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g4borg

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Posts posted by g4borg

  1. Posted · Edited by g4borg

    messages.xml restart works fine. you do not need BEC to do that.

    there is a nice night acceleration parameter additionally to the default time acceleration parameter, as well as the option to set a fixed starting time in the configuration file.

    the init.c of the mission file actually has it covered aswell, so you can do more advanced initialization there.

    you can control ingame time per script if you really want to finetune it.

    there are day-only servers, aswell as long-day / short-night servers. our server is long-day, but since it restarts every 12 hours and resets time to 6 morning on a beautiful summer day, its basicly day-only, e.g.

    so imho the problem is only the settings for public servers.

  2. Posted · Edited by g4borg

    the name is as far as I read out, actually set in the mission base script. you could simply script a script which rotates through ~100 names, if the user does not provide its own name. If it is just about having a more unique name.

    the function where this happens is in missionServer.c at OnClientNewEvent.

    the survivor name gets set by

     characterName = GetGame().CreateRandomPlayer()

    you could simply override OnClientNewEvent, and hook in your own little name generator, right after this; or similar. just set the string to something else instead. as you can see the name is actually retrieved from the name of the skin chosen. together with random skins this creates a bit of a trifle.

    I never tested this, but I bet it works. this could include quite sophisticated solutions to that, but I think, the name itself should never be the identifier anyway. I did however consider to do this as well for purely aesthetical reasons, maybe I will drop the script if i ever do it (or someone else can be kind enough, or you try it yourself)

    Otherwise, give the community time. I will definitely personally release my own rcon script at some point, when it becomes usable, and I am sure, others will too. For now, I have been rather okay with DaRt, and one other trick you can do is place in any of the events that are fired at login (e.g. OnPreloadEvent), where you can get the identity from an argument, and Print it into the log file, if you need it for bughunting with

    Print(identity.GetPlainId());

    this will output the SteamID64 into the logfile in the profile folder.

  3. Posted

    you could learn punctuation or it is really hard to read your sentences

    silencers on guns dont help with zombies, only pistol silencers do.

    it is true, they wear off quickly. gun cleaning kit is definitely useful.

    lags are random unfortunately. sometimes it can be a massive data burst, in which case it lags for everybody.

  4. Posted

    As this was one of our main goals for our server early on, and we already had a similar system in the mod, definitely agree. You might be happy to hear, that some hints in the scripts show that they were working already on something. There is experience based functionality, aswell as "softskills", whatever they may be.

    I totally agree with this; Anything that makes surviving worth while, without generally giving you an advantage over fresh spawns in terms of fighting was our idea.

    Our personal ideas included...:

    Definitely lowering food and water usage rate, increasing resistance to infections like cold or even reducing zombie cold rate

    Special ideas we wanted to script include also better avoidance of cloth damage in melee fights

    Instead however we wanted to increase the time and resources to make fire initially, and reduce them later, or just introduce a fail rate to that action, as well as the result of skinning, etc.

    And on long term we also wanted to introduce long term diseases on higher levels, which affect mostly long term residents, which however once cured, give some extra immunity.

    Finally there was even talk about changing the type of loot you spawn over time, when scavenging, making it harder to find food and ammo, but easier to find rares over time. This would also make it interesting for endgame chars to loot where fresh spawns are more common.

  5. Posted

    23 hours ago, robbyj said:

    compared to bi's other games it's beyond evident that BI sent in it's B team to take on DayZ. And that's a shame.

    really? compared to which game? i mean, i played almost every game they created, but most of them are not really catering to a large audience, barely make fps, and when arma came out, i could have probably coded the same stuff myself; certainly not the b team, or, i am glad it was the b team.

    ~

    1 hour ago, Buakaw said:

    You say there is no goal, but there is actually one goal no matter what: surviving, unless you enjoy respawning every 15 minutes.

    i do not get people who require a goal in a game that simply lives from emergent gameplay.

    but unfortunately, some people need closure. which is why even minecraft has an endboss. funny tho, however, there are myriads of long term minecraft "vets" who never even saw that.

    ~

    i think any change that could be made by scripting or tuning a private server (more starvation, loot values, whatever) is not as important, as things not being addable by the community (mod loading, database, persistence, netcode, new mechanics, values which are not exposed as settings, documentation, etc.). but years of watching game development shifting to crowd pleasing, i am just hoping they will keep this in mind, and not fullfill every single whish people have. but thats just me

    • Beans 1

  6. Posted

    10 minutes ago, MaxwellHouse69420 said:

    Yes it did , LOL . Have you ever played dayz mod or are you just one of those dayz sa F.Bs ? The base building was ABSOLUTELY dayz mods claim to fame , what else did it have going for it besides vehicles ?

    but base building came with epoch.

    and by the time epoch came around, dayz already was glorious, and actually started to flatline

    the fame was long there, and base building might have influenced a lot of games through it, true, but it was not really _the_ argument of dayz. it is just unthinkable today to play a survival game without base building elements (but this is also due to rust, ark, minecraft, spaceengineers&derivants, 7dtd, aoc, basicly any game after dayz in the survival genre). 

    most bases were choppers, suvs and tents for years.

    or wait, are you just one of those F.B. who came in with epoch?

    • Like 1
    • Beans 3

  7. Posted

    should be doable with server scripts alone, but i think for that the whole persistence should be more streamlined, we need databases, and maybe even a better mod support so we can make stuff like bed mods.

    as long as they do not have a good solution for server hopping, building will be mostly just a gimmick on public servers anyway, so its something for private hives anyway.

    altough, i am personally against such a system in vanilla also for other reasons. death should not come easy. and in late game, once we have choppers, and stuff, spawning for inhabitants will be easier.

    i would actually whish for the map to be extended in size with some vegetation beyond the current borders, where maximal a few rabbits spawn, to have clear areas where teams can build their bases / or even some island mechanic. i see a bit of a mixed bag of interests, if someone builds bases in the middle of the existing map and tries to control a certain area. I know that is not the intent of someone who just wants a friendly player town with gardens and stuff, but it is what it ends up to be, see Rust, where you have to wipe servers because it ends up in a sniper tower landscape every time, or even Ark, where most of the map will be littered by abandoned strongholds.

  8. Posted · Edited by g4borg

    I have one little small whish that I would consider a flavor fix: can you reduce the interval animals do noises? I mean, that should not be a large fix, and to be honest, next to persistence, database, whatever, I think that would already create a lot of happyness.

    It kinda ruins the immersion a lot to hear a friggin animal crying every 5 seconds. The first time I heard a deer i was impressed. The 304th time i heard it 5 minutes later i was kinda starting to get super annoyed by it.

    Less is More. a simple concept you could truly embrace for many things. Might also be hair growth, I really hope that super speed is only for experimental. Maybe add switches for such things in some xml.

    and thank you very much for showing your efforts by throwing out a few experimental patches. Please keep that up!

    • Beans 2

  9. Posted

    18 hours ago, Term_NCR said:

    A backup system doesn't change the fact this system does not work. If you look at the .bins, they do not save until the server begins it graceful shutdown.

    the .bin files are saved continuously, so its even worse.

    at least using a ram disk never had any corruption yet for me :P. but of course it comes with other risks. it also changes nothing at the problems the game has in terms of resyncs, global lags, strange effects or bugs. so at least we can really argue, that speed of world-dumping is not the issue on stability.

    i already had put that in my suggestion list. you should probably do that too, because i do not think it helps to increase your own post count in the patch thread.

    16 hours ago, Term_NCR said:

    GO HIVE THE FILES YOU HAVE MATE. Let me know how that goes xD

    to be honest it took me also a while to get what you mean, because the word "hive" does not mean much if you see it from a technical aspect. the "public hive" vs "private hive" as in dedicated servers storing your characters can already be emulated if you run multiple servers from the same mission file with different instance ids, according to forums here. put that on a network drive and it would be kind of the idea of shards with a common db.

    while the "old school" dayz term "private hive" was only refering to a server that has its own database, not the idea to have multiple servers using the same character data. so that word is conflicted.

    of course, now i get it if you refer to that i cannot start a public server on my own, because it will be only a local copy, and you want the software to actually build a real private hive, not the bin-file dumping stuff they give us. well i agree to that. but strictly speaking, i can already do a "private hive" like this, so your critics were not as off as you might say. funny iw as under the assumption if i start the server as is without modding, i will connect to the public db, but since i started modifying it immediately, i never tested that.

    as there is a sqlite database file in the storage, which stores player data in exactly one table, i doubt that actually official hive servers retrieve more than player data from the central db, and i also suspect, these functions are not part of scripts, but solved in the binary.

    • Beans 1

  11. Posted · Edited by g4borg
    Minutes not months

    The launcher as in the built in launcher you can start from steam has a parameter menu. In there on the second tab is IP. Always also enter the port. Just look through all menus it is not that many. 

    The dayzsalauncher however has no such field. There you need to go to the sponsor link, enter the IP on their website and submit it. It will ask for further donation for sponsoring it, but by then it is already in the db. You need to wait 5 Min and restart dayzlauncher. The server will be in the list now, if it is online. 

    Last option is to create a steam link to dayz on your desktop, open that and append "-connect <ip> -port 2302" to the magic steam run command. 

     

    • Like 1

  12. Posted · Edited by g4borg

    2 hours ago, DarthRogue said:

      Tracking all of the items in game this way would require way more performance than what SQL can provide.

    o_O

    erm no, this is what sql is for. anyway, mariadb or not, i rather would want postgres support, at least then they can also skip encoding data in a binary blob and just stream out json.

    or just give us optional socket support for saving/loading, and we handle it ourselves.

    1 hour ago, Term_NCR said:

    saving system shits itself on a crash and deletes everything;

    actually the server startup deletes the files, and you can disable that, at your own risk.

    however unfortunately, neither the blobs in the .bin files are documented, nor the blobs saved in the sqlite db file where player loadouts are stored.

    i was yet too lazy to try to decode it - at least it does not seem encrypted - but i am happy to hear if someone else has.

    5 hours ago, ImpulZ said:
    • We are considering a character wipe for this update, in case issues appear due to the changes made!

    i hope that does not mean wipe if you go stable with this, because then i really start to not understand 1.0

  13. Posted

    as items disappear even when servers are running, i would say persistence is indeed broken.

    but i agree also completely to the notion, that actually, we should have the ability to choose how we serialize this data out, instead of some undocumented binary blob files

    obviously this could go into any type of database storage

    and writing those files every few seconds is not really ideal either for SSDs and creates unneccessary io, which is just another source of problems. of course, it works nice on a ramdisk. but why write to disk, if you use ramdisks.

     

    30 minutes ago, IMT said:

    you can't expect the servers to run stable and never crash, that's impossible.

    tend to agree. there is simply nothing which can't crash. even perfectly programmed system with overly perfect hardware could crash with the next solar flare or a slight power fluctuation. not saying focus should not be reducing crashes. but if your server crashes, and your data has been safely streamed into a database, you won't care as much, as if it basicly makes things disappear at will.

  14. Posted

    On 6.1.2019 at 9:54 AM, Fing said:

    A little bit of a rant.  I'm fucking fed up with night time.  I have to stop playing as a completely black screen is no way to play a game.  Yes I know there are light sources in the game, but that doesn't help with navigation and I find results in death by zombie as you might see one, but not the other 3 in the area that come to join the fight.  And on the server list are not displaying the correct time.  I have lost count of the servers that say its daytime and I log in to find its actually night time.  This has been talked about a lot, but it seams that the deves are being slow to fix this.

    use dayzsalauncher to find servers. it has its own server list afaik, so if you miss one you can add it on their homepage. once your character is made, you can rejoin anytime.

    if you prefer to play public, you can also try to look at dayzspy, copy the ip / port there.

    there are day-only server, or short-night servers out there. but i agree, the default settings should do less night time.

    On 7.1.2019 at 3:21 AM, eno said:

    Release the game out of Alpha after 5 years and then the following week they leave.

    i think there was some activity already. but using twitter to communicate is imho not enough. in fact, i think they should really realize, that now after release, they should have had daily activity, posts, replies, etc. at least for a few months, but i can also imagine, that now they are filled up with bug-reports, and stress is palpable.

    my biggest issue is, that bohemia should have actually put way over 50% of its effort into this game instead of the felt 5%. It is by far the most viable product next to the hardcore-fanbase stuff they produce. or could be. if they get their ? together. because the niche is closing, where arma operated.

  15. Posted

    5 hours ago, DenverDeCoY1 said:

    But I wouldn't be surprised if there are "ESP" hacks out there, allowing players to get a heads-up display of nearby (or distant?) entities, such as tents.

    I do not think you would even need ESP hacks for that. I can remember this was pretty much standard already in the mod. The game is after all - if you include the mod times - not new in terms of mechanics. there are people who have a ton of experience.

    As we ran back then in mod times a "graph" on our server, which showed movements of the players across the map, I can confirm, edge running was already as popular, as was running straight to stary.

    7 hours ago, milestr11 said:

    So, my question is this- Is it possible for cheating players to simply teleport to any placed tents, loot them, and leave?

    as already answered, unlike arma2, which allowed any client to give commands to any client, dayz is strictly server authorative. that means, you can't just teleport yourself around, or others.

    But as mentioned by others here, any "standard" (as in "like in every game") type of hack might still work, like aimbotting or packet sniffing. The network bubble is 1000m server side, and the game is pretty laggy, so both will not be as lucrative tho.

    7 hours ago, SmokeyFTM said:

    find a server with friendly admins  you will find a server you can call home

    I would extend this to: "find servers where the admins are already seasoned, and do not abuse their powers to powergame."

    I would not expect them not to use their powers at all for personal gain, but at least not abuse it to terrorize others.

    Good luck!

  17. Posted · Edited by g4borg

    just because the character is not on display does not mean it is not there. the client side display is only a cached copy of your loadout. the real data is server side. which means, connecting to a server you already were on will restore your character.

    in fact it can be that a character still exists in the main menu, but will not be there once you log in.

    @mookie gotta say, i am happy it proliferates. altough, atm. the mod playing community usually prefers heavily modded servers, and most with only a few mods usually give up again. imho vanilla should do what dayzsalauncher does already.

    • Beans 2

  19. Posted

    One question: anyone knows if lifetime gets subtracted by ingame / mission date? Or is it just some steady countdown that gets loaded / saved?

    My thought is this: currently the mission only allows the date to be between months 9 and 12. if however on first january the date jumped by one year, does that not wipe the server?

    what if the date gets set back at server restart, and something has been placed "in the future" because of that?

    Sorry, the despawning tent just gives me the creeps. All this does not completely explain why it disappeared at some random time while the server was running, but who knows...

    Can we access lifetime by scripting?

  21. Posted

    17 hours ago, g4borg said:

    7. Proper Mod Flags, especially Server Only Mods. Is it client/server? Is it cosmetic? Does it have dependencies? Even if dependencies e.g. are not as important, marking a mod as server only might be important for  "equalmodrequired" setting; atm. we can go two directions: either have the player install all mods on the server (leaving out the possibility to use a mod server only), or not use the mod check at all, which is built in (and building our own script based modcheck might be a bit fubar)

    Added this point inspired by pilgrim*s remark, as I started to realize, this would also be important, very much so.

    Also fixed the year to 2019, as this text was started to be written in 2018, but we do not live there anymore :P

    • Like 1

  22. Posted

    1 hour ago, pilgrim* said:

    having the data available to hackers was what destroyed DayZ Mod and rendered it totally unplayable - as we all remember so well. ( - just saying). You can give access to game info to players when the game is an ArmA based cooperative game, because all players are friendly and cheating is uninteresting. This is not an option on a public server where any data locally available will (definitely) be exploited. Hence, rapid total non functionality & un-playability of the DayZ Mod. 

    I doubt that however, I must say I even totally disagree with this - arma itself was based on a trust based protocol, where the server did not strictly have authority - that is what destroyed the mod most, not available mission / script code. Having the source code does not automatically make it easier to hack someone. IF someone has malicious intents, he will find weaknesses in any code. In fact, if we talk software, any code that is closed source, has no official bug tracker, and only gives you binaries is usually much more prone to problems, than code where everyone can write you an email and say "hey, your code has a backdoor if we do x or y". But usually they also have more money, and a better marketing department (its like arguing internet explorer is a safer browser, because you cannot find any reported issue, while the official mozilla bugtracker has 200...)

    Also even then you could have server side logic hidden from the user, did not help.

    I do understand why arma was built that way (expecting friends to play friendly war games with tanks and helis, mostly in coop, and wanting to make it easier for lots of units to be usable, so giving clients direct control over them), but it totally backfired, not only on dayz; the hacks were around in arma generally, it only made it more interesting to write even more, as the mod became popular.

    But anyway thank you for your positive feedback, having a first response being nice is something uncommon in the internet :)

     

    • Beans 2

  23. Posted · Edited by g4borg
    added point inspired by pilgrim*

    Dear DevZ.

    Some people have issues with DayZ release not being a bug free, all-weapons-vehicles-mechanics feature complete superb game, that will somehow reignite the magic of the game in the past and surpass all AAA expectations. Most only are a bit sarcastic, 1.0 felt a bit rushed and reduced, and fear you abandon extending it.

    I am not one of these people. I trust you to continue releasing content, and I rather have you work on the base, than anything else. 

     


    I accepted Arma engine for being rather clunky when bohemia was still a small studio, and i could read blog posts of game programming lessons in the changelogs, which i actually read around the same time, so my bond was full of understanding, that things seem easier if you never do them.
    DayZ has hands down the best engine bohemia ever created. unlike arma, it is not behind its time, actually has FPS, finally some sane networking instead of the trust-based concept that probably only worked in lan parties, and even the scripting language does not look like php anymore.

    But. If you talk about feature completeness, and basicly trying to offer a game, that will not break future mods, I do have to remark, some things are rather disappointing even from the "technical feature complete" aspect.

    Especially when it comes to community servers, I would actually hope for the rather painless experience.

    1. Proper Database support. Those self corrupting bin files are not a really good solution. They get written a lot onto the disc. The whole process seems unstable. We live in 2019 where postgres is widely available on all platforms and supports binary json blobs for your orgasmic dynamic object pleasure. SQL was made for this. Please add database support for saves and player db.

     

    I cannot stress this enough, as a developer, this is the greatest letdown of them all. I do not expect redis key value support for the server, or anything, and I do not even expect you to reimplement the plugin support of arma, which never really went further than loading DLLs and was totally no-linuxy. but using some AUX port to communicate to a third party tool was at least what i hoped for. No, not even that, no db at all, this is imho the only feature that should have been definitely learned from dayz mod back then, as the whole success of it was basicly having your own database - which also helped fixing issues, finding hackers, etc.

    1.a) Please do not forget primary keys. Please do not create tables without primary keys.
    1.b) Please give us the option to clean up entries ourselves, if lifetime reaches zero. It is enough if the server adds a boolean, that the item in question is considered despawned. The rest is just an SQL statement.
    1.c) BIN files and an SQLite DB could still be default setup for servers without db support. It might help you debug stuff even faster like this.
    1.d) Please support postgres. If you support MariaDB/MySQL/whatever, i am fine with it, but please also support postgres. Json datatype is your friend. It is super fast aswell.
    1.e) Of course adding some nice script options to trigger loads from the db would be awesome.

    2. Proper official Docs. Please provide proper offical docs of the Enforce Scripting Language, and the XML files and their entries. You could also work together with community members to provide it, just please make it accessible and up to date. I think a lot of people would be very happy. I am sure this is a fair and nice new years job for someone, please dear scrum management, write that ticket. ;)

    3. Join by IP. Join by Steam Link. Joining by IP is impossible from inside the game. steam protocol "connect" links seem to not work (e.g. used by dayzspy). also -connect does not work if you forget to specify port. LAN does not show 127.0.0.1. Stuff like this make it really hard to actually work with testing environments or inviting friends to join your server; if the server browser does not work, not everyone is versile enough to use thirdparty launchers or connection parameters either.

    4. Linux Server Binary. Yes, I know you work on this. I actually invested now into a windows server. It is expensive as hell, and feels unconformtable in my trousers.

    5. Client Mod Loading. Please provide a unified way to load mods. You could make it compatible to the existing third party solution DayZSALauncher in addition to steam workshop. Just please make it possible for people to join servers without magic. The engine supports it, it feels like you only need to tie it together. Well I do hope you already have planned it.

    6. Server Mod Loading. Please add possibility for the dayz server app to download workshop mods from dayz. Other apps already do that for their server solutions, so i am pretty sure it is possible. It would be also a big step for modders and security, to allow server admins to use steamcmd to update not just the server but also the mods it uses via `workshop_download_item` command; which unfortunately does not work for steam accounts not owning DayZ client - of course anonymous download for the server would also be neat.

    7. Proper Mod Flags, especially Server Only Mods. Is it client/server? Is it cosmetic? Does it have dependencies? Even if dependencies e.g. are not as important, marking a mod as server only might be important for  "equalmodrequired" setting; atm. we can go two directions: either have the player install all mods on the server (leaving out the possibility to use a mod server only), or not use the mod check at all, which is built in (and building our own script based modcheck might be a bit fubar)

    Okay, my points are not all totally new, but I wanted to bring them together, after what we experienced in setting up a server.
    I hope someone gets to read this, otherwise, thank you all for trying your best in an industry, that is very unforgiving.

    • Like 1
    • Beans 1

  24. Posted

    5 minutes ago, drgullen said:

    I believe the nominal number indicates the nominal amount of that item to spawn in the first place, so I would think somebody looting a large tent would eventually trigger the CLE to spawn another one, but I wouldn't think a tent in use counts towards that number.

    i also hope that it is only for tent spawns, not pitched tents.

    but i am out of explanations otherwise. does not really invite to play on, if things just disappear. at least tents should not suddenly go away. unfortunately, without database, like in the past, you can't really just respawn it :(

    otherwise the "min" value is the one which is spawned definitely. so i kinda read "nominal" as the "max" amount. 

  25. Posted

    we had the same problem now on our server. tent stayed fine for many restarts. it was placed 2 days ago. lifetime entry is vanilla 45 days (3888000).

    yesterday it vanished, while the server was running, and players were nearby. there was no entry in the logs, only players online who owned the tent. 

    I could not explain it yet, as it was during server running. the car parked next to it stayed. no crash or restart involved.

    i certainly hope the "nominal" entry for LargeTent being 10 in vanilla does not mean, "built tents" despawn if new tents spawn in the loot? does a built tent still count towards that number?

     

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