Aug 2019 Status Update

As you have probably guessed already from all of those blogs I have posted so far, Namalsk is really touching quite a lot of things in the game. While I have certainly not yet covered all of the things that are planned/implemented/adjusted on Namalsk, lets talk about a bit something different here. This month, I have a invested significant amount of time into getting to know more of the medical systems behind the character. Why you ask? Well, it is quite interesting story, because it all begun with me trying to make some space for the medical loot within the hospital complex on Tara. Only to realize, do these things really work? Do they have a place in the game?

This has ended up with me doing quite a lot of experiments and eventually proper changes, some of which (after some further discussions with the DayZ dev team) actually made it into the vanilla 1.05 update. Just to give you a few:

• restored functionality for blood bags and saline bags
• blood systems bug fixing and balancing
• hemolytic reaction changes (reaction to wrong blood type given)
• salmonella, cholera and food poisoning adjustments

Work on this has greatly helped me to further advance my understanding the inner workings of DayZ character and I will surely use this knowledge more in the future as I have some more ideas how to spice up the game-play. And who knows, maybe I will get an opportunity to include it again in vanilla game too.

But the focus was also on the maintenance of Namalsk features and assets for past two DayZ updates (1.04, 1.05). One of the bigger ones was the pass over all the custom Namalsk objects to make sure they support recently added vaulting and climbing feature. Dynamic nature of vaulting and climbing has certainly added more complexity to all of the underground areas on Namalsk, especially the 6-floor facility called Athena-2 (A2).

Just to give a bit of background to this – most of objects on Namalsk were created during 62 and the versions prior. With 1.05, you can climb various heights from standing position. This was not possible back in times of using low vault (62) or jump only (63). Coupled with the new player controller using new physics in 63, all of this means that player movement no longer needed to be restricted that much. Player character is now capable of climbing from various places, which meant that a lot of adjustments had to be done to ensure there are no longer fake invisible walls preventing players to get into previously impassable areas. The removal of fake invisible walls has also solved a lot of issues with throwing in these enclosed areas.

In addition to the various collision geometry changes, I have also went through the whole object library and made sure canClimb named property is set to zero for all objects, which should not be climb-able at all (usually various small props, which would fall on the weight of the player character).

Last, but not least, I have been also doing some regular updates to the Central Economy setup, making sure that it contains new 1.04 and 1.05 items alongside some further balancing. This has (for example) included the distribution of various magazine types (1.05 added support for more magazine variants).

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