, custom designed to feel more like a civilian rather than the trained soldier of ArmA2.
Internal Artists Mostly they are working on creating the interior data required for the AI zombies to pathfind correctly inside buildings. New road decals have been created by Mario for the roads so it looks like they have a damaged look to them, to give the world more of a feel like “the Road”. One of our big special new buildings is in game, and we will surprise you with some new screenshots of this in the next devblog!
External Artists Our team of artists recruited from the community have been hard at work. The new male character mesh is being prepared, in line with the new skeleton, as well as a new template for clothing skinning. The new M4A1 has been committed with proxies that allow our new attachment system to be utilized along with the crafting system. Also being worked on are a Gas Mask, Pilot Helmet, Mauser Rifle, pen/paper, mess tin, can opener - a huge amount of items are being developed while we wait for the programming tasks to be completed heading towards our first public release.
The excitement from the team is tremendous with all these fantastic new items, allowing huge crafting possibilities.
Map Design Seven towns have been remade by SenChi, overseen by Ivan, to alter the look and feel better. Bugs are continually being fixed and we have purchased new satellite data to improve the detail of the base map (looks much better in the distance with this new data).
Conclusion I realize some people are upset at my departure from the project for two months to climb Mt Everest, but hopefully from this you can see the large team Bohemia have assembled behind the development that are continuing to innovate and develop DayZ Standalone in the direction of the game we all want. This is going to take as long as it needs to, we want to release our initial alpha under the architecture it needs to avoid hacking and security issues - this is the only remaining task stopping us from releasing the alpha. But while this task is being completed, we can continue with other activities.
The next devblog will feature some screenshots to demonstrate the progress, captured by Matt, but my satellite connection and tiny laptop cant cope with downloading the current build.
So, this is the devblog I write from Everest Base Camp, at 5400 meters! Tomorrow I am off to the Khumbu Icefall for training in fixed lines and ladders, big thanks to the community for their continued patience, and everyone at Bohemia who is pushing hard towards our DayZ standalone initial release!
