AshleyP

I was going to post a quip in response but these are actually very good suggestions. It would be nice if the developers could have a "crunch month" where they devote an entire month to just building interesting map elements. Basically work the team for seventeen hours a day seven days a week until the map is a wonderland. Games developers enjoy long hours, they mess around if they don't have stuff to do. One problem is that all of the above (particularly the 747) would necessitate enlarging the map. But you'd hope that by now they would be able to automate the terrain generation process. Perhaps the map could have gravitational anomalies that the player has to avoid. And quasi-supernatural artefacts that enhance the player somehow. And the zombies could go around saying "get out of here, Stalker!".

There was a similar topic back in 2012, at least when it comes to money. No real data; one chap estimated that Bohemia's wage bill came to $5m+ per annum, but he doesn't seem to have accounted for the fact the BI is based in the Czech Republic, not California. The standalone sold 172,500 units in the first twenty-four hours. At £20 a pop that's £3,450,000. Steam's 30% cut comes to £1,035,000. Equals £2,415,000 for Bohemia Interactive assuming no-one else gets a cut (e.g. Paypal). That works out as roughly $4m in your American money. As far as I can tell the Czech Republic has a VAT rate of 20% but presumably Bohemia Interactive accounts for taxes when they set the game's price. But of course this is just one day of revenue. The trick now is to entice a general audience - people who aren't hardcore DayZ fans. The hardcore fans have already handed over their money. EDIT: These people estimate $12m worth of sales in the first week, which would leave $8.4m for BI equals a very merry Christmas.

This is Bohemia Interactive though. It's taken them twelve years to almost reach a point where Operation Flashpoint has most of the bugs ironed out. They operate on a geological timescale. (I mention this because I dug out my old Operation Flashpoint and Resistance discs, and it's interesting to see the bits of these games are still in DayZ (bearing in mind they came out in 2001-2003). The pub has the same model and the sink is basically the same, with the oddly inverted sinkplug: Resistance added the tower blocks, which are unfurnished but were ported into ArmA and ArmAII: The cut-off church bell noise is the same, and so are the green military towers and the security guard huts at the entrance to airfields. The hangars are the same shape, and there's a familiar-looking industrial building. Of course a tonne of changes have gone on behind the scenes but I remember buying ArmA and feeling that they really needed more staff.)

Okay, the game doesn't have an M1. Yet.

I've always assumed they were government offices or post office buildings - which would explain the reception desk, all the boxes, the shelves and so forth. And perhaps the weapons spawn. If those rooms are classrooms, they're really small classrooms. And a couple of the buildings are in industrial locations (e.g. the one outside Berezino).

I've had this too - after leaving the shipwreck I decided to run across a rock, instead of keeping to the normal ground, at which point the screen wobbled a little bit and then YOU ARE DEAD. Rocks were always a bit iffy in the mod. Of note, I had logged out while in the ship, and logged back in again. But when I logged back in the game dumped me outside the ship, swimming in the water. Perhaps if you get too close to certain objects the game assumes that you've intersected with them, and tries to move you somewhere else, and something in the physics engine breaks and kills you.

It's never going to happen, but Green Mountain would be the obvious choice. If you can assemble a generator in one of the outbuildings, climb to the top of the tower and turn on a radio set, you instakill all other other players on the map and win the game. 'cause their brains have fried. Then you turn into a pillar of light and ascend to heaven, or something.

The game actually models the entire solar system - no extra-solar planets, but obviously it includes the sun itself and the asteroid belt. Although the gravitational effects are slight they're measurable, and in fact several breakthroughs in the field of gravity wave physics have been made by studying the ArmA II engine. I suspect the planet Jupiter had aligned with the moon (e.g. the Earth's moon) and that's probably what's throwing off your aim.

On the other hand you're running full-pelt for miles while carrying 20kg+ worth of equipment. In real life soldiers need a tonne of calories per day - there's an interesting article about this at the Chicago Tribune: "The MRE, which costs the Defense Department about $7.25 per meal, was first introduced in 1980 with a dozen different menus, including a few that soldiers deemed inedible, such as Smoky Franks, which soldiers called the Four Fingers of Death, or Chicken a la King, which was known as Chicken a la Death. When the MRE went to war in the early 1990s, it fared little better with troops on the ground in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, who derisively referred to the rations as Meals Refused by Everyone. The MRE developed such a poor reputation that former Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell ordered it overhauled. In 1995, the National Academy of Sciences found that troops were under-consuming their rations by 1,000 calories per day." Course, in real life if you ate a whole can of cold baked beans and then sprinted for two miles you'd probably throw up. There's an issue whereby former service personnel put on a lot of weight after they leave the service, because their eating habits don't return to normal.

People used to use the bridge in the far south-west of the map, along the coast from Kamenka.

I think I remember reading that the rabbits are buggy and make zombie noises. It might be a server thing - I remember the first game I played there were odd zombie cries that cut off half-way through, even though I was in the middle of nowhere, but it hasn't happened for a while since then.

I had a shufty around there when the game came out (there's a description here). EDIT: No - I'm wrong. You're showing the north-central, I had a look at the north-west. North-central there's a train station, one of those blocked-off drainage tunnels, but not much else. The big "lake" in the north-west is just a depression, and on the ground the formations look like this: Dunno if they're placeholders for future buildings or if you're supposed to build your own tent city. The surrounding forest is very dense and it's surprisingly easy to miss 'em (at first I ran straight over them and ended up heading north). It would be amusing if you respawned there underneath a new building. There's one well in the north-west, but it's right out in the middle of nowhere equals sniperville:

One word. Mountain Dew. Someone found a can, ran off into cover to try it out. Right-click, drink can, BOOM. But the can didn't die. Next player runs to find out what happened. Sees a smoking pair of boots on the ground. And a can of Mountain Dew. So he picks it up. Takes a drink. BOOM! That's how the Mountain Dew moves, you see. It's a living creature. It persuades people to pick it up, and move it. Then it kills them.

It's a shame DayZ doesn't have the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mythology - the developers could make server restarts literally part of the game by calling them psychic blow-outs, or something.

My opinion is that on an emotional level the M4 is more "cool". It has many more attachments, different magazines, it looks the business etc. Against zombies it's more than sufficient. In contrast the Mosin feels boring. It's a big old wooden bolt action rifle from years ago. The bayonet doesn't even work. But it's essentially a one-shot kill, and in a game where people can instantly despawn without penalty, you often only have one shot. Ultimately I suspect that the weapon debate in the game will mirror the real-life debate over the future of military small arms. The game currently has two examples drawn from opposite ends of the spectrum. The M4 is a kind of super submachinegun that can keep the enemy's heads down at longer ranges; the Mosin-Nagant is in its element on the open steppe but not much use indoors. In a real-life zombie apocalypse you'd probably err on the side of stopping power - wounded zombies are going to keep coming at you - but you'd be vastly outnumbered, so a G3 or FAL would run out of ammo quickly. Realistically something like an MG42 would be ideal. An MG42 and a jeep.

Here's mine - it looks as if the description text isn't done yet, and it rotates wrong (the axis runs through the grip, so you can rotate it off the screen): It makes a cute reloading ammunition when you stick rounds into it. With only 17 bullets I haven't fired it. It should be more powerful than the FX45 and I imagine it should blind you at night but whether it is and does is another matter. In the hand it looks a little bit like the revolver from Operation Flashpoint (although that was a Smith & Wesson):

I've noticed that if you de-equip your chap so that his hands are free he can run like a rocket*. I assume it's been added in for debugging purposes, so that the players can explore the map in a reasonable timescale. It's as if the short-range sprint from the mod has been permanently activated. It would presumably be an easy fix. I can't wait for them to add all-terrain skateboards, or a hoverboard. I'm in two minds as to the merits of being stealthy or just pegging it across the map. It seems to me that a player sprinting through the woods is just as hard to kill as somebody carefully crawling from bush to bush. Unless he's running directly towards you he will be a difficult target. Perhaps they could make it so that you could only sprint on concrete or stone, and if you try it in a forest or on muddy ground you twist your ankle. * Obviously not literally like a rocket. Rockets don't run.

I think they want you to post your stab-proof vest.

If you're really desperate you can load a single round into the M4 (just drag the cartridges onto the rifle) even if you don't have a magazine. You can't however do this with the pistol.

The new shipwreck worries me. It's like ladders multiplied by a million. It feels glitchy and I don't trust it at all. I'm waiting for it to (a) teleport me through the floor (II) teleport me outside the ship (yellow) launch me into the air above the ship (delta) jam me underneath the ship etc. I make a point of visiting it as quickly as possible and logging out when I'm far away from it (and the shipping crates) just in case.

That chap's also in the mod, I assume they just ported the map over:

Here's mine: Sadly it doesn't have any item slots, and I have no idea if it's any good in combat. I would prefer to have more inventory space.

"This is also the former Soviet Union...." I have in my possession a book called Inside the Soviet Army, by a chap called Viktor Suvorov. It was published in 1982 and is mostly bullshit but very entertaining. I have no idea if the current Eastern European armed forces are culturally descended from the old Soviet Army, but I find it hard to believe that the soldiers would be evacuated leaving all their equipment behind. Broken trucks, maybe, mobile generators etc, but not rifles. And any infantrymen in Chernarus who lost their rifles would probably be made to run back and forth across a frozen riverbed until they promised never to do it again. Disposing or destroying the munitions scattered across Chernarus would be one of the state's top priorities, because the state needs to maintain a monopoly on armed force in order to remain the sole power. Assuming DayZ takes place in the Czech Republic it seems that you'd hunt far and wide to find a few semi-automatic rifles, except that in reality someone else would have got them first. If Wikipedia is to be believed you don't need any kind of permit to own a pre-1890 bolt-action rifle, so a late-1800s military rifle might slip under the radar, except that you'd never find cartridges for it and it would probably blow up if you converted it for a smokeless cartridge. As for machine guns, satchel charges, specialised military gear etc, they're numbered and accounted for. In the event of trouble the soldiers would be helicoptered out; the helicopter crashes in the mod look as if they would have torched the contents of the helicopter.

"I was attacked by someone who had been following me with a gun." That's the problem right there. No amount of ballistic protection will help unless you look behind you every now and again. If you have a bullet proof vest he would simply have shot you twice. Or in the head. Or with a bigger bullet. And you'd end up with a situation where everybody has a bullet proof vest, so what's the point? People would just shoot twice, or in the head etc. In fact the problem with night vision gear, GPS and so forth is that immediately after it's added to the game everybody will have one, just as basically everybody in the mod has a ghillie suit and night vision and a DMR. If everybody has night vision there's no point to it; you gain nothing over the other players. A second problem is the odd way that the mod implements night vision even in the third person view - you end up with a kind of magical all-seeing floating eye. And in reality the vast, vast majority of servers will be daylight only. If the night vision gear was awkward and looked like this: So that you essentially have to stop and look around instead of just running about as normal it might be more worthwhile. If we assume that DayZ takes place after a horrible cataclysm, then GPS is plausible (the satellites won't fail for a while) and there seems to be some power left, 'cause there are streetlights. Perhaps the game could implement a system whereby you have to recharge your electrical gear from a streetlamp, and it takes ninety seonds, with the danger that you're standing still and illuminated like a Christmas tree during that time. It wouldn't be realistic - real-life batteries take hours to charge, not ninety seconds - but it would be tense.

I was disappointed by this. It feels buggy. It doesn't have any item slots - so that's six slots gone straightaway - and oddly it doesn't seem to appear on the chap's inventory screen either. I surmise that in the altered reality of DayZ it might stop pistol rounds but until someone opens up the source code I'm unconvinced that it's much use.