echo38

Yeah, many killings are in cold blood (just tonight someone shot me in the head as I was fiddling with my inventory, in perfect darkness), but a lot of them are due purely to tension. To this day, I don't know if the player I shot (the only player I've shot) was hostile or not. And yesterday, I managed to have a peaceful encounter, but, man, was it tense! Although there was only the "Friendly?" question and some subsequent conversation, the fact that I was potentially a quarter-second away from being shot made it feel as though we were both screaming "Drop it! Get the [bleep] down!" I imagine he probably felt the same way, since I had my gun on him the whole time. Easy to see how misunderstandings can happen, amidst all of the deliberate killings.

Yes, you're right. I'll edit it, thanks.

So I've read virtually the entire wiki, have played on low-pop servers for about a week, and have made a few forum searches. Lots of out-dated and flat-out wrong info, especially on the wiki, but trial and error usually takes care of that. However, a helicopter is so incredibly rare that I don't want to risk losing yet another (I found two and lost both due to B.S. reasons--e.g. the last one disappeared after a server restart. Was in Sobor, then the server restarted. It wasn't a server crash; there was a 5-minute warning message, and I logged off outside of the helicopter with the helicopter on the ground, before the server went down. Server comes back up a few minutes later, and chopper is gone--and people on side chat (was a private hive--I'm tired of being killed by cheating script kiddies who teleport me to them and are invulnerable) start talking about a helicopter just taking off from Chernogorsk. So, um, obviously this is more than a bit frustrating--my goal since the beginning was to get a helicopter and repair it, and it took a full week before I was able to locate one (and I got lucky--next one could take months) and then longer to repair it. And then, before I'm ever able to even fly it (it being out of fuel) the server eats it. This is getting really quite old! Various servers have destroyed countless amounts of my good equipment. I never did find another coyote backpack after I lost mine due to the "debug plains" bug (and no, my corpse wasn't where I'd logged off peacefully before). And I'm not even going to start about the amount I've lost due to script cheaters. But, this rant aside, what I really originally intended to ask here was a few questions about helicopters, which is not given in the wiki or in any of the forum posts I could find. Firstly, is there any way to get a helicopter on a server which already has one placed in an inaccessible location (e.g. a full fuel load's flight off of the edge of the map)? Or will there never be another helicopter on that server again, barring some sort of server reset? Secondly, I read that helicopters which blow up must be "saved" to get them to respawn a week later. But how does one get to the wreck to save it, if it is in an inaccessible location, such as the middle of the ocean? Does this, too, mean that the server will permanently be without a helicopter, barring a server reset? Thirdly, how does one rearm the chopper's guns? I've found quite a few M240 magazines and have been saving them for the helicopter guns, but I'm not seeing any way of using them to rearm the chopper. Finally, what happens to a helicopter if the server goes down while it is in flight? What about when the player is disconnected while in a low hover?

Thanks for the reply. Hmm, I was under the impression that the save function was just to save the vehicle's inventory, not the location of the vehicle itself. No?

A few days ago I had to spend a few hours on a such a hacked server, because the moment I joined the server (unknowing, of course, that it'd been script-bombed), my character suffered the "debug plains" bug. I spent hours travelling back to where I'd been when I logged in, because it was dark, but also because the forest of skyscrapers everywhere made navigating by landmarks virtually impossible. Navigating in the dark with no map and no compass can be challenging even for a player with a thousand hours in Chernarus, but with dozens of skyscrapers covering every square kilometer, almost as numerous as trees, it becomes nearly impossible. I eventually did find, after a few hours, the place where I'd died, my old camp--and my corpse wasn't there. Horrible. I've added that server to my list of servers never to go to--whether the server owner was at fault is doubtful, but, either way, I don't want to risk going back there and losing my stuff again. I had some excellent gear which I never have been able to since replace, and what I did replace cost me a very long time to do so.

Thank you. I must not have been in the right place.

My first player interaction, I killed the guy--but only after he declined to respond to my two warnings to identify friend or foe, and he tried to set up what looked like an ambush for me around a corner, so, bang. Hey, that's how I got my first pistol and compass. May seem a bit harsh, but he had more than enough opportunity to say "friendly" or something. Also, after playing for a while, it can get really hard not to become jaded, when most players are selfish jerks. (Kind of like R.L., I guess, except I've never seen someone teleport I.R.L.)

Noob question here. How does one move an unconscious character into a vehicle? I was standing guard over an unconscious friend today, but I didn't see any option to pick him up or anything, let alone put him in a vehicle. Did I just miss it?