Saethkept

I am quite pleased so far with my DayZ.st server, however I have not been able to fully use it for going on 24 hours. Full server function needs to come back up, and really soon.

The best gift an admin/server owner can give to any player base is to return the full degree of freedom that DayZ allows in the first place. I played on an awesome server once called 'Worldwide Infection' which died with the transition to 1.7.5.1. After weeks playing on that server I never once noticed sign or presence of an admin - though I suspected one of the regular players might have been one. Basically, all the admin stuff was in the background and we players were free to do as we pleased without fear of interference from a heavy handed admin. How that server was never hacked (was not whitelisted) I do not know. On topic, not all private hive admins will mess with your hidden camps/vehicles/bases. I will only do so if a player hides a tent or vehicle within texture gaps, or loot generating buildings. Finally, the best place to hide your gear is the place you never reveal.

I've tried the main rotor death shave trick from '28 Weeks Later' on a horde of zombies. Did not work out too well. <_<

The 7.62 x 51mm NATO round is fully 12mm longer than the formerly Warsaw Pact 7.62 x 39mm. The difference being more grains of powder and a larger bullet in the longer cartridge. If I remember correctly the standard NATO FMJ round was 165 grains ... or is that the match grade round? While the Warsaw Pact FMJ round was 139 grains? Something like that. Thus more velocity and energy at extreme ranges. At least they got the tracer round colors right. Nevertheless, while your ideas are interesting OP, DayZ and Arma for that matter are already realistic enough for me. It's a video game. Polygons have no mass. I suppose you could argue that they exist since they occupy a hard drive and pass into video memory but why? It's a game. That said, I also enjoy tinkering with such things in shooters/mil sims, yet all I need is enough realism to suspend my disbelief.

As an *older* gamer myself I too have begun to more clearly hear gravity's call. This though ... sheesh. OP you ought to invest in some depends or whatever those diapers for grown ups are called. And ... you are supposed to make the other guy do that.

Last time they had it fixed fairly quickly. Hopefully this time as well.

My server as well.

On Chernarus, my hometown would definitely be Gorka. Tractors and sedans. A gas station down the road. Plenty of acreage to roam. Fertile soil. On Taviana, home is Lypestock. I live in the stadium.

It was a dark and stormy night . . . Actually, it was just past sunrise when I woke upon the ice edged heavily alpine forested shorline of what I would later discover to be one of two small islands joined by a land bridge and geographically located on the precipice of the Arctic Circle. A gelid, razor toothed wind gnawing through my soaked clothes to leech warmth from already numbed flesh. I crouched to check the contents of my rucksack. Inside the ice glazed, sand encrusted nylon bag I found a few road flares, a chemically activated heating pack, a can of sardines from some bygone era when fisherman where hucksters as well as sailors, a couple of first aid dressings, and a single chemlight. Mind shivering within trembling flesh I took a bearing on the newly risen sun and set out at a jog north along the coast. Forest line to my left, jade green glacially kissed waters to the right, I moved as quickly as my thawing bones permitted - all the while knowing that my best chance for survival depended on movement, warmth and clothing dried by a combination of moving air and body heat.The wind carried a sound like a lost child's plea for it's mother to my ears, and hairs raised on back of my neck as if some frigid demon had been unleashed within the heavily shadowed forests to run me down to the frozen earth. Of the plight of the rest of my mercenary company I did not much consider, for with extreme temperature of these northern seas unavoidably in mind, the chance of survival for those jettisoned from the spiralling C-130 further out to sea was unlikely. Even the cause of the sudden malfunction of both engines did not perplex me just then. Death and life - that being a matter of my own - occupied my full sentience. Some distance north of my landing I set foot on a dirt road and that sign of habitation, though it appeared deacades old construction, buoyed my fading spirit just enough to give some lift to my step. A half kilometer later I followed the packed dirt surface to the top of a small rise and in the near distance saw the sight I had for so many hours been in dire need of.Constructed along the near vertical breadth of a rocky slope was what appeared to be a 60's era Soviet military installation; low concrete walls enclosed perhaps twelve acres of well used space, in turn occupied by two several story metal guard towers, a pair of barracks, a two story headquarters edifice, a ring of rusted smaller guard stands around the inner perimeter, and a small military jeep parked next to a fuel tank. To celebrate my discovery, to realize my sudden fortune in the face of my company of fallen comrades in arms now surely eternally entombed on the bed of the Bering Sea, I sat down cross-legged on the dirt road, piled in a small pyramid some twigs I had gathered from the forest edge on my journey north and with a section of cloth torn from shirt, used a road flare to raise a small fire. The meager heat radiated to me like life itself as I cooked the sardines in their can. With a hatchet discovered in a loggers shanty some distance back, I cut the lid off the can and drank deeply the rank, salty preservative. I followed the sickenning draught with chunks of the scaly fish and though surely the last meal I ever desired to have, it was the best I could recall. Sated, I placed the empty can in my rucksack for later use as a vessel to gather and boil water. I set out for the evidently long abandoned military base, folding knife at the ready, wondering if such large predators as the Kodiak grizzly inhabited this remote and frozen land. Closer to the gate I noticed movement. Several soldiers in the uniform of a defunct Soviet paratrooper brigade milled aimlessly at the entrance as if in a stupor. While unarmed, the sight gave me such sudden pause that I instinctually hooked left into the forest. Moving quietly I paralleled the perimeter wall until I found an opening in the outer ring of concertina wire and a breach in the concrete wall iself. I went prone and rolled through the breach, finding myself a few hundred meters uphill from the gate entrance and it's group of strange soldiers. With one thought only - a moment sheltered from the wind and perhaps a gulp of freshwater from an ancient tap - I crept toward the nearest barracks, dreamily aware but not concerned over the presence of such anachronistic uniforms worn by soldiers who behaved as a herd of confused animals. What were they doing here? All that mattered to me then was an escape from the bite of the Arctic gusts. Barracks door before me, hatchet held as threateningly as possible, I opened the door and froze. Crouched before me across the threshold was another man. He held smartly an assaut rifle and before my frigid mind could thaw enough to identify its make and model, the barrel rose toward my chest. In a blur of clumsy motion I brought the ten ounce blade down to meet the other man's hairline and was rewarded with a crunch and spray of hot blood.Relieved to have survived I clawed the assault rifle from the dying man's grip, charged the weapon and took good aim. My knees failed and all my meager strength drained. I realized as crumpled to a heap on the icy floor that I had just slain Rogers, a member of my mercernary company and a friend of fifteen years. What adversity he must have survived to crash land at sea and make it to this base so far removed from and forgotten by the world. As a needle of madness punched into the last of my will and sanity, shadows that bobbed in the now afternoon sunlight danced jerkily over me from the doorway.I turned to confront their source and into my vision swam the faces of some of the soldiers I had seem milling about the gate. Soldiers they had been, but human no longer. Red, voracious eyes met my own and fingers like bony claws were aimed at my throat. I do not remember how I did it, but when I next awoke I found myself barricaded in the latrine of the barracks, moans of the once human solders barely audible over the thump of their fists against the other side of the door.Let it be known that mercenary Jack Caine wrote this account with the rim of an empty shell casing on the tile wall of a barracks latrine on an island somewhere in a frozen hell, a place long abandoned and shunned by and emtptied of all sane life.

I agree with you JubeiDOK. I also think it is a subculture within a subculture. DayZ gives a player much latitude to approach and play it in many ways. Sure, a player must eat, drink and avoid danger in order to survive, but just outside the sphere of that cycle is plenty of room to do as one pleases. Also, trends have much to do with it. I think that the longest I have ever played on a 200 vehicle/M4SD starting gear server was less than a few hours, and was very early into my DayZ life. The ability to try so many helicopters, ground vehicles and weapons was great, but after a bit the game felt like a flight sim, or a racing sim or a shooting range. Some gamers just seem to want to cut out the early game stage and go directly to end game. I do not agree with that, but since the mechanics exist to allow for it, there's little to be done. Running a server is fun, but honestly, it is not as enjoyable as logging into a server blind and unable to know what to expect either from the player community there, or the admins, or many other factors. I think the experience should be as difficult and horror movie like as possible, yet that does not really suit everyone evidently which is no surprise. Were the game to more directly enforce a greater challenge which could not be altered by scripting, but still provide open world freedom, then I imagine some or many would complain and then leave it. Overall, the game is what you make it for yourself and that is largely determined by which server you find a DayZ home on.

Actually, it is not too hard on a private server to make zombies die by headshots only, do more damage, run much faster and spawn more rapidly and in greater numbers. It is also possible to spawn all zombies at once - though that seems to be quite buggy at the moment. With features such as these, the zombie factor comes back into play - big time. However, a player can still run forever and mostly avoid zeds, but listening to tales of players getting knocked unconscious while trying to lift off in a helicopter is quite satisfying. Understandably, the DayZ mod devs are doing their best to implement features desired by the whole community and I salute them for that. On a private or test server, you've no one but yourself or your micro community to please, and so more drastic measures can be taken or experimented with. I do wish however, that much, much more focus would be placed on the zombies and the difficulty of hourly survival versus the environment. PvP is fun, exciting, and fits well enough in the genre but in my opinion it ought not have dominated it like it has. There have been times when I might as well have just reinstalled the original Unreal Tournament for the level of player on player combat I've seen. A symptom of the era I suppose.

For some reason it's the "Tims", the "Bobs" and the "Toms" - the most common of forenames as the whole user name - that give me pause. So were named the bulk of the hackers to whom I have fallen on various servers. Then again a really high ping and the name "Timmy" will sound the alarm every time. Common first names as player names - they freak me out.

I've noticed. D.C. server owner here.

Planting satchel charges ... now. But seriously, there are a few good locations. The thing is, is players are like random search programs that automatically run each time they play on any given server. Sooner or later, someone will find your stash no matter where you've hidden it and most times it will be found by chance. All of that being the case, I used to set camp between two closely placed buildings in out of place villages, or either way out in the woods. More than anything you want to be far away from a vehicle or loot spawn location. I once found a camp on Namalsk set up in the center of a large zombie spawn point. How those dudes managed to access their gear while fending off the hoarde I never did find out.

Yes, I prefer a modded server ... modded by me and perhaps a select few others, including of course the DayZ Community Dev team. What? You ask. If done carefully and with proper respect for the original dev's vision, one can realize his or her own zombie apocalypse vision on their private server which is completely and soley thanks to Rocket's creation of DayZ in the first place, and gifted coders around the web. Rather than stomp some more upon the well trodden grass on the path of a bajillion vehicles and main battle tanks in your pocket as starting gear, I personally have been trying to make DayZ as difficult as possible .... within some reason. But anyway, modded servers can almost be as good as the original flavor, and I see no reason not to mod and script your server. It's entirely up to the individual player whether or not to log in to or remain on a server with mods that turn them off.

At least the G17 will likely never show up as starting gear. In desperation I recently shot down a boar at over 100 meters with it. A Makarov can be quite deadly, even at some distance if one has used it extensively. The low magazine capacity seems to have a negative psychological effect on most. Just as well, I'd rather it did not become starting gear.

I've encountered this most often with the Mi-17 family of helicopters. Sometimes you just need to fool around with a helicopter that is out of fuel and eveything on red, yellow or orange. I've nudged them with other vehicles, hopped in and out of them many times, and ran couched around and around them to get the repair option. One thing though, after repairing everything, you might want to hop in and out a few times before adding fuel, as sometimes you can add twenty jerrycans and get nowhere.

I agree with you OP. Testing some ideas on my server ... seems that is all I do ... to make DayZ more challenging. I really do wish I could go back to my very first log in to a DayZ server and well, log in for the first time ... again. My first experience with a supposed massively online zombie game was WarZ and I argued for months on their forums for some of the issues you raise to be resolved or addressed. Of course, that game was headed for nihility from day one - in my opinion. Luckily, I heard of DayZ, purchased Arma2 and here I am, much happier than in years with a PC game. Pvp will always be a factor in DayZ I am certain, and I do enjoy the tension the presence of other players inspires in me. Hopefully however, zombies will get their day in either DayZ or another game, and become the greatest source of fear in that game world. I also agree that scavenging, scraping by and just making it is great fun.

Prognosis Negative.

I began the DayZ experience with Namalsk - because honestly, I felt lost on Chernarus in the beginning. Namalsk can be amazingly eerie and like no other map at night, but it is very small and packed with high grade military loot. Not the best map to hide out in the mountains on, but one of my favorites. Chernarus is great. The pervasive feeling of tension it inspires is like no other - even driving around is a nightmare with all of the obstructions in the road. Definitely holds a place in my DayZ heart that no other map can replace. However, Chernarus can get stale for me from time to time. Taviana is my favorite at the moment. For exploration purposes and urban combat, her cities cannot be beaten. Taviana has in my opinion a near perfect blend of sea, air and land exploration/interaction. A couple of drawbacks are the glitchy buildings, and the overabundance of loot around every corner. But Taviana is also a map capable of sustaining a large player population without feeling crowded. Takistan is a great map as well - the ground being so loud to walk across combined with the vast open spaces and lack of traditional foliage for cover prevents a good challenge, but the variety of buildings and sites to explore does not really do it for me. Overall, Taviana, Namalsk, Chernarus and Celle get my vote.

The oil rig is not a good place for a base - but it is a cool concept. I run a Tavi 2.0 server, and I can tell you that if you leave a helicopter on an oilrig helipad it likely will not survive server restart. You can get up onto the base of the rig from water level, but you can't climb any higher ... unless I am missing something. On my server I added custom loot spawns to the oilrigs via worldspace coordinates, but most often, nothing spawns on the rig itself. Whether or not this has to do with approaching the rig in a vehicle, I am uncertain. I did try swimming in from 500m and climbing onto the base where I had added a few loot spawns, but no luck. I also do know that some of the oilrig surface textures are treated by the game engine the same as road surfaces, so perhaps that has something to with it as I have never seen loot spawn on a road in DayZ.

I run a Tavi server which I hope will eventually garner some interest. Namalsk is always popular as a new player can hop in and quickly find good equipment. I had thought about running a Takistan server as with the update to 1.7.5.1 the zombies are quite difficult and numerous but Takistan is somewhat bland in my opinion as it is all desert. I think you would do better with either Namalsk, Taviana or maybe something newer like Oring.

I was hiking through Pogorevka once. Found a diary beneath a pew in the church there. Read it as I continued north. Seems the state funeral director for the district had had a run in with a travelling coroner six years before the outbreak. In the diary, the funeral director details the time the two spent together - sheltered away in the funeral parlor basement - away from the sensitive eyes and ears of the district special police. Most of the entries described their sharing of professional knowledge of the dead - of how a corpse gets that way, and to what measures one must go to make a face frozen in death appeal to the living - one final time before the worms go to work and the maggots colonize. I pitched my tent one twilight just south of Lopatino, and with an unusually bright moon riding black toothed clouds, set about to finish the diary; an unusual but welcome means of soothing the ever present hunger gnawing my sides and the paranoia which never pauses for a second its soft, cold exhalations along the back of my neck. In later chapters - no longer titled with dates as had been the previous - the funeral director's steady, almost print type neat writing style had become a shuddering mess of blotted ink and scribble. Though nearly illegible the funeral director's description of the travelling coroner's experience on a mountain to the southwest was strikingly clear; so clear in fact that it clawed at my mind from the very page and shredded the immersive distraction that had salved my sanity these past nights on the march. The formely bright moon seemed to dim as I read, and on the wind I thought I could hear cries of the infected, although I had swept the area thrice before setting camp. To a high point called Green Mountain, by the local villagers, the travelling coroner had once been summoned by no one less than the district governor himself. With no description of the need for his services there - so far out in the country and above it - the coroner arrived perplexed and quite the bundle of terror had grown within his stomach, as the district governor was locally famous around central Chernarus for his issuance of summary execution orders for lesser political offenses against the state. Tool bag in hand, the travelling coroner arrived at the summit of Green Mountain, borne by his old but ever faithful bicycle. There the district governor himself introduced him to a scene of charnel savagery that even the coroner had not imagined possible to inflict on the human form. In the shadow of the hundreds of feet tall weather station lay the vacated by human sentience remains of a platoon of more than thirty federal soldiers. Regaining a modicum of his years of experience dealing with the sight and scent and grisly power of the dead, the coroner set about examining the carnage body by body. The long bones of both the arms and legs of both soldiers had been removed - by an unknown means and with incredible strength - had been splintered and used as utensils on the softer parts. That the platoon had been eaten was immediately apparent. After finishing his recording of the coroner's story of what transpired on Green Mountain, the funeral director had seemed to end his diary. Upon further inspection however, I discovered a sketch several pages separated from the supposed end of the body of text. It was labelled as a drawing of the coroner's arm ... and in great detail was reproduced the scar where the long bone had been removed by violence. A few final words followed the sketch: "What hunger ravenous in darkness rises whence to force a man to remove bones from his own skeleton, to eat of his own flesh so greedily, that less than much of it remains?" -On Green Mountain the living hunger only for satiation in death-

If you have a heatpack in your inventory when you log in ... use it. I sometimes think I was adrift for hours in the Baltic before coming ashore. By the way, when are you dev guys going to implement the positive temperature effect from being inside a building?

Not the case as a rule or even a common problem. I have overidden both .sqfs as well as many others native to the DayZ Code .pbo, and have no such issues. Also, it sounds like you are using a custom skin addon script or change clothing script that was improperly implemented, or is conflicting with either normal server operation or some other script you have added. You ought to check your RPT logs to possibly see what is going haywire.