DayZ Still Potentially Many Dayz Away

Did you play DayZ before it was cool? I did. I spent two hours getting it to work and a further six hours wandering around aimlessly before it clicked and I had fun, because that's the kind of trendsetting cool guy that I am. But I understand if you're waiting for the standalone release, that maybe makes it more functional and accessible. We can't all be a cool person like me.

Unfortunately you might still have a while to wait, as lead developer Dean Hall outlines the remaining progress required on the game before you can get your bandwagon-jumping not-a-cool-person sticky fingers on it.

DayZ was spotted in the Steam database two weeks ago, sparking rumours that it was going to appear in Early Access imminently. Hall took to Reddit to address their progress, and it seems optimization is the big challenge for the team.

Optimizing/Bugfixing Dedicated server.
This is why we are not out. We need performance

We think we need a minimum of 15 FPS will 50 players, 2000 zombies, and 25000 loot items. Our latest tests have all shown some runaway systems in the code we have to tidy up. The variable synchronization system that was developed for work with the network bubble, is checking the variables very often. We're optimizing this. Also, there are many string comparisons. These have been refactored so references are used (lookup numbers) to speed up the process. things like animations etc... are generally recorded as strings - ArmA wasn't build to handle very large numbers of things so this has been a large area of optimization.

Which still, to my mind, makes it sound as if they're on the last, long straight towards getting a version of the game out. In the meantime, why not go back and read cool guy Jim's tales of survival in the original mod?