g4borg

To be honest, to me it was always just the wish, that the rest of Chernarus gets a bit of vegetation, a few ruins, so it can act as player-based terrain. no loot and only a few zombies, and animal spawns. That would always have worked the best for the old school Epoch era, where you could often see, that admin bases and player bases tried to establish themselves in the far north (Green Acres). It was a natural trend I would have picked up and developed upon. At least this is how I would go forward if it were my game. Maybe a giant river and mountains as a natural border, and the rest just rudimentary map design. Allow the individual servers to stitch their own solution there, and just give basic support. Could also be some procedural solution on some Voronoi based cellular map, which could also have worked in the south as islands, so that it always feels like there is some boundary around you, but incentive to loot is to travel south. This should be fairly easy to create, and would not diminish the quality of the main map. That way player made castles would not have been a problem in the playmap either, and even the server hopping could have been solved easily, if you disable it in the "Green Acres of the north" , so it would not even be needed to forbid building in the main map, because for players it would be much more lucrative to go north and claim some land in the empty vegetation (which is hopping safe). Going north then either means, you want to be left alone in the wilderness, you want to establish a permanent presence, or you want to attack other player groups. The standard gameplay of loot and shoot would stay mostly in the main map. Custom servers could do spins like wastelands, custom map design, close it off, etc. One could always further expand chernarus to the west, if the engine gets negative X coordinate support. But designing the map further and further would not yield much, if it stays the same old same old. It just dillutes the playerbase. I am fine if new maps have other servers.

to be honest, the game is dwindling, if you try to arbitrarily make it harder than real life just to keep it more "hardcore survival", especially, since it is now way beyond it's prime. so yes, untreated infections, diseases, etc. would be nice mechanics, if they have long time survival consequences. on the other hand, surviving diseases could give you resistances. and surviving longer should make you tougher for some threats. and in any case, giving constant issues for the character is not really a play experience. player numbers seem to show, that making every issue a critical one seems to not fare well. after all, the nice thing about dayz was the constant danger, until you forget it, and death happens suddenly. a constant "you need to fix another issue with your character or you die in 10 minutes" is just not fun gameplay. It does not achieve the goal to make the game harder, only more ridiculous.

seriously guys, the amount of switcheroos in your xml files, tabs vs. spaces vs. tabs, trailing spaces in the xml, constant switch of line endings, etc. is annoying as F. it is really hard to keep custom server files in sync with 1 mio microchanges per patch. i have to clean them up every time to keep some sane diffs.

is this some xbox specific bug? never had issues with that. anyway, my point is not that dayz is specifically a bug free experience, far from it. but the opposite of it, being bug free, is basicly no game ever. the time you keep ranting here is the time you should have invested looking at one or two youtube videos of the game you are going to buy. i am far from someone who does not criticize this project, but your buyers remorse feels like you spent your inheritance on this game or sth. now, i could ask you, if you are f*ed? GTA V held it's price of 50 bucks almost 5 years after it's release and only recently has started to go down in price. It was for years the most expensive game ever made, so it is the creme de la creme of the AAA business. It had extreme starting problems, with lots of bugs the first years after release, with multiplayer not working properly a long time. It is still one of the most cheater overrun games, in multiplayer, which at the same time has a grind based model, that costs extra money through microtransactions. quite a strange comparison.

you should always research what you buy. it is your duty as a consumer, to tell the market your demands. how can the market know, you want 1.0 games to be totally bug free, if you just buy buggy games? also, i love your expectations of a totally bug-free game with 1.0. I think that is a world we all would love to live in, where such things exist.

Books are probably gimmicks, but bows are definitely more important than dragging and crawling. Vaulting and climbing as top feature however we can agree on and luckily that is coming.

Any ideas how to sweep the server for items? Especially if I want to check each item of a specific type... (Will answer myself if I find it out...)

I guess to search we have to sweep the map X by y in intervals and execute the position search .

sad for eugen leaving, but projects go on. most of what has been said sounds plausible. happy that the dlc is not items. sounds good, go for it! although, if i had been asked back in the days to do a standalone dayz, i would not even have started on the arma2/helicopters engine in the first place. enfusion is nice, but working with it is really hardcore, i whish there was a compiler / syntax checker you could just plug into existing IDEs instead of your broken windows toolset with that qt ide. that on the other hand seems like wasted time for me. bring the bows back.

ah on console you might not have that option, i dunno, do you have private servers? in that case might be an interesting test for console to have some single-server-character servers from official.

this would not be very much different from what private servers are doing, where you have server based characters. so just play on privates.

i find this interesting, as indeed the main usecase would be to have mods that are optional, like administration can you report your achievements?

as many dayz rounds end up in searching each other for a long time, and quite a few ended with "ok we all met finally, now lets log off", i find team spawn just as useful as harmful to one of the few goals that keeps you ingame sometimes, but it is also a feature, that might indeed make it more userfriendly. you might want to post a thread in suggestions, however.

it makes me question how it works then, since i thought the one in the mission is the decisive one.

makes me really happy. now i just hope we can define a custom location for the mission or the storage.

i think the biggest issue with server hopping was it to abuse raiding bases by teleporting into the defenses. besides the fact, that ´hopping coordinates now are basicly the worst idea to build bases around, the current solution would work better if it would be bound to some base building system, where you have some kind of anti-hopping system in place. Well and that bases might not be hard to destroy with grenades now anyway. I personally would add a "Safe", that has a (gracious) deflection zone for hoppers, if you place it and add a combination lock. If a base has a "safe core" around an area someone hops on the other server, his character gets moved by the hopping mechanism. Such safes cannot be placed around hopping coordinates, and close to other safes, and they still can be destroyed. They can be used as secure storage as well, to give them some additional usage. So people could secure their bases against hopping. Of course it would not prevent people who log in who were already part of the server. To prevent other abuse, otherwise i would only enforce hopping coordinates on a player if he switches server several times, so he has to wait a 15 minute cooldown or sth. to safely change servers. Of course it would not alleviate all the issues players have with this new mechanism, but it would certainly aim more at the abuse and less make changing servers being punished. Other abuse cases could be similarly targeted with rulesets. Now if that makes everything better or worse, I dunno. As i only play on my own server if ever, and usually on private servers anyway, I am not really impacted by all of this.

DDR3 based systems have slower RAM, that is often not taken into account, causing micro lags in many contemporary games, I also had a 3rd gen i5 cpu until recently and suffered microstutters in many titles, even if same games worked perfectly years ago. Sometimes these changes occur so slowly, but models get swapped for more polygons, etc. the cpu itself may even have enough raw power to handle all fine. Old HDDs, not enough RAM, etc. culminates as well. if you drive, you will a) do physics calculations and simulate your car, b) load map/assets into RAM, c) eventually load textures / models into GPU, the faster you drive the more throughput, the more vulnerable the whole simulation gets. you only need to enter a small cycle of lags, and this could be even from a few stray network packets, and if multiple parts struggle, you will end up with really heavy hits on performance, since in a simulation, you have to "keep up or sync", causing even more stress on an already bottlenecked system. in worst case, this leads to a simulation "explosion", where syncs and trying to catch up lost frames cause troubles, especially if e.g. the car is slightly sticking in the ground, causing the known death trap. Try lowering settings, swap in an SSD, make sure you have plenty of RAM. (E.g. do not underestimate, that windows 10 will use your swap for the gpu as well, so make sure you have enough swap / free space)

you can easily adjust that in the mission file in types.xml, by setting the values to "0" where you do not want them to be counted in the totals. i have removed that on my server a long time ago, i am sure others have aswell, as it kinda does not work well in a single server economy. because turning it up will only result in people hoarding more of them, and them disappearing again to be honest i am myself very skeptical about that feature.

Really nice. Especially the docs. Happy about them documentation. So there is no try/catch for exceptions? And, maybe, just maybe, could we get a config setting to - define how many files can be in a directory (max of 500 is bad) - define a separate path for missions folder (so we can have it on a RAMDISK, but not the game) Well, maybe time to create some tickets for these...

I tend to agree, that server hopping is a subpar solution. initially i thought they wanted to make a server-independent system, where you switch server instances with your network bubble. kinda like “Star Citizen” or “Dual Universe” aim to implement it (which however is questionable if they even succeed at this, as this has never been done yet successfully - but it kinda begs the question, if it is not the age of cloud computing, where such a solution would begin a new era of online gaming, but i digress) however, I do find, the server hopping could be solved really better by “extracting” and “landing” on the island in some way. If you really want to go from one server to another, this being possible is not bad, but it does not need to be as it is now. Since as it is now, you can simply walk into other players' bases, and other ghosting tactics. To be honest, this was a personal project of mine, by looking at what I saw from Escape from Tarkov, or remembering the good old Ultima Online times where you had a magic bank account, you could access in each town: simply have a player storage, you can return to, equip items, and start into the game, and have a specific extraction goal (reaching a bunker, flaring for a chopper, driving out with a boat, etc.) to return to that magic place. From there you could either be smuggled back to one of the insertion points, or jump in via plane, or come by boat. This is what I would have modded my server to play like to. Atm. this is on hold, as without mod-loading, proper DB access, or interprocess communication, I struggle to do it. I am pretty sure, DayZ needs such a spin, to evolve (not just watering it down with trader cities or ten thousand different items) To the technical solution of Duping, I got also my two cents given the current solution, and it's downsides, which IMHO is mainly a problem of communication between the central player database and the instanced server (less an issue of the actual economy system), I find it a bit of overkill, to mark every item generated on the server with a serial number. However, items which players do bring into the game, and items which they take out of the game, could be added with a serial number. However the main issue seems to be communication with the player database and servers. I had this happening already by accident, as I died to a Zombie, logged off, relogged, and spawned just where I was before I died, and ran from a player shooting at me. In this case I was happy about Groundhog day, as I could escape my death the second time, even if the stakes were higher. I understand that fixing this issue, of proper communication between servers and player db, has it's caveats. Locking the player character from relogging, until the old server reports what happened to it in the instance, would be the best solution. However of course, what if the server goes down - crash or restart? The solution seems actually to tackle it at its source, with some proper protocol of how server instances get player characters, like in some financial transmission or object database: A server can lease a player. A leased player is completely managed by the server database. The Server can update the lease, by sending a current status of the player occasionally. Each time a player logs in the server asks if his lease is valid, and proceeds to load the local cache copy of the player if yes, or retrieve the current player from the central database, if not. If the player wants to play on another server, the leased server has to have transmitted its current data, and returned the lease. This is the tricky part. Now there are two ways to accomplish this server2server: one is to have the servers listen to active push notifications from the player db, which asks them to submit the latest version of their leased player. This might be extra work, but it might be worth it. The other is to rely on periodic lease updates, and give a grace timer until the next update window. This of course increases the server traffic needlessly, better is the server polls the central db for current tasks, and in such gets informed to inform about the current player state of one if its leases. If the server fails to respond, and only then, in the grace time period, the player gets reset to the last centrally saved state / character. This might still allow duping by abusing server restarts, but only between two servers, and only once in a while. It certainly does not allow to dupe on the same server. Together with the solution, to tag serial numbers to items players have brought into the world, and maybe even revamping the whole system you travel between servers, this could make duping really hard. Of course this assumes, duping is mainly done with the central player database being abused. But everything else is a major flaw in your object instancing and server authority model.

I just whish they would improve the core. Better modability, mod loading on server join, database bindings or at least socket communication so we can do it on our own, some documentation... Why build a new scripting engine and have very limited exposure of tunable functionality like weather or item scripts. Why not focus on this engine with arma 4 in mind and use the opportunity. Dayz itself was a result of modability. That value should be core.

Sorry to say but no. The correct critique would be that they should have used a new engine from the start. And they should have developed it to be used for a future engine used in more titles. The engine they used, arma2 / choppers, is very amateur compared to even a five minute unity project, or modding unreal a bit. Which got proven by pubg using standard assets and minimal coding in unreal. So that choice was just late. Also it is not a few hackers. It is a lot of them. Even more than you assume, as many only use hacks moderately. Not everyone staples all cars on the server. FPS. Something that clearly improved. Physics. Network code. Fluidity of animation. No clipping through walls. Not saying I am happy about the current state especially about how overengineered cr4p the scripts are, I am absolutely not happy at all. But the old engine was a wrong choice from the start.

sorry, but making money should be the companies priority, not the consumers. this defensive attitude is by no means "unpopular", and many shady game developers actually profit highly from the advocates, even pushing their own "victim" standpoint, while most of the money is disappearing in completely unrelated "sinks". I know you mean it well, but unfortunately, money isn't everything. Game development is one of the hardest jobs in programming, it is taxing intellectually, operationally, emotionally. Sometimes money cannot solve these issues.

I know this is sort of a rant, but I have to kind of document it somewhere, because atm. DayZ Scripting made me encounter a really frustrating situation. How it started: It seems that files have maximum sizes, that means, simply serializing e.g. player based data into a json file is impossible. I have to start using multiple files. Weird, but fine. I implemented my systems with steam ID as filename in a custom directory in $profiles. It also seems, maximum amount of files in a directory, for whatever reason, is set to 500 in scripts. Saving a file will raise an exception. Nice to realize this by accident. Now since there is a MakeDirectory function in System, one would think: okay, let's use sub-directories with hashed directory names. At this point I just whish, the dumb 500 would be at least 1000, so I can properly hash a SteamID. But no. And MakeDirectory does not work, it simply returns 0, and does not create a directory in $profile. I have no idea how to use $saves on a server, but it does not matter, as it also returns 0 there. I cannot of course read inside a script, how many files there are in a directory, but maybe I have overlooked a function in EnSystem.c I could also of course pre-create a trillion directories so i do not need to create them. naaah... c mon. I have no idea how to create exception handling in this script language, as the documentation is non-existant. But of course if I had that, I could at least try to catch the maximum files error and simply hardcore some directory rotation and predefine maybe 100 directories i jump through until i can save; Of course I would feel dirty at that point, having to fall back to programming techniques like this. (If anyone has an idea how to do that, pls tell me; I mean exception catching, not feeling dirty) There is no socket support whatsoever. By now, But Clipboard copy / paste. Maybe I should implement communication with the outside world over that? Holy crap, do I just really thought about using the clipboard for application communication? No DB Support exposed. I mean, after the problems Arma2-DayZ Servers had, because you could not use .so files like .dll files to write a db plugin, while most servers ran actually on linux, you would expect them to at least have that on windows. But no DayZ Standalone is even worse in this regard. I know there is database stuff used internally, as the player database is a sqlite db file. So maybe it is still under development. Please tell me it is under development. Because SQLite is not really something you would use in production. It is usually used as placeholder for a more dedicated db system, because it is really not performant, like at all; which probably also lead you to use file dumps for the saves. I am deeply disappointed at this point, how the technical stuff is handled. No mod loading on join, no linux servers, no database or at least socket communication, no documentation, and then silly restrictions on stuff like files in directory. Who decides to set a 500 file restriction in a game scripting api? What is that even for? Why? The Operation System itself will handle that! Or wait, was it just because you did not implement exception handling from the operation system side?

I usually try to avoid 0.0 tbh with the weather script. but yes, in theory that would mean it, albeit, Set actually is supposed to set the current rain, and it very much depends whether the weather system itself reacts or not. maybe better to ask in that reddit post however.