DayZ Fast Travel

Fast Travel is a mod that aims to enhance DayZ's gameplay by letting players quickly travel between predefined locations. Players can choose their destination by interacting with markers on a map board. Both the cost of traveling and the locations that can be visited are highly configurable and can be set up to, for example, cut down on travel times between traders, allow players to access higher tiers of loot in walled-off areas, and function as a more immersive spawn selection.

What was my role?

I developed Fast Travel alongside my first DayZ mod Banking. As a result, many of the lessons I learned and knowledge I gained in regards to system design, gameplay, and networking are shared between both mods. Some aspects I worked on as part of this mod include:

• Flexible fast travel system: The biggest challenge during the mod's creation was the design of the system governing the actual travel between locations. Not only did it have to be configurable to support a variety of maps and server-specific scenarios, but it also had to be simple enough to enable server owners with little modding experience to set up the mod. My final design achieved just that, allowing for complex travel networks and a customizable travel cost per connection, all while providing an intuitive visual representation.
• Efficient player teleportation: Even though teleporting a player itself is rather simple in DayZ, designing a system to handle this as part of the mod required some planning. I had to ensure players only spawn in valid areas that aren't too pretictable to prevent camping, while making sure finding such a position didn't affect the server's performance. The final system divides spawn areas into smaller, more manageable sections and validates chosen spawn points through collision checks to prevent players from spawning inside building meshes and other objects. On top of reducing the actual work that has to be done on the server, this approach also ended up making the entire system a lot more customizable as spawn points can be freely distributed over large areas.
• Working with DayZ's codebase and networking: Since I had started working on my banking mod a bit before this mod, I had already gained some familiarity with modding DayZ and its multiplayer framework. While this definitely helped and allowed me to reinforce my understanding of the systems that both mods use, Fast Travel utilizes the base game's components to a far greater degree. This led me to work with a wider range of the game's systems to integrate the mod and make it work flawlessly in multiplayer.