Technical difficulties and engine issues may force the delay of Rocket Hall’s zombie standalone.
“We will not compromise the [DayZ] project for the short-term gain of meeting this [release] date,” says Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall in the latest developer report for his zombie standalone. The development team still wants to get the foundation release out by end of year 2012, but that’s looking much less likely now.
“The reasons for any slippage would be publicly discussed,” said Hall, “and would most likely represent a failure personally on my part to plan correctly.” Among the issues complicating release are major architectural changes – Hall describes them as “very bold” – in the switch to a server-side MMO model. Effectively, DayZ is so completely altering the Arma 2 engine it used to run on, that the zombie game is pretty much using a different build altogether.
“While the graphics may look the same (for now),” Hall said, “under the hood so much is being completely rewritten.”
Hall also mentioned the imprisonment of his friends Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar, who would have been working on DayZ were it not for their Greek espionage charges. Their forced departure from the project meant that Hall had to bring in someone else to finish map design for ChernarusPlus.
“Screenshots, videos, etc… will unfortunately have to wait,” Hall concluded. “As they say, loose lips sink ships.”
Source: DayZ Report
