During an AMA on reddit this week, Dean Hall announced that DayZ would be moving to a new engine called infusion.
Rocket: 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.
He revealed some additional details about the engine as well. The engine is based off a mixture of current Bohemia Interactive technology and brand new code they are writing. The engine will come in phases over time in a modular fashion. It should be interesting to see how things are implemented as the patches get released.
You can read the entire DayZ AMA on reddit
DayZ is available now, you can grab a copy on Steam Early Access