DayZ is about to see a crucial update as the team behind the title plans on implementing better collision physics in the coming weeks.

The patch was originally planned to be released this Wednesday, however the developers of DayZ standalone took to their blog to state that patch 0.37 has been pushed back due to being unstable and having some new bugs that made players invisible.

Their main focus for the next few weeks is getting the patch stable along with implementing cooking and other survival combat mechanics.

The main beef of the patch though is fixing the network issues, collisions and their new physics system implementation, which is crucial when they implement vehicles later on in the Alpha.

There’s still a long ways to go with the Alpha, but things are beginning to take shape. Here are some details, as seen on the official blog:

Trying to get 0.37 to stable

Our main focus this week was to deploy a new version of the game to stable branch. We have two public “branches” of code, stable and experimental. A deployment to stable branch of the latest version of the game was scheduled for Wednesday, however we were not happy with some of the issues that remained.

Three major code changes have been occurring. We have been changing the way collision works to solve a number of bugs, such as shooting while prone colliding with the world and zombie collisions. Also our new physics system has been implemented, allowing us to have throwing, dragging, ragdoll, and even vehicles. In addition, a new guaranteed network message system has been developed to solve network issues, improve client/server performance, as well as reduce the “desync” issues experienced by many.

A number of bugs came out of these developments, two of which cause situations where players and zombies can become invisible to some clients. We want to solve this issue before we deploy to stable. You can try the current version out for yourself on experimental branch.

Survival Cooking

Progress continued with the development of several different kinds of fireplaces, and has moved onto creating assets for constructible ovens. These items will be persistent in the world, allowing the player to cook many things. The temperature system developed in the engine has been refined to have correct return from hot or cold to ambient temperature.

Survival Combat

A new area of work commenced this week is combat directly supporting survival. This includes throwing items, bows and arrows. We now have a great new animation for throwing, and the system developed for this will allow us to support proper animations for bows (e.g. drawing bow back, awaiting player input to fire).