DayZ tech in Arma 3

[rawalanche 13]

Hello,

sorry if this has been asked already. When reading DayZ dev blog lately, i have been amazed of the amount and quality of the game engine improvements that the extensive DayZ team has managed to come up with. In various interviews, i often heard that things developed by DayZ team will benefit ArmA as well. So i am curious if we can expect to see those improvements in ArmA as well, and how long could it possibly take to translate the solutions from DayZ to Arma.

I am starting to get slightly worried that in future, DayZ department could completely fracture from BIS and be unwilling to share their technology as it could make ArmA their direct competitor in some ways.

[k0rd 3]

I don't think this issue is as bad as it is with VBS vs. ARMA.

With those two titles (nevermind that they are different companies), you have a completely different price range and target customer base. The one thing that they wouldn't want is to lose all the VBS revenue by making ARMA/VBS the exact same thing... Customers would simply buy ARMA instead!

Now, with DayZ standalone and ARMA, we have a different case. Many gamers don't mind spending money on titles with similar engines. It isn't worth the work to get one to emulate the other - because they are both reasonably priced for the gaming market. So I don't think it would be a big deal to share code between the two titles in this case.

Being your own competitor isn't so bad when the price of the two competing products are the same.

This is just my opinion.

[KlassenT 10]

The optimizations and improvements would be purely conceptual in nature. As far as I'm aware, DayZ-SA and ArmA 3 are running on two different implementations of the RV engine, and from playing both, ArmA 3's engine optimization is leaps and bounds ahead of DayZ-SA on my machine. I nerfed the crap out of mose of my DayZ graphical settings (No applicable preset, everything was adjusted on a case-by-case basis), whereas I can run the stock Very High graphical settings on ArmA 3 and average around 50% better framerates than my optimized Standalone tweaks.

Now, that said, the guys doing Standalone really have made a lot of optimizations beyond the initial Alpha release, so perhaps the things being developed by their branch are being shared at the procedural and handling level (How to handle culling, minimizing input delay within RV, etc.) that can be re-implemented in ArmA 3's development cycle, but with the two games running on fundamentally different architectures, I wouldn't expect any easy copy-and-paste fixes between the two projects.

[CyclonicTuna 87]

I agree with KlassenT. The diffrence between the optimized DayZ engine and the RV4 engine of Arma 3 might be bigger than you think. A really big chunk of the code was rewritten for the transition between Arma 2 and Arma 3, most of it backhand. They're quite diffrent structurally.

I actually hope that the DayZ and Arma teams will continue to grow apart development wise, because DayZ is such a radically diffrent game compared to Arma conceptually. I wouldn't want an egine that does a mediocre job at creating an immersive military sim, and a survival horror game. I'd rather have two engines that do each job respectivally well.

They might be similair on paper right now. But the DayZ dev's and the Arma dev's have really diffrent goals for the future, if you watch some of Rockets presentations at all the conferences he has been to the last 2 years or so, that will become really clear. DayZ is going to be focused on thins like survival and crafting. Whilst Arma should focus on large scale, and perhaps small scale intergrated combined warfare simulation. So I hope that BI will continue to branch out each game, instead of trying to merge the tech. The only thing that I could see being connected between the two games could be something like the game fx. The DayZ developers have already introduced some of the lighting and enviromental effects from Arma 3 and its looking really good.

But besides that, player interaction, AI, weaponhandeling all that stuff is going to be very diffrent structurally and development wise.

Edited May 23, 2014 by CyclonicTuna

[strangere 2]

What about, how they want to change rendering engine in Dayz, that could solve a lot of issues, low fps in cities for example.

[Valken 622]

DayZ Standalone is using a modified Take On Helicoptors Engine. Before it was on Arma 2 engine as a mod.

I rather just see some asset and fx sharing like CT and KT said. The games are totally different but sharing some of the content such as guns, or accessories, ballistics systems, ragdolls, lighting, physics, sound and graphics would be great as it allows more resources to create better missions and games.

Arma 3 will have its own zombies (waiting for undead mod 3!!) within a military game framework which is different than DayZ survival sim with the ability to find military hardware.

For 15 bux (when on sale), it is cheap enough that people can own both and enjoy two different game settings while support two different dev teams to make the best of both Zombie survival and Military Coop/MP/SP game.