14 DAY TRIAL // Bohemia Interactive, developer of the highly popular Arma series and wildly successful albeit still in early alpha first-person survival shooter DayZ, has delivered a piece of exciting news for its fans.
The latest DayZ developer blog update informs gamers that the Czech studio has decided to allocate considerably more resources to the DayZ project, significantly increasing the personnel involved with making the zombie survival sandbox.
"We are inducting a large number of new people to the team, effectively doubling the whole project," read the most exciting announcement on the dev blog.
Bohemia Interactive has not stated whether the decision is related in any way to the fact that original DayZ Arma 2 mod creator Dean Hall has left the team at the end of February, in order to pursue different goals, but the studio did mention that they expected to make a lot of progress in the near future.
As such, the team has also started work on an in-game cooking system, which they confess was inspired by the "outstanding" cooking system from a different kind of zombie apocalypse game, Project Zomboid, an isometric sandbox also available on Steam Early Access.
The cooking system will offer a deeper survival simulation layer, allowing players to make use of several cooking devices. The items placed in the cooking devices will slowly heat up, and after a certain period of time they will turn into something else, as they become "cooked."
Development plans include overcooking and items going cold via some processes that will be introduced further down the road.
Apart from that, the developers have been hard at work, focusing on some key bugs and on bringing all two-handed melee animations that were missing into the game, including evades, two handed tree and others, as well as on developing some new attacks and reworked zombie animations which will be introduced sometime in March.
The upcoming patch will be distributed to Stable servers during the scheduled maintenance time on Wednesday, March 5, at which time a full changelog will also be made public.
Additionally, the developers also noted that a new delivery system for updates is currently being worked on, currently undergoing internal testing, which will solve the issues some players have, experiencing severe desync. The new feature will ensure that updates are distributed across the entire network, and will start testing on experimental severs next week.
Bohemia Interactive has scheduled the release of the full version of DayZ standalone sometime during 2015, but the game is currently accessible through Steam Early Access.