Freeborne (DayZ)

Could it be a problem with Jay2Lib? Make sure you have that and CBA working on the server. AFAIK J2L is what allows data from ARMA2 to be exported in real-time, to... say... a mySQL database. If it establishes a connect to SQL server, then the ports are open on your firewall, so that shouldn't be it. The Hive apps are launching, so not DLL or DirectX issue. Also make sure you are on Hive's IP whitelist (i.e the Devs approved your server) and you are using the correct instance ID (every server needs a unique mission file, with includes this custom instance inside it). You'd had to ask the Devs about this, and supply your server IP so they can double check.

Fenrix, I didn't dob you in or anything lol. I was on TeamSpeak with Antipop though, and he did ask me to find out what your instance ID was and that he didn't realise you were only going to run 12 slots.

Yes. I think it's access has been revoked already. 20 slots is bare minimum I think, but depending on the region they prefer 50 slot servers that will be reliable and provide good experience for players.

So we should have: 50 (Games.on.net) 90 (AusArmA) 40 (Shizweak) - coming soon. That's approximately 180 slots in total. It's 2PM AEST, and there is 140/140 slots full already. We have 195 slots running last weekend, and it was not enough. Should be enough during the week, and 'maybe' enough during the evenings. So if we have 140 slots during off-peak, I wonder how bad it will be this weekend? :( We'll be monitoring demand very closely, and if it keeps growing, or if no-one else can afford to host DayZ, we'll bring up another 2 servers. It's just a shame everyone tries to bring up servers in secret, as we'll end up paying hundreds of dollars for another server that could easily go to waste.

You need to delete the // in your reportingIP line. Those two lines comment out anything after them, so anything after them are ignored. Make sure your firewall isn't blocking the Hive data. From memory it uses TCP port 3306.

None of the default ARMA2 difficulty settings will achieve what you want. They all have to be customised by server admins. Even Veteran mode still has waypoints enabled, so you can shift-click on the map, and get a pointer on your screen telling you how to get there, and how far away it is (HUDWP = 1). You also still have crosshairs (WeaponCursor = 1). class Veteran { class Flags { 3rdPersonView = 1; armor = 0;// Cannot be changed autoAim = 0;// Cannot be changed autoGuideAT = 0;// Cannot be changed autoSpot = 0;// Cannot be changed cameraShake = 1; clockIndicator = 0; deathMessages = 1; enemyTag = 0;// Cannot be changed friendlyTag = 0;// Cannot be changed hud = 1; hudGroupInfo = 0; hudPerm = 0;// Cannot be changed hudWp = 1; hudWpPerm = 0;// Cannot be changed map = 0; netStats = 1; tracers = 0;// Cannot be changed ultraAI = 0; unlimitedSaves = 0; vonId = 0; weaponCursor = 1; }; skillFriendly = 1; precisionFriendly = 1; skillEnemy = 0.9; precisionEnemy = 0.75; }; The only difficulty setting that gives you what you want (with default settings) is Expert, but that also disabled 3rd person view that most people can't live without, and no HUD to show you your ammo count (ouch). A lot of people are setting up DayZ servers with no experience with ARMA. It's partly their fault for not doing any research, but it doesn't help the DayZ devs don't give any help either in how to properly setup servers, or explain things. Regular is the best setting because you can fully customise it, but hardcore players will still choose a server that says "Veteran" even if it has easier settings than a fully custom Regular server.

I like the 'idea' of more zombies, but for us (ANZ servers) it's doubled our bandwidth and crippling our server FPS. We getting a lot of crashes, and having to drop a 70 slot server down to 40 or less, still getting worse performance. Any other servers having similar issues? I know the zombie numbers were unintentional, but currently it's game-breaking for us. We were already struggling with providing enough slots for local players, now we're having to half our slots.

So you're going to deter death matching.... by.... death matching? I'm a bandit, and one thing I hate is having to run miles to find new prey. If you're all going to hang around the coast, and make it easy for bandits to find someone to kill, then on behalf of all bandits I'd like to thank you for your misguided intentions. So while you guys are acting like all the other noobs in DayZ asking "Are you friendly?" and 'questioning' other players, us bandits will be watching the whole thing, reading Side Chat, and ambushing your whole posse of wannabe vigilantes.

Pretty sure the dayzmod.info said it takes 6 scrap metal to fully repair a chopper's hull, which will fix the fuel leak. The website is down at the moment though, so you will have to search forums for confirmation.

Hamilton, what server? There's about 70 DayZ servers now I think. A2CO is $30 on Steam. If that's too much to pay, just for this mod, go get a job. It's a bargain price for a brilliant game, not to mention a brilliant mod too (DayZ). A free version of PMC is included in A2CO updates, but the textures are reduced. You can buy the full version DLC for about $10 on Steam, but it will just mean the Survivor uniforms look nicer. The DayZ servers should accept both the free and paid version of PMC. If they do NOT accept your free version of PMC, it's possible the server admins installed PMC on the server, and are using the full-version keys by mistake.

I think every server is running Windows 2008 Std (most probably R2). They can host their own SUPER DUPER fast database. Updates to the central server can then be sent from the local database, once every 10 minutes or so. Not sure how many transactions a second the central DB can safely handle, but our server spits out an update for player gear at at rate of 1 per second (approx) with 100 players online. The main issue we experience is when we start the mission, vehicles don't always spawn. Trying to load gear from 70 players and spawning server vehicles, all from the one DB, is usually too much, and causes long wait times, and vehicles often don't spawn. We have to start the server, lock it at 20 slots (or so) and start the mission, confirm vehicles have loaded, and then unlock the other slots. A local DB would probably fix all this, and be much cheaper and more responsive then an upgrade to the central DB (which is 180ms away from us).

I do like the design. Please make a white version too. It's frustrating not being able to read DayZ forums on mobile devices without going into a dark room.

It's pretty simple what you need to do. Invest 10x the amount of time and effort you're currently putting in, and take on more staff, so you can meet customer deadlines for releasing a standalone product. Take donations from players as soon as possible so you can quit your job and develop it full-time, because if you wait too long someone else will come out with a competing product, and you'll never make any money back. Sell out now, before it's too late! Either that, or tell all these new players to go take a hike, and you have more integrity than that, and will release the product for free, like every other ARMA mod before it, and not hold it back by forbidding community involvement in it's development and progress. - Community developed - Community funded - Community supported P.S: Having just read Reymas' above post, I would also agree that giving Rocket a team within BIS to further develop this mod would be 100% okay with me.

Haven't confirmed this myself, but in standard ARMA2 a helicopter can get a fuel leak from a single bullet to the fuel tanks. So the helicopter HULL and FUEL will still show as bright green, but health will be at 99.999%. So you either need scrap metal to repair the HULL, or Fuel Tank parts to repair the fuel tank, to 100%.

NZ is only 2 hours ahead of the Australian East coast, where majority of Australians live. Western Australia is 2 hours behind the East coast, or 4 hours behind NZ. It's a bit discriminatory to reject all Kiwi applications, but I doubt that was the intention. Some of us just forget NZ exists, a bit like how the USA often thinks they're the only country in the world. :)

Damn. Guess I was wrong. Apologies to Rocket, you're still doing a fab job!

Like the bandit system, it's not perfect, but its a bandaid fix to combat several problems, and will evolve into something better I'm sure over time. I like the fog at night, although I wish it wasn't so dense during the day. There's no reason the weather effects need to be applied across the entire map either. I've seen positional weather many times in other missions. It would be nice if some areas, such as valleys, or coastlines had more fog than northern areas. These would be good places to spawn at too, as the fog as mentioned makes it harder for snipers and bandits to claim easy kills. It would also be good if you could get swallowed up occasionally in really think fog that makes it easy to get lost in, if you don't have a compass and map. Even a GPS would greatly help. Not 100% keen on the current fog either, but I'm happy to live with it for now at night, less so during the day.

Wow, there seems to be so many DayZ players who just got A2CO to play DayZ. The huge open world, the weapons, the sounds, the weather, the atmosphere, all that and more comes from ARMA2, not DayZ... I believe these are the ones encouraging a pay-to-play or standalone game, because they simply don't know how much credit needs to go to ARMA2, and not DayZ. The mod's only been out a month, and most players have only been playing a week or two, so it's really too early to determine how long player interest will remain, or what future demand will peak at. Still it would be good to know now if you plan to go commercial. If you go commercial, the only thing you can count on is that the ArmA community will release something else, for FREE, and I would suspect be a better product, with a more mature, long-lasting, and supportive community. Iront Front will probably be a good example for us all to follow closely and learn by. One other thing. Why do you keep blaming ARMA2 engine for the performance issues and many other things (such as VON)? DayZ mission is generating an insane amount of errors for everyone, with vast majority being caused by your code. Missions like Warfare perform better with 40-50 players and hundreds of "complex" AI, that move in formation, drive tanks, fly choppers/jets, etc. I'm not a coder, but the VON issue doesn't make sense either. We've had revive and respawn working in hundreds of ARMA2 missions with Direct Chat never being an issue. The error reports include "No speaker given for ". That suggests the way you're respawning players is probably flawed, and we're being spawned into slots that are not defined a name. Again, I'm not a coder so I am aware I could be way off, but I'm sure there's a lot of experienced ArmA devs out there that could help you fine-tune it and fix these problems.

Lower view distance results in: - Not being able to spot cars and other valuable things from long way off. - Not being able to fly around in a chopper and easily spot everything and everyone. - Makes the map feel bigger, as you have to travel further to inspect every area. - Cannot easily follow trail of bodies, or a flare to hunt players down. - Sound can be heard further than you can see (for a change). - It's easier to be stealthy without worrying someone from 2KM can easily spot you by zooming in. - Players can't camp from safe spots as easily now and pick off players with a sniper rifle, while being well away from zombies or ear-shot. - Fog makes for a bleaker atmosphere. Running around in a nice open sunny, cloudless day doesn't seem right with a zombie apocalypse. - Server view distance is about 1600m, fog is about 500m. Not having to send data to clients for objects that are 2000m away does help server performance, although I doubt that was high in the list of reasons to implement fog.

What CPU has 3 cores? If you have 3 cores, I'd say you don't have a Dedicated Server, but a VPS. Are they also 3 full cores, or 3 "units"? Sometimes host providers will sell a unit of CPU processing power, which is just 1GHz, or a ratio of the full CPU. Either way, you did not include information on the type of CPU. There is a HUGE difference in performance from an old CPU in a hosts "Specials" section, and the latest and greatest server CPUs. How is data counted? In? Out? Both? Just the largest usage of the two? You know what's RIDICULOUS? Complaining that DayZ don't give out enough information (which I completely agree with) and then not doing the same thing yourself. rocket and crew, save everyone some time and effort, and make all this information clearly visible and easily accessed. Why waste time responding to people who post the bare minimum info and then require to be asked again and again for more information, because they can't Google, or search the forums. Setup some auto-responders on gmail that reply back with a form asking all these specifics. Have more than one inbox for different queries, etc. I know the success hit you by surprise, but some more Organization couldn't hurt.

Hey everyone, Can we please pool our collective knowledge to provide each other with tips and best practises for optimising our server performance? What is everyone finding the best Max Slots to have, for sustaining acceptable server FPS? What is your data usage for your servers, and what is the peak bandwidth use? What are your arma2.cfg values set for min/max bandwidth, etc. Is there much difference between having HyperThreading on or off? Any tips for ensuring Hive and HiveAuth performs efficiently, and doesn't go into an auth-loop, crash, or become unresponsive, etc. I'll start off and answer some of my own questions. We are using about 7.5GB an hour with 80 slots (across two servers). Average bandwidth is 8Mbps in, 10Mbps out, but it can peak to 12/20. We currently still have H/T on, and 40 slots is best max slots we can sustain before FPS drops too much. This is on an E3 1240 at 3.3GHz. We are running games and Hive apps as services, with auto-restarts if they fail. There has been about a dozen times that the HiveAuth didn't seem to work, and players were stuck at "Waiting for character data". Restarting HiveAuth often fixed the problem. A few times, the HiveAuth seemed to be in a loop (was authenticating a user every second, even though no-one was joining). Started a second instances of HiveAuth and it seemed to fix the looping, so then closed the other instance. Server FPS still drops after a an hour or so, and usually hovers around 8-15 FPS. This is normally low, but game still seems fine and zombie cleanup scripts still run, etc. Past 5fps, zombies usually keep multiplying eventually leading to a crash. What FPS is everyone else getting, what are your configs like, etc.

View distance max can be set in missions, and in server configs. Server view distance default is 1600, unless someone changes it, but I believe that's what the Devs are setting it at. The mission I think has fog about 500m from memory too. So little point in setting your own above 2000. I've used lots of different ArmA game launchers in the past, and I'm currently finding ArmArize a pretty good one. For new players it has all these custom startup options as tick boxes, so it's easy to start your game with all the above parameters, plus a few more.

You can browse for servers that are on Regular or Veteran. If it's on Veteran, some things cannot be changed. For example you cannot have crosshairs on if it's Veteran, which then means player tags won't show either. Some things can still be changed on Veteran though, such as turning map marker on/on, 3rd person on/off or showing death messages (who died). Regular, with it's default settings has most of the visual aids, but again, it can be customised pretty much anyway the server admins want, so that it's actually harder than the default Veteran settings. You need to find servers, visit their websites and see if they've posted this info up, or start a discussion there asking these questions. We ran a server on Veteran for a few hours, and put (Vet Mode) in the server name, at the end. Then a few hours later, one of the Dev team guys got in the server, removed it and changed it to "normal" difficulty (a non-existant setting btw). So we tried, but guess someone didn't like that idea.

Wow. No responses? What about changing the AI skill level. Will that make much of a difference to FPS, or the zombie AI (which I imagine don't need as much processing as soldiers, who need to aim, move in formations, take cover, lean out from buildings, etc).

Depends how your data is charged. Seems about a 3:4 ratio between IN and OUT traffic. Some charge data both ways, some charge just one way, often whatever is highest. Rough estimates, a 50 slot server would use 4Mbit in, 6Mbit out. It all varies a lot though on your config. With 10 player it sits around 500Kb in/out for example, and with 50 it can go up to 9Mbit at times. 50 slot server can use from 100-200GB a day, or say 60-120GB per day if only charged one way. Hosting a DayZ server probably isn't something you jump into blinded, with no idea what it entails.