JoeM (DayZ)

I don't know if this has been discussed before but I have an idea for a new feature for SA. I searched for it and nothing came up. Sanity. I imagine it would be quite mentally difficult to have to survive a zombie apocalypse and if anyone has seen the films there always seems to be one person in the group or someone that they meet who has gone insane so it got me thinking that maybe there should be a sanity meter, a bit like humanity I guess. If your sanity is positive you are not insane, if it goes negative you start going insane, and the further it goes the worse the effects get. I think I have some potentially good ideas for the effects of sanity. What makes sanity decrease? Well here are some of my ideas: -Being alone. I would think that being alone in such a difficult situation would start to have negative effects, and whenever you are alone your sanity should decrease. Only slowly to begin with but the longer you go alone the faster it decreases. -Killing survivors. Personally I don't think that IRL I could actually kill someone, maybe I could if it was me or them but thankfully I have never been put in that situation. However I think most people would struggle killing people over and over again with no actual contact to people. -Being unclean/underfed/thirsty etc. Not very good for morale to be constantly dirty, hungry and thirsty. Your sanity should not decrease every time you have these but if you have these factors against you for longer amounts of time. Being constantly in this state then your sanity should suffer, I don't know how people react when they have these effects but it probably isn't good. Being constantly on the edge of hunger/thirst/unclean, e.g living on the edge, eating/drinking just enough to survive should start to lower sanity. What makes sanity increase? Again just a few of my ideas (and basically the opposite of the decreasing factors): -Being in groups. To have human interaction in these situations would be good. Say, when you meet someone you can greet them in some way so the game can acknowledge that you know they are there (to avoid increasing sanity when you don't even know someone is close). A handshake or something, then whenever you are in a 50m radius of that person your sanity increases. The idea is that you are talking to them and just generally taking your mind off the whole zombie thing. -Helping people, bandaging wounds, giving food/drink and all those other good things should increase sanity. Not too sure about this one. -Opposite of above. Maintaining personal hygiene, keeping well fed and well watered should provide a boost in sanity. Just generally keeping moral high. What are the effects of being insane? Now this is the interesting part. I will say that there should be no benefits of being sane, the only benefits will be that you are not insane. Just some ideas, feel free to post some below. -Hearing things. Running through the forest and out of nowhere you hear a gunshot or zombie but only you hear it and the source is nowhere to be seen, would scare the **** out of me. -Hallucinations. Just like hearing things, but on a visual level. Only for the people who have a very negative sanity level. But potentially seeing people that aren't there from seconds to up to minutes. These visions would run around like normal people, appear to shoot possibly. They may shoot you (doing nothing of course) and you can shoot them (again doing nothing) then after some seconds your player will snap out of it and will see normally again -Flashbacks. Don't know how this would effect the server but the server could potentially save a small video clip of where you have killed someone and at a random time play it back to you, so you could be running along and suddenly you have this flashback of where you killed a survivor. Or you could just be running along and hear the screams of the player you shot. -Forgetting to do basic actions. You might tell your player to do something but he has a mental slip and fails whatever he is doing, maybe even something simple like reloading a magazine. I am no mental health expert and I don't know what insanity does to people but I know there are different types and possible something like this exists. Few extra notes This should only affect long term survivors. Simply, it should only increase and decrease slowly so only long term exposure will alter it significantly. After all, I don't think many people will turn insane after a day. It could possibly replace humanity entirely, after all it seems to be the same sort of thing There should be different levels of sanity. Everyone that is positive is quite simply not insane, then once you hit the negatives it gets worse and worse unless you counter it. At say, -100 then you maybe should forget some basic things and once it hits -5000 then you start the hallucinations. Problem is that some people are more mentally tough than others, but then again some people are faster/stronger/better and this is also not displayed in game. It may promote teaming up more, and less of the KoS attitude. Hopefully less pointless killing if being insane is truly detrimental to survival. Sanity should not be transferred character to character, like humanity currently is. After all, it's meant to be a new survivor. However if you are insane you could just suicide and loot your body with a fresh character. What do you guys think? Feel free to add some ideas if you like the idea. TL;DR. Read it

I'm impatient because it's getting a bit of a chore playing the mod, but I still really enjoy it!

Hmm I must have may have mis-typed it in the search, oops. I know that there is little way we can know how the mind will react in that situation but that just gives some room for us to make it up a little, as long as it isn't too ridiculous. And to everyone saying that everyone is different so will have different mental limits then how come if everyone is different everyone spawns in the same anyway? Surely it can just be the same with sanity as well, you don't get people spawning in overweight or bodybuilder style.

I used to hate how buggy/glitchy/generally messed up zombies are. Now I just laugh at them they are so bad.

I'm guessing you want to ask what the game is like now? I will answer I guess. Everyone has the KoS attitude, you see someone you kill or be killed. Why? Because there is no incentive to make temporary groups, permanent yes but not temporary. There are no OP weapons anymore AS50, M107 and the Thermal L85 all taken out. Zombies are difficult, very difficult. Infection is high and they do a lot of damage. Loot is a lot lot rarer, be prepared to find a lot more tin cans. Look elsewhere for loot instead of the main areas.

I can imagine! 'Zombies WTF??? When were these added they are OP!!!!!!!!!!!' I honestly think that the first stages of SA Alpha will be the best time to play. Everyone who is used to the run and gun attitude playing on servers with custom gear and spawn in with high end gear will think 'WTF' and won't play. All the bugs and glitches will be annoying but it will also mean that the only people who play are the players that want to play DayZ for its aspects that it was meant to be. Mostly more mature people will play and less CoD kiddies will play *hopefully*.

This is what the sun looks like on BF3 http://www.tehfusion.co.uk/uploads/bf3/damavand-sunflare-on.jpg Sorry for OT.

Hmm. I want to hear more skin being stripped and bones being cracked, there is too much flesh chewing noises not enough bone crunch. Yum, bone crunch...

I feel that looting is always going to be fairly linear but as I understand (if I am correct) loot only respawns on server restart? So sure you can check Cherno hospital but you can be sure as hell that there will be nothing there unless you get there quick so the player has to look for more varied sources to get the loot they want. Am I correct about loot only spawning on restart though?

Ok I understand what you mean about the influence, either to be a hero or bandit but the sanity system will be different. It will be almost as fundamental as thirst or hunger. Nobody will want to be insane because the effects will make the game possibly very hard, just like nobody wants to be thirsty or hungry. It will only influence people to stay away from being insane, the same as food and drink.

To be honest I don't quite understand what you are trying to say with it being a play style influencer? Could you perhaps go to more detail?

Fine! You can have your ponytail! I will rephrase and say your hair has to be tidy, not getting in your face and in the way of things and generally being an annoyance. And you can have a beard as long as again, it is tidy and isn't host to wildlife, I don't want to see bird's nests in people's beards. It is similar to humanity, but that is because it is a possible replacement to something that makes a little more sense than killing a few people and your player saying 'Better wear these bandit clothes now!'. Maybe the visual effects would be a bit too far, I don't know. But if the engine can handle it then why not? The noises should not be too common though. I want it so that every time you hear a gun shot you have to think about it instead of it being a methodical every 5 minutes again where you are left thinking that it is nothing again. I think you should hear things maybe on average once per 90 minutes. Enough to get in the way but not too often that you know when it's coming. And if you want to hear gunshots and voices just run through Cherno :lol:!

I will try to make this clear now. I am do not want to make the game unplayable for lone wolf players. If you can keep yourself clean with plenty of food and water you will be fine. However if you are constantly hungry/thirsty with hair down to your knees and beard a you can use as a turban then you will see drastic negative effects. But if you look after yourself keep on lone wolfing!

That's kind of the idea. If you want to kill someone you have to risk the lowered sanity, so you will no longer shoot that poor guy with a makarov when you are fully geared unless he is a direct threat. And I think hearing/seeing things that aren't there would actually be quite exciting.

But human interaction should be a great beneficial factor. So if you want to bandit, that is fine. But bandit in a group so the interaction you get from your group can counteract the negative side of killing.

But I thought Rocket wanted to promote teaming up. I do agree that it shouldn't exclude the Lone Wolf player entirely. I would like it to be at the stage that if you are a lone wolf and don't kill (too) many people and stay well fed/watered/clean keeping short hair and short beard (finally we can use razors) then you should be fine, but it will be more difficult.

AS50 is better in every way. Apart from the noise the M107 makes, highly inconvenient but highly badass.

Man up. Use big gun kill all zombies

I was certain a place was Scotland somewhere!!! Turned out to be somewhere in Australia. Oops, I suck so bad.

SA is going to be awesome, can't wait for it to be a proper survival game instead of some slow paced FPS.

So I could dress up as medic and pew pew everyone on sight?

It used to be that you had to save the vehicles to lock them in place, then they removed it and it automatically happened. I think they put it back in as a precaution so if you want to be double safe you can save it as well.

FPS should be generally better all round due to the game being most server side. But remember that it is still a demanding game, a decent PC is needed to play with good settings. Oh and zombies should be fixed, maybe not so much on the first stages of the Alpha, but a few months into the game and most things should be working fluently.

Ahh such satisfaction!

Please don't make us wait this long AfterShave!