NEWS

DayZ is moving to a new engine


Dean 'Rocket' Hall, the benevolent creator of psychopath's haven, DayZ, was recently pinned down and interrogated by the friendly folks over at Reddit. Along with divulging the secret plans to build an impenetrable underground bunker in space*, he also confirmed that everyone's favourite free-roaming zombie farm simulator will be moving to a new engine.

Sort of.

Named 'Infusion', Hall says that the new engine will open up possibilities for all kinds of improvements in lighting and shadow effects. Whether or not it will fix the rest of the ArmA engine's notorious jankiness is unclear. What is clear, though, is that Infusion isn't actually a new engine at all, as producer Brian Hicks pointed out a little later on.

Over the last many months, extensive clean up, new functionality, and so forth has been created for [the RealVirtuality engine] - while at the same time, vast amounts of it were removed, or rewritten entirely.

We have begun to approach the point at which [it is] no longer recognizable as RV and, because of that, it is now known by its own name - Enfusion [sic].

That seems clear enough, but apparently Hall isn't quite sure himself, as demonstrated by a brazen contradiction given during the Reddit interview (if you can bear the management-style jargon he seems keen to make use of):

Q: With the new engine is it based on your current tech or is it a complete rip out of everything and rewriting it?

Rocket: It is a complete rip out of everything, but we’re definitely leveraging existing tech.

Whether or not Rocket makes his mind up, the move to a DirectX 10/11-capable engine is hotly anticipated by the DayZ community. You can check out the rest of the interview here.

* I've just been told that Dean Hall almost definitely isn't building a secret bunker, which is a shame.