DayZ Standalone being held up by bugs & optimisation, Hall reveals

DayZ Standalone creator Dean Hall has taken to Reddit to give fans eager for the new zombie sandbox release an update on how it's all going, and why it's being held up. It should clear the air a little for those growing impatient.

It follows DayZ Standalone Alpha appearing in the Steam Database, suggesting a test phase is incoming.

Hall took to this Reddit thread to give gamers an update. Under a section labelled 'Optimizing/Bugfixing Dedicated server' he wrote, "This is why we are not out. We need performance."

In the section he stressed that his team needs the game to run at a minimum of 15 FPS, with 50 players in the sandbox, 2,000 zombies and 25,000 loot items.

"Our latest tests have all shown some runaway systems in the code we have to tidy up," Hall explained. "The variable synchronization system that was developed for work with the network bubble, is checking the variables very often. We're optimizing this. Also, there are many string comparisons. These have been refactored so references are used (lookup numbers) to speed up the process. things like animations etc... are generally recorded as strings - ArmA wasn't build to handle very large numbers of things so this has been a large area of optimization.

"We also have a bug where sounds (which are temporary vehicles) are being queued up and sent to all JIP players. This causes us a steady loss of performance on the server. The synchronized variables are also checked for each player, this is inefficient and we are refactoring that. It is our biggest obstacle to releasing the alpha right now. We know what needs to be done with it so we're working on that, then we will again reassess the performance."

Hall then addressed why he and his team are reluctant to give a release date for DayZ Standalone, "If I start saying 'oh it won't be out then' people start asking me about the day after, and the day after. So it just encourages people to keep asking me when it is, and the 'announced date' would be when I go 'yeah, it could be out then'.

It seems to be coming on surely enough though, as Hall added that basic functionality works for between 10-20 players, new zombie types are in, the client runs smoothly but is prone to frame rate drops, and he says the inventory system is a "mixed bag."

Finally, he confirmed that development is very much ongoing.

Are you eager to play DayZ Standalone? Let us know below.

Via MP1st.