A new developer diary was released for the upcoming DayZ Standalone, in which Dean “Rocket” Hall talks about possibilities, work and the current build. The bad news is that the standalone is not ready for public consumption just yet because the server architecture still isn't ready for the load. The good news is that the build after the current one could set the standalone up for a public release once the streaming and load optimization on the client-side has been fixed.
Blues caught wind of the new dev diary from the official DayZ tumblr page. IncGamers also managed to capture some of the important quotes from the diary, but not the most important quote, in which Dean explains what's being worked on for the next milestone build which would determine viability for public release, saying...
“So I guess the biggest piece of work remaining for us is what we call the multiplayer network bubble. So what that means is, is that clients receive updates within the vicinity of being.“In Arma it receives updates from everything that occurs on the map. That works out very well for the Arma system but it doesn't work out so well for DayZ, where we have hundreds of thousands of items and thousands of zombies on the map, and lots of players doing complex little interactions.“So what that means is, is that when the player is moving around they're only getting the updates that are close to them. This gives us good performance games; it gives us a lot more security – in terms of dealing with hacking and things like that – because there is limited data available to the client.That has been programmed to be developed for this sprint that's coming up now.So we'll have more reports on the progress of that in the next dev blog.”
Once that's been ironed out, most of the hurdles will be out of the way and we'll be looking at an actual, viable time-frame in which the standalone will be accessible for public consumption. At that point you can let the fanboy flaps hang loose and go all out in gathering your friends and throwing money at the pre-access of DayZ's standalone on Steam.
For those who don't remember, the main hurdles that the team had to overcome was the new client-server architecture that the standalone of DayZ operates on. The whole thing set the project back by a large bit because players complained dearly about the hacking problem in the mod, and the best way to address that is with an MMO-type server infrastructure.
Now for those of you worried about the game stepping too far away from its mod roots, rest assured that there will be builds made available (further down the road) that will allow users to setup their own servers so that they don't have to rely on Bohemia. The roadmap for that hasn't been detailed in a publicly accessible time-line, so we'll just have to wait for the standalone to release and then see where things go from them.
Additionally, the team had also been hit with a setback in the last milestone build that caused a nasty bug to crash the game, rendering the game unplayable for a time. That's all been sorted and based on what's been showcased in the video above, the game is looking extremely fresh and very engaging. I honestly can't wait.
The new plan is to get the public alpha up and going by the time Gamescom 2013 gets underway at the end of August. If things continue to go as planned, it's likely that the new target window could be hit and we'll be playing the standalone of DayZ before the end of summer. Keep those fingers crossed, people.
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