Don’t mess with my walled garden, or I’ll ‘ave you.
I’ve not read a DayZ update blog in a while, but they’ve got awfully convoluted and technical. This latest one is talking about two potential updates that aren’t actually out yet; 0.48 and 0.49.
Let’s start with 0.48, which is scheduled to pop out of gestation on 13 August (but might not) and should address “issues with melee combat, container contents, global voice manipulation, some camera clipping issues.” It’ll also add persistent containers and items which is, apparently, something players will be head over heels in love with.
0.48 is just being labelled as a hot fix, while 0.49 is the more meaty August update. Meaty is perhaps the wrong word, as one of the big feature additions is set to be horticulture (fancy gardening.) This should provide an alternative source of food for peckish survivors and may also get you featured on the BBC’s Gardener’s World. Is Gardener’s World still aired? I don’t know.
Anyway, the DayZ team say they’ve added swine to the game too. So maybe meaty was the right word after all. Hurrah.
On a more technical level, there’s some in depth design chat about what does and does not work about the present melee system and what’s being done to tighten it up: “the melee system is being redone within the engine itself so we will expand upon it and hopefully find the most ideal solution on how to retain hit detection during swing in game but the task will take some time.” Swing hit detection is going to be turned off on short-ranged weapons for the time being (replaced by cursor detection.)
In addition to all that, there’s an update about the possibility of renting private “shards” of the DayZ “hive” which sounds a lot like the premise of a Philip K Dick novel to me. In DayZ terms, it will “enable dedicated communities to create their own private DayZ worlds.” That sounds sufficiently important. There’s no date given for when this might be possible, but don’t expect it any earlier than “the next few weeks.”
Here’s what private shards will and will not be able to do:
Can:
- Password protect the server
- Operate a white list (using BEC)
- Ban/Kick trouble makers
- Define and enforce server gameplay rules (eg: DayZRP, PvE only, etc)
Can not:
- Access or modify the base game configuration (amount of loot, amount of dynamic server events, vehicles (when they are implemented), etc)
- Violate the naming convention declared in the hosting rules (these will be updated to reflect the new private shard capabilities)
- Have access to the database itself
- Operate any 3rd party “Admin tools” aside from the approved BEC (BattlEye Extended Controls)
- Access debug logs (currently these are unavailable for both user privacy, and performance)
- Exceed current maximum player limits per instance (40, as of the time of the writing of this status report)
