Following the recent announcement of a successful 52 man server test (that you can read up on here), Dean Hall aka Rocket, the lead developer of the DayZ Standalone project, has been kind enough to give us some details on what the test meant for the development, and what they are working on.
He took the time to explain the issues concerning FPS (frames per second) when speaking about the server (and, as he emphasized himself, I feel the need to underline that we’re talking about FPS counts on the server hosting the multiplayer session, NOT the actual FPS players encounter on their own machines), highlighting some good news and some bad news.
In terms of good news, Rocket stated that the server FPS isn’t affected too much by the number of players online anymore, which opens up possibilities to run high-population servers in the future. Currently, most DayZ mod servers handle a maximum of 50 players per session, with some handling up to 75 (but these are rarely lag-free). In the standalone, we can expect these numbers to go up to 100 or more, without huge compromises to server stability and speed.
The bad news is that the test also revealed optimization problems in the handling of zombies, these taking quite a toll on server FPS. Surprisingly, item counts aren’t a big issue (a server hosts a minimum of 15.000 items), but zombies seem to be hitting FPS hard. Still, it’s not all bad – the test made them aware of this issue and now they can work on fixing it.
Feedback from participants in yesterday’s test was mostly positive, reporting decent server response times, even when the server was running at an 8 to 12 FPS. The most affected feature seems to be inventory management, where players encountered minor delays.
Lastly, I personally appreciate the sincere approach of Rocket in his post, underlining that when the game will be released on Steam, it will really be an Alpha version, and that people who are undecided about buying the game should wait until the game gets more polished. Unless you’re ready to face countless bugs and stability issues, and provide constructive feedback for the devs, you really shouldn’t invest money into the DayZ Standalone when the first version is released. Honesty of this level is rare from developers, so I tip my virtual hat in front of Dean. Still, I’m sure that the hardcore DayZ fans that have been playing the mod since it’s first release are accustomed to such issues and will not hesitate to grab it as soon as it becomes available.
The full update from Rocket can be viewed here.