Jun 2019 Status Update

Jun 2019 Status Update

 In Namalsk posts

First of all, if you have not yet heard, on June 7th, Bohemia Interactive officially announced an update to the Licensed Data Packages (more info at https://www.bohemia.net/blog/licensed-data-package-for-dayz). This update essentially means that already released public data packages (content from Arma 1 and 2) are now available for the use by modders in DayZ. And because Namalsk uses quite bit of Arma 1 and Arma 2 assets (which are not all available in DayZ), this announcement means that Namalsk can legally be released whenever I decide to now.

But unfortunately, Namalsk is not there yet. Nonetheless, a good progress has been made this month, so lets get to it!

DayZ update 1.04 features an option for a music playback. I was waiting for this moment for quite a long time, because I do like what good ambient tracks can bring to the overall feel and the environment soundscape. So it was finally time for me to implement a dynamic music system for Namalsk. How does it work? Well, first, there are three different types of ambient tracks:

  • time-based tracks (dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, night)
  • location-based tracks – when player enters an area (day and night version)
  • event-based tracks – to increase atmosphere during a random event

The list is ordered by the priority, which simply means that location will play over time tracks and event will override everything else. Music playback is completely client-side and the timers in between individual playbacks are definitely up to further refinement, which mainly depends on how large will the final library of ambient tracks be (less tracks mean longer pauses in between to ensure things wont repeat too much). Now you may ask about the tracks itself – I have been very lucky to receive a help from Daniel Staff aka Bubson (visit his soundcloud here). The cooperation with Daniel has been really amazing so far and it is really something to listen to the already prepared tracks in the game with the system in place now. He also prepared a special track for the main menu (when Namalsk is loaded in the background). So, lets have a small taste of what is to come!

And what else has happened? Update 1.04 also officially brings support for the attachments on infected, which allowed for some cool looking military infected models. Take a look on following picture – a randomized example showing gear on 3 new infected types on Namalsk – NAC operator and two Russian soldiers. These (alongside existing USMC models) will enhance lore feel by a tiny bit – players will encounter all the factions, which took part of Namalsk Crisis conflict.

Ability to spawn items on the infected models means that I can somewhat decrease the availability of these items in the world and thus forcing people to hunt the infected to get and patch selected gear from their bodies.

I have also spent quite lot of time on debugging respawn issues with AI herds. Given the fact that Namalsk is smaller and has perhaps a bit different approach to the use of CE and AI, I was able to discover an issue within the AI, which basically prevented from a territory to be used again unless server would be restarted. On such a small map, it would basically mean that most of the animal herds would be killed within 1-2 hours. Luckily, I was able to eventually compress this issue into a simple test case on Chernarus and send it out to the DayZ game-play programming team. They have managed to pin point it, fix it and it is already available in update 1.04 (kudos to Mirek and his guys!).

And so thanks to my tireless research done on Namalsk, Chernarus and any other custom-made terrains should hopefully see more animal activity with 1.04.

And that is all from me for this month, see you in the next one!