DayZ Standalone project developer diary shows how zombie mocap is done

Dean "Rocket" Hall and Matt Lightfoot, developers on the DayZ Standalone project, released a DayZ developer video diary today, where they visited Bohemia Interactive's motion capture studios.

The 21-minute long video goes behind the scenes as the DayZ Standalone crew take the first steps to redoing the zombie animations that were in the DayZ mod. The aim is to make the zombies in the standalone be more challenging and scary than they were in the initial mod.

Rocket dons a mocap suit and acts out a range of zombie motions, such as stalking like a panther, awkward running, stiff speed-shuffles and tearing into a corpse. Hall explains that they are after a "more sleek animal-like" and "much more tormented" zombie animations.

The mocap session revealed in the video is the first of many mocap sessions and will mainly serve to tweak their technology and optimize the mocap process, Rocket said.

"It was a good first step for us and over the next few weeks we'll start implementing what the guys have done," Rocket explained in the video. " And [we'll start] tiding up the AI and the path finding, so that hopefully when we come out, we'll have something that is much more challenging and scary in the zombie sense."