Greetings, Survivors! We’re excited to announce that Experimental game update 1.24 is now available on experimental branches on Steam! As with most updates early in the year, this one includes a clean sweep. Basically, we went through our backlog and tackled a variety of lingering issues. Let’s go through some of the major ones, so you know what to focus on while you’re enjoying the experimental branch. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//4458811/396266ab3cf4069279ed8935c27923a73e6c996e.jpg[/img] It’s pretty much tradition at this point that our awesome community breaks DayZ’s record for highest player count every new year! It was definitely a confidence boost this time around, as we face a number of challenges in this year’s plan—by far the most ambitious we’ve had since the engine switch in 2018. But it’s far too soon to talk about such things here. Instead, this post is dedicated to the year’s first experimental release: game update 1.24! As with most updates early in the year, this one includes a clean sweep. Basically, we went through our backlog and tackled a variety of lingering issues. Let’s go through some of the major ones, so you know what to focus on while you’re enjoying the experimental branch. The collision geometries of vegetation (particularly trees and bushes) received a substantial polishing pass. Our aim was to simplify and fix issues which were causing odd collisions with vehicles. There were also performance problems with too many particles, which occurred whenever a bullet pierced through branches. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//4458811/382451a69e0649afdd465eeb0eb3dc3e00d99a25.png[/img] Speaking of particles, we took a look at firearm particles and optimized them for smoother gunplay. We also increased the recoil slightly in several automatic firearms. Furthermore, we unified our approach to randomly loaded firearms that spawn in the world. This change now makes it impossible to recognize whether a firearm was dropped by a player or spawned in recently. [url=https://giphy.com/clips/update-dayz-124-z6Qz3WaeOJHKUitkyE]We dramatically improved the way weapon lifting behaves[/url], making it smoother and more precise now. [url=https://giphy.com/clips/update-dayz-124-BJE0JzRzn7qK8BLxLl]We also improved the way weapon lengths are calculated.[/url] We hope these changes will make close-quarter combat with firearms less frustrating overall. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//4458811/4153b37151c7b322caf8b142c03bb994fcc235b6.jpg[/img] Unfortunately, we had to postpone making more complex changes to the infected AI, though we still found time to investigate some of the issues. As a result, we significantly reduced the noise from the impact of bullets. This means the infected won’t be so easily drawn to the impact from fired bullets (particularly helpful when suppressed firearms are used). We also increased the damage output of blunt melee weapons and tools against the infected and animal AI. This was done by adding a portion of their shock damage into the total damage dealt. Moving on, a noteworthy improvement was also made to bandaging. If your character has multiple bleed sources, and your bandage stack has enough uses, you can now continuously bandage without any interruptions. If you’d like to dive deeper into experimental update 1.24, you can find the[url=https://forums.dayz.com/topic/258752-experimental-update-124-change-log/] change notes[/url] on our forums. Fair warning—the change notes also mention a few fun things that are included in this update. So, if you’d rather not spoil the surprise, join us on the experimental servers before you do any more reading! As usual, please report any issues you may encounter to our feedback tracker. Thank you! Read more from our Article here: https://dayz.com/article/game-update/1-24-Experimental-Release Read patch notes here: https://forums.dayz.com/topic/258752-experimental-update-124-change-log/ On behalf of the DayZ team, Enjoy and we look forward to your [url=https://feedback.bistudio.com/]feedback[/url]. Thank you Adam