With the recent release of version 0.44 to stable branch, DayZ is taking significant steps towards becoming a fully functional game. The full changelog is decently sized, and includes various fixes and new content like an entire village, some weapons, tools and pieces of clothing. The netcode is supposed to be improved, and mouse acceleration is finally abolished.

But that's not all. In a new entry to the dev blog, Dean Hall lays out the plans for the near future. Apart from the typical optimizations and improvements, a few topics stick out. The improvements and expansions to the loot system as mentioned earlier in the dev blog are still being worked on, and Bohemia seem confident that they can soon start allowing basic loot to respawn on servers without the servers having to be rebooted.

"Most important for us is to allow loot to respawn, even just at a basic level. Once this is done we will focus on persistent items (backpacks, tents, potentially even all or most items). Finally we will focus on globally managed loot."

Furthermore, 64-bit servers are ready to be tested and will likely be shipped out in an update to the experimental branch sometime next week, which will remove memory limits and hopefully help improve the performance of various things like the physics. Bohemia's Bratislava studio are just about done with the textures and meshes for the first batch of animals that you'll be able to hunt and kill for food, fur and other resources. Next up for the animals is AI and animations, and the work on that will be started shortly. Though the AKM still isn't in the game, it too is closer than ever to completion. Once it gets implemented into the game, it'll come fully customizable like the M4.

That just about wraps it up for this time. There isn't much concrete to get out of this entry, but the mere fact that 0.44 just came out should at least satisfy us for the time being. Time to check out those crossbows.