And that is quite in the literal sense, too. Well, not in real life (although, I have been close to that a few times in my DayZ playing career), but in the game. With the expansion of the medical system, the next updates will keep adding complexity to the health system within DayZ. The experimental servers are already juggling with various new conditions, from broken limbs, to the possibility of getting sick from rain and cold or the possibility of a heart attack. The defibrillator will be crucial in reviving unconscious players with an irregular pulse. Here’s the current change-log for the experimental branch, set to come to the regular servers sometime next week:
New:
- Actions: Vomiting have associated sound effects
- Actions: Can check pulse on unconscious players
- Actions: Searching for berries will now add berries to your inventory
- Actions: Eat All now supported for consumables
- Animations: New Ruger 10/22 reload animations
- Animations: Player now can sit with gun/weapon
- Environment: New rock textures
- Food: Sambucus berry item added
- Food: Canina berry item added
- Graphics: Adding lights to currently rendered scene changed
- Map: Olsha has been updated
- Map: Khelm has been updated
- Map: New rock formations outside Svetlo have been created
- Map: New Orthodox Chapel has been created
- Map: Police Stations & Medical Centers have been placed across the map
- Map: New villages surrounding Svetlo
- Medical: Players can have a heart attack (declared as “irregular pulse” with pulse checking actions)
- Weather: Rain, Clouds, Wind, calculated on server and distributed to clients
- Weather: Rain now causes items and player to become wet
Fixed:
- Actions: Added ‘inUseItem’ back to action on target function
- Actions: Proper nutritional value will be added when eating near empty food
- Actions: Berry picking script messages to player improved.
- Graphics: SSAO in options saved
- Graphics: Rain effect settings changed
- Graphics: Rain geometry optimized (28bytes vs 12 bytes per vertex)
- Graphics: Spot light culling fixed
- Graphics: Fix of terrain intersections
- Graphics: Fix of geometry trace for flares
- Login: Failure during new character creation could cause player to get stuck as unconscious
- Map: Optimizations for Svetlo performance
- Map: Forests surrounding Svetlo bugfixes
- Medical: Would never actually die from zero health or blood due to medical conditions
- Medical: Epi-pens will now wake anyone (briefly) from unconsciousness even if blood very low
- Medical: Defibrillator used for restarting the heart of players who have a heart attack
- Medical: Unconsciousness had irregular and unpredictable behavior (epi-pens will now always wake an unconscious player, unless they are having a heart attack)
- Medical: Melee damage application system changed to better balance
- Medical: Chance of bleeding from fists reduced significantly
- Medical: Disconnected players avatars did not take shock or blood damage
- Zombies: Zombies aims mostly for chest area now when attacking
Additionally, Rocket also made a guest appearance on a DayZ stream on twitch, and was kind enough to answer some questions (quite a few actually). Vehicles will be coming into the game in 6 months (the worst case scenario), but are likely to be introduced a lot sooner. “I think six months for vehicles would be a very conservative one. I think it’s possible they could be much sooner” stated Rocket. Even sooner than that, we’ll be seeing persistent containers, such as the tents (which already have an in-game model).The loot hoarder in me smiled at this news, already foreseeing the countless hours spent hauling the best of the best gear, only to have some fresh-spawn stumble over my secret stash and robbing me blind. In addition, the next patches will introduce items like the taser, the CZ 550 hunting rifle, or even horse riding (we’re very curious how Dean and his team will pull it off). While DayZ is still currently in an early alpha state, the rate of progression on the development side of things is great. DayZ feels different (and for the most part, better) with every passing week, and we’re anxious to see what the future holds for this ever-growing running simulator.
What features are you most excited about?