If it seems like Bohemia Interactive’s DayZ hasn’t progressed very far into development since the past few months, then it’s because the development is busy moving to a new engine. Creator Dean Hall took to Reddit to explain how this new engine – Infusion – would allow for DirectX 10 and 11 support along with dynamic lighting and shadows.
“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.”
Producer Brian Hicks explained this further. “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.“
So if DayZ starts looking different in the next few months, you’ll know why.