DayZ moves to new game engine they call Infusion

Dean Hall and the team revealed that DayZ is now moving to what they’re calling a new game engine but don’t panic.

We know that most of you will be thinking and that this means even more delays but it’s not as drastic as it first sounds because it looks like this has been in the works for the past few months. With the game having been built on the ARMA II engine with some pieces nabbed from the ARMA III engine, the DayZ engine is now so different from both of these that it’s become its own thing. However the engine had limitations that were hampering the development of  features so they reassessed the foundation they were building on.

Dean says that it’s “a complete rip out of everything” but they are “leveraging existing tech”. Because of that the engine has been given  the new name  “Infusion”. Dean Hall explains.

“So that is what we have been doing over the last three months. It is one of the reasons that development had seemed like it had slowed. The studio is now about 160 people we had a team building event last weekend. It is kind of crazy to see everyone in one spot. I guess the big news that we’ve been telling here at E3 is that we’re actually moving to a new engine. It is called infusion. So that is going to allow us to do DirectX 10 and 11. It is going to allow us to do dynamic lighting, which means no more flashlights going through walls, proper dynamic shadows, stuff like that. So it really kind of opens a lot of possibilities for us and I think it is going to allow us to deal will a lot of those issues. We had to decide, did we want to do a lot of little short term fixes or did we want to focus on the architecture. Given the success of the early access we felt like we really had to invest in the future.”

DayZ producer Brian Hicks also hit Reddit earlier to clarify what this actually means for the game and also elaborates a little more on Dean’s “complete rip out” comment.

“When DayZ started – we took the source from the existing RV Engine – Over the last many months, extensive clean up, new functionality, and so forth has been created for that engine – while at the same time, vast amounts of it were removed, or rewritten entirely. The changes Dean spoke of entail major leaps forward in that work, with those changes and the many more that will come through out development – we have begun to approach the point in which DayZ’s engine is so no longer recognizable as RV, and because of that – and the massive work to come, it is now known by its own name, Infusion. “

There’s really nothing new to be concerned about, anyone who’s been following Dean Hall’s updates over the past six months will be aware of the changes they’ve made to the engine to fit with the requirements of DayZ. With DayZ‘s development having been quite slow in the past few months, this comes as good news for players.

In related news, and this will please players, Dean Hall has today confirmed that rubber banding issues have been fixed and they’re now planning to deploy the fix on to the live servers.

Rubber banding issue confirmed fixed in internal. Now planning deployment to exp to confirm then onto stable #dayz

— Dean Hall (@rocket2guns) June 12, 2014