DayZ creator Dean “Rocket” Hall updates the zombie-loving community with some of the progress being made on the standalone version of the popular Arma 2 mod.
According to his blog, internal testing is going well and the team hopes to begin their “first large-scale capacity testing next week,” provided they have a stable enough build. Testing will range from 50 to 150 people on a server.
The team has also “been experimenting with some novel approaches [to loot] such as not having loot spawned at the server level, but having it spawned at the database level – therefore negating the ease with which loot tables could be produced and allowing us to conduct a form of economic regulation to item spawns dynamically.”
Along with these architectural developments, character design has become “the absolute core of [their] current design efforts. As demonstrated in the gallery at the bottom of this post, you’ll see a few new ethnic heads available for female characters. Hall also comments, “we want to allow characters to be fully customized and reflect the players story as they are going along. This has included some fantastic ideas inspired by the community. Until initial release, the vast majority of our efforts will be with expanding options for developing and customizing your character.”
This applies to inventory as well: “…we want to allow maximum ability for the customization and development of a players weapons. As part of this, all weapons being introduced into DayZ are being redeveloped from scratch at extremely high detail. The work being produced so far is outstanding! This means that, on release, there will be less weapons in the standalone – but it allows us the ability to continue each week to release content updates with new weapons and items.” So, expect continuous updates with regards to weapons and equipment.
World development is back in full swing as developer Ivan Buchta has returned to the studio. You can check out some of his new work in the gallery below as well.
Don’t forget to catch some of the first gameplay footage of DayZ SA here.
