I figure there are many of you Axeheads who play (or have played) Day Z, but may not have your finger on the pulse of the latest developments, so here's a one-stop shop of info goodness.

 Patch 1.7.3 has been released! This is an unprecedented collaboration between the devs and community. Rocket's words on the subject:

This is the first community + development team generated update for the DayZ mod. It is the culmination of a huge amount of work by both the community and the development team. The half-done 1.7.3 patch was made available to the community, who included many of their own fixes and updates. While dogs are "in" there are some mechanics missing so they cannot currently be used. Both myself and Matt spent a significant amount of time playing this today, and it was a lot of fun.

Credits

A small summary of those involved in actual development of the patch are as follows (visit https://github.com/R...n/Developers.md for the latest list).  Many others helped with testing and such. Please get involved with the community development project! There is much being done, new features and content. Official support is also being made available to community development team members for some requests, where possible.

• AJ (Leadz)
• Alakakala
• Alby
• Ander
• Rocket
• f0rt (ashfor03)
• Ayan4m1
• Facoptere
• HumbleUk
• IMF2000
• Tansien
• Killzone_kid
• Stapo
• Sumrak
• Pwnoz0r
• R4Z0R49
• Rajko
• TheLaughingMan
• VRShiva
• Venthos

Patch notes

Client:

* [NEW]  Tents can no longer be placed on concrete.
* [FIXED]  Building checks for tent placement (No longer place tents in buildings).
* [FIXED]  Tents now are one click place.
* [FIXED]  Fixed function for checking if in buildings.
* [UPDATED]  Vehicle repair menus now all replaced.
* [NEW]  Vehicle menus now list all damaged parts no matter if you have the item or not.
* [NEW]  Vehicle repair menus will now let you know the exact item you need to repair on failed repair attempts.
* [FIXED]  Vehicle Damage is now fully working.
* [FIXED]  Vehicle Killed is now in effect fully destroyed vehicles will now set correct in db.
* [FIXED]  Tents Now add and remove from db.
* [FIXED]  Food can no longer be consumed if the player does not have in inventory.
* [FIXED]  water can no longer be consumed if the player does not have in inventory.
* [UPDATED]  Updated UI control bug.
* [NEW]  Toolbox is now needed for all repairs.
* [NEW]  Alt-f4 is now locked and will only open your status menu.
* [Fixed]  No longer possible to drink/eat/pitch a tent/put on clothes/build sand bags/cat wire/hedgehogs/consume medical supplies/free filled water without consuming the item.
* [FIXED]  No longer possible to create axes out of thin air if you already have one
* [FIXED]  Switching skins no longer repairs pain shakes/broken legs/resets/dupes/screws/resets ammo
* [FIXED]  Duping no longer possible through zombie corpses/etc
* [FIXED]  It should now be impossible for a new players spawns to spawn unconscious.
* [FIXED]  You can no longer cook infinite free meat from camp fires
* [FIXED]  Survivors should no longer pickup a single item at the same time and both receive it.
* [FIXED]  You can no longer generate multiple tents while packing up a deployed tent.
* [FIXED]  You can no longer change clothes/eat/drink/etc. while in a vehicle
* [UPDATED]  ItemWire reduced from 0.06 to 0.01
* [UPDATED]  PartEngine updated from 0.01 to 0.06
* [UPDATED]  Version info is now displayed correct
* [NEW]  New Combat System If you fire a weapon, then you go into combat.  During combat, "ABORT" is disabled. (Need to look at the effects with high player counts)
* [NEW]  Combat 30 sec timer on all combat actions.
* [FIXED]  Zombie death animation is delayed (now it plays instantly)

Server:

* [NEW] HiveEXT.dll now replaced with our new version.
* [NEW] Official Hive login is now hard coded into the .dll
* [NEW] New Hive can now set ingame time to custom, local(local server time), static
* [FIXED]  Object Gear syncs happen based on radius not just on menu.
* [FIXED]  Vehicle Position is now updated with client position.
* [FIXED]  Vehicles save fuel properly

Here is a vid of the new zombie animation. As you can see, there is no more delayed reaction and bullets seem to have greater impact:

 There's also a blog post from Rocket detailing engine changes for the standalone. It looks very promising from a performance and anti hacking/scripting perspective:

Whatever you say it is, it isn’t

tl;dr

DayZ standalone will be based on a client-server architecture (more like an MMO), not the current ArmA2 architecture.

Full text

This blog post doesn’t contain any pictures, or videos, but I think it provides far more to be excited about. When I read many comments regarding the choice of engine, it can be very frustrating.  Up there with the endless debates of what is or is not alpha, is the maddeningly uninformed arguments about what does or does not constitute a “new engine”. I see people say that DayZ is based on the ArmA2 engine, or Take on Engine, or even the ArmA3 engine. I have been joking with team members on the project, that if we were to focus on making shader updates and not change anything else, everyone would be proclaiming that it was a “new engine”.

This week saw our lead programmer outline a dramatic plan to change the face of DayZ and how it will hit the world at the end of this year. Simply put, the application will move into a traditional client-server relationship which the server makes most of the decisions. This is the common architecture behind virtually every MMO currently out there, and it will be DayZ’s architecture when it releases. How is this possible? Well, thanks to an extremely fortunate set of occurrences much thinking and some development had already occurred; the crack team of programmers behind Operation Flashpoint have been thinking about these things for many years. Combined, again, with the unique string of events putting me in the position to have the idea for DayZ, and everything to come together… one could be forgiven for thinking it sounds like fate!

Currently ArmA is running simulation calculations on all clients and on the server as well. Clients have the power to make changes to their world. When the world is as complex and changing as that which DayZ creates, it has created an environment where hacking and performance issues abound. This is not an issue with ArmA, this is an issue of the designer (me) making a design that far outreaches it’s foundations. It is a testament to the Real Virtuality engine that this is even possible. So, what we are doing right now is removing these operations completely from the clients and ensuring the server runs the world. DayZ does not require the complex array of player and AI interactions that ArmA does, so these are all gone. What we are left with is a very heavily optimized solution where the server “call’s the shots” so to speak.

For those with some understanding of such endeavours the significance of these changes will already be readily apparent. For those who do not, it is simple. we’re not just locking the application and data down any more, but we’re making the server the umpire. We’re ripping out everything not required and replacing it with an optimized solution that has players (the survivors) and AI (the zombies). Our zombies don’t need to conduct flanking maneuvers, they don’t need to reload their magazines. They are simple, and our architecture reflects that. Achieving this will be tough, as we are already crunching very hard. If this heavy optimization is as successful as it would rationally seem to be on paper, then we will be limited on player numbers not by performance, but map design. To ensure we are right, we will be running an architecture test at some point, soon.

(the title for this post is a quotation attributed to Alfred Korzybski, philosopher and scientist, and for those not able to understand the subtext - it is a light jab at those professing to know much about engines, and alpha’s, what exactly they all mean)