AshleyP

In the mod I remember a tree south-west of Gorka that floats in the air, and it's still in the standalone - I guess they worked on the northern part of the terrain but ported most of the southern part of the map whole: Taken at night 'cause it's in the middle of the field. It seems that you can't get underneath it, and it doesn't move, but I decided to spend some quality time just touching it: It would be fascinating if it talked. Sadly it does not.

Apart from being a top wit I also used to work as a games journalist, so I've decided to set down my thoughts on the new standalone, in the hope that future generations might understand what life was like in 2013: http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/dayz-and-confuz.html So far I've explored most of the west, north-west, and north of the map, but I've generally avoided the player hotspots. My heart sank when I realised I had spawned in Kamenka, but rose again when I noticed a new supermarket had opened just outside of town. This saves having to run north to Zelenogorsk in order to kit up. Zelenogorsk itself now has some barracks, which is where I killed a man. My killcount so far is one possible, several zombies, no deaths. That man was the third player I saw, the first I saw whilst in a position of strength. Never strike unless you are in a position of strength. And when you strike, klotzen, nicht kleckern. I learned that from reading the internet. I was confused by the large empty areas in the far north-west, which look unfinished: Whether they're supposed to look unfinished, or if the plan is to populate them with buildings later on, I have no idea. In the latter case it'll be hairy if you wake up one morning to find yourself embedded in a building that wasn't there when you went to sleep. The "lake" in the north-west is actually just a depression in the ground, there's no water, and as a consequence if you want to explore the northern reaches you need to carry several canteens and plastic bottles. But without tents and parked vehicles etc there's not much point going there, because there's no loot to stumble upon. I used to love raiding camps. They are the enemy's weak point. Wipe out his supplies and he will die. My other impression is that sniping is going to be awesome, now that you can hide indoors: On the other hand, this might not be so smart if the place was swarming with zombies. Depends whether the AI will be clever enough to climb stairs and open doors. It'd be handy if you could use a hammer, some nails, and a plank of wood to barricade yourself into a building. Or if you could use a gas stove and some petrol to set fire to a building, thus flushing out any snipers. After a short while the entire map would be covered in burned-out buildings. My impression is that the standalone is a good solid foundation, and of course the basic gameplay is already in place, it just has to be translated across. Forty people per severe is going to seem less crowded than the mod, because there are many more places to hide, and in general the outdoorsy engine feels much more realistic. Less as if you're running over a lot of metal panels covered in grass, more as if you're running over actual terrain. At the same time, I wonder whether the developers should have gone for a lower price-point for the alpha, with a discount for the full version somewhere down the line. The trufans have now handed over their money; further sales have to come from new players, who are going to be baffled and disappointed when they load up the game and find themselves in pitch-darkness with no goal and a handful of broken zombies. New players would be better off with the mod, except that it's silly to buy into something that will presumably become a dead-end. But on the other hand, Bohemia now has a big pile of cash with which to fund their holidays further development.

Remember me, Mr Fryer? Mittenwald, 1991. I never forget a face. For twenty-two years I remembered yours. Looks like your paymasters don't need you any more. Only one thing lasts forever, Mr Fryer. DEATH. You'll find that there's a queue of people just waiting to pay you back. It so happens that I'm in the lead.

Interestingly, whilst looking through the game's resources I found this, which might be an early implementation of the concept: Notice the intuitive HUD, and of course they've introduced skiing! Whoo! I hope you can fly balloons.

I'm with you there. I'll never forget it. See, while I was waiting for the host I got to thinking - what does that mean? In a wider sense? Obviously in the game you're supposed to wait for the server to respond, but what if there's some deeper meaning to it, and I'm supposed - me, personally - I'm supposed to wait for... but what? I picture a kind of spiritual insect, like a cockroach, with one of those chitinous exoskeletons, and it basically descends on my head and burrows into my brain, and the exoskeleton covers my body and it's like suddenly I'm the host. It's just that I haven't been born yet. "Things you call dead haven't yet had a chance to be born", in the words of a very wise man. So, yes. There's the host. There's me. We're waiting to see what happens. Will he turn out to be The Thing? I mention this because there's a theory going round that Childs is definitely a Thing, 'cause you can't see condensation coming off his breath, so obviously he's not human. Perhaps at that point he realises that there's no point trying to assimilate a race of beings that are prepared to kill themselves rather than be taken over. That's the message I get from The Thing. Humanity rocks because it would rather die than lose control. Kurt Russell would rather die than let the rest of the world become One Of Them. Thank you, Kurt. Or perhaps we're trapped in the waiting room of a dinner party at the end of the universe, and the host hasn't turned up yet, so we can't make a start on the food. We're stuck with the canapes and aperitifs. Not often you see those two words on these forums, eh? Vol-au-vent, there's another word. I'm put in mind of Abigail's Party mixed with Waiting for Godot plus zombies. Maybe the host is dead. I keep wondering if I'm just supposed to press enter or something. Perhaps the host is waiting for me. Perhaps the host is God, but he died long ago.

In the name of research, you should have stunned them with your Mosin - the players don't die, they just go to sleep - and had a look at their gear. All these "kill on sight" players are misunderstood. They're researchers.

This game will not be complete until you can behead people - with your fists

I believe you have to make your changes and then click "set default" (and not "back"). There should really be an "ok" button.

Well, if you mean creative in the modern art sense, off the top of my head: 1. A generative liveblog which mixes snippets of Youtube videos with comments taken from Facebook. You're attempting to mine the fertile framework of proximal relationships in order to create an ecology in which new adjacencies reactivate latent meanings. While the other player is gazing into the soul of the internet you just sneak up and take stuff from their backpack. 2. A site-specific audio installation - you force the other player to wander around a scrapyard wearing headphones, which play environmental sounds that mix and fade depending on his location. The intention is to emphasise the disconnection between direct experience and memory. Once the other player has transitioned the symbolic pathway you shoot him. 3. A large-scale rural art space containing a small herd of cows, each one fitted with a GPS unit. Their motions are tracked over the course of a week, and at the end of the week you enlist a troupe of dancers who are instructed to mimic the motions of the cattle, using their upper bodies as a series of symbolic pointers that attempt to seek congruence in incongruity. Scatter the area with 20l fuel cans and bear traps, you can imagine the rest. 4. If you still have some bear traps, commission Turner Prize-winning landscape artist Richard Long to create a landscape piece somewhere near the coast which consists of one hundred bear traps arranged in a circle; and then have him recreate it physically in one of the real-world locations featured on the map, thus creating a commentary on the interstitional spaces between reality and its "sibling". 5. Following on from 4, with the assistance of the Czech government create an exact duplicate of Chernarus in and around the real-life locations featured in the game. Lure tourists with the promise of riches and the chance to play a beta of the standalone version of Dayz. In the control tower of the North-West airport, site a computer that runs a mock-up of the standalone (just use Vanilla Dayz and change the logo). As the player becomes engrossed in the game sneak up and rifle through their backpack. With this piece you're attempting to create understanding through inversion in a space that normalises transgression.

Because a picture paints a thousand words, can you spot the vehicle camp in the following image? Let's have a closer look at the tractor, Land Rover, Humvee and bus: And let's take an even closer look at the Humvee: The other vehicles appear to have caught fire. Faulty workmanship in action. In my opinion the problem stretches all the way back to Operation: Flashpoint, and the decision to make the engine an all-purpose military platform that encompasses infantry combat, tank warfare, and aerial combat. It gets progressively less suitable as it scales up. I'm not a games developer, but it's a shame they can't have a system whereby beyond a certain distance the trees are treated as a single, dense mass - like a cloud - rather than remaining as a bunch of individual objects. 'cause as you can see it doesn't scale.

The fundamental issue is that most players, with the exception of the few newbies who have just joined, will be playing with night vision googles; and so the only functional difference between night and day is that daytime is in colour and uses the full screen, whereas nighttime is green and you peer through an oval window. Aces High used to have a night setting, but people simply logged out and waited, and with DayZ the players are just going to move to a different server. This is one of those things were the vast silent majority have voted, and they don't agree with you. As in a democracy your options are to either passionately convince the silent majority that your cause is right for them, and worth fighting for - or you can try to take control behind the scenes and impose your solution, with the problem that your grip will loosen eventually. And when it does you'll be consigned to oblivion. They'll tear down your statues and rub you out of the history books.

This is how I'd solve the problem. The issue is that DayZ is built on a realistic foundation, and so a single bullet is generally lethal; which makes playing the game a frustrating exercise, because you can do everything correctly without making any mistakes and still die because a distant sniper decided to try out his aim. Which is doubly irritating with a game that has such a time-consuming setup phase. I'm reminded of Aces High, an online flight simulation that I used to play; if you wanted to survive you had to take off, climb to 15,000 feet, attain combat speed, approach the target from an unexpected direction etc and after forty-five minutes of this you could still be wiped out instantly by the AI flak routine. Remember Mad Max II, and how The Big Humongous has a .44 Magnum pistol with a scope, but only four bullets? He's a major regional crime boss but he still has to choose his targets wisely. Max has a handful of shells and some of them didn't work. In that environment a man with a functioning Lee Enfield with a bag of reliable ammo would be a rare sight, and he would be in charge. I'm sure if DayZ was set in South Carolina or inner-city Baltimore guns would be all over the place, but in real life all the useful stuff would have been smashed or looted long before you arrived, guns would be as rare and valuable as Fabergé eggs and ammunition would be even more scarce. The flip side is that the developers have to strike a balance between their vision and the commercial demands of selling a lot of copies. But then again, if they were solely concerned with sales figures they wouldn't have bothered with Operation: Flashpoint, they would have licensed the Quake III engine and chucked out a cheap Return to Castle Wolfenstein clone way back in 2001. And nowadays there would be no DayZ and no Bohemia Interactive.

To be honest they've always reminded me of The Monster from Young Frankenstein. "Where fashion sits - PUUAAAIIONNAAREEETZ!" "For as long as I can remember people have hated me. They looked at my face and my body and they ran away in horror. In my loneliness I decided that if I could not inspire love, which is my deepest hope, I would instead cause fear. I live because this poor half-crazed genius, has given me life. He alone held an image of me as something beautiful and then, when it would have been easy enough to stay out of danger, he used his own body as a guinea pig to give me a calmer brain and a somewhat more sophisticated way of expressing myself." In the film the monster had an enormous schwanzschtücker, although I suspect the zombies in DayZ are... I imagine that parts of them have dropped off. That's probably why they're so angry. That, and the fact there are no lady zombies.

I disagree. DayZ reminds me a little bit of the foot and mouth epidemic that struck the UK in 2001. I vividly remember news footage of piles of burning cattle: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/05/foot-and-mouth-disease-detectable It was creepy as hell and I always assumed that 28 Days Later (which came out in 2002) was in part inspired by it. Anyway, quoth Wikipedia: "Ireland suffered one case in a flock of sheep in Jenkinstown in County Louth in March 2001. A cull of healthy livestock around the farm was ordered. Irish special forces sniped wild animals capable of bearing the disease, such as deer, in the area." It makes sense that the game would have scoped rifles, because soldiers would have been sent in to kill off any zombies wandering the countryside. It's debatable whether the military would have just left the rifles behind when they had to flee, but then again DayZ isn't supposed to be 100% fact-based documentary. Heck, earlier today I almost bled to death from crouching on a rock.

It is a bit. The new infection routine is clever, in that it forces the players to raid the hospitals thus making them bunch together in a new set of locations. I think the intention was to produce more opportunities for the players to bond, make friends, trade antibiotics, band together against the zombie threat etc, but in practice it turns the hospitals into sniper death zones because that's human nature. Give a man a hammer and suddenly everything looks like a nail. It's irritating to brave this gauntlet only to find three piles of empty cans, some painkillers, and bandages. Especially if you're slowly dying. Thank the Lord Almighty that the epi-pens aren't more crucial to the gameplay, because they seem to be even rarer. My suggestion? Infection makes the screen shake; your temperature slowly goes up; as it reaches a certain limit you start to pass out; then you pass out for a minute; then you're cured, but you still need painkillers to get rid of the screen shake (let's pretend they're NSAIDs). I'm reminded of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. In one of the later chapters Ernst falls ill with the influenza pandemic that struck down lots of servicemen at the end of the war. He finds that the sweat and effort of assaulting allied trenches burns this off, and he's right as rain afterwards. A similar mechanism - I don't care if it's medically accurate - would work wonders for the gameplay (let's imagine that you can still cure yourself instantly by necking down some antibiotics).

I'm not too sure about that - a good shot will plug you forthwith but I'll bet that zig-zagging towards the typical player, or doing the classic thing where you run towards them in an arc, would bring you within striking distance. And once you're up-close the hatchet is nasty. THWUP! I'm reminded of this scene from The In-Laws (skip to 0:48 for the "serpentine!" bit): My vote goes for a combo of hatchet + situational awareness + tactical nous + navigational skills, and it doesn't matter so much which rifle you have. Any M16 variation with a couple of magazines of SD ammo is a fantastic all-rounder, an M14 is good outdoors but now that we have to raid hospitals for antibiotics any loud noises in the town centre are going to draw a lot of flak.

I remember this was the case beforehand - even in the big boat. I guess it's supposed to simulate the bracing sea air.

I've found it helps if you double-click on the backpack, and then click the right arrow next to the weapon: It swaps the weapon in your backpack with your active weapon. Handy if you want to switch to the hatchet quickly (in fact, in the screenshot you can tell that I've put the hatchet in my backpack).

I notice they don't specify the religion in the description at least (I can't make out the drawing on the cover). If you're non-denominational you could imagine that it's a printout of the Linux kernel, or The Star Trek Technical Manual, or some ancient Jedi text. It would be fun if it made you partially immune to pistol rounds, just like the old urban legends of the soldiers in WW2 putting bibles in their top pockets so that they don't get shot in the heart. Or, hey, WWI: http://www.canberrat...0419-1xaah.html

Looking in ArmaII it's at 47,102, just north of Kozlovka. If you follow the road leading SE out of Green Mountain and keep going straight ahead you'll run into it eventually. Here's the same location in ArmaII: If I recall correctly I was heading east from Zelenogorsk with a plan to run through Stary Sobor from the SW

Presumably you're this chap: http://www.pcgames.d...Bertits-681322/ The problem is that DayZ doesn't have consequential permadeath. Your character doesn't gain stats or improve over time, so when you die it's meaningless. The only things you lose are your physical location and your gear, but the former is a matter of running around for a short while and the latter involves either pitching a tent and hoarding some stuff, or running through one of the major cities, picking stuff up. As a consequence death is not a life-changing event in DayZ. Indeed, lots of players deliberate kill themselves so that they can spawn somewhere new. Now, if the player character built up stats - if he ran faster, could carry more things, had a steadier aim, didn't get worn out so quickly etc - then death would be more meaningless. The more and harder it is to build up stats, the more irritating it is to lose them. But apart from the poorly-implemented hero / bandit feature, DayZ doesn't have that. If your character survives for 200+ days he's just the same as he was when he started, albeit with more gear. If you're going to quote me, quote "In DayZ, death isn't a life-changing event". I used to write for computer magazines as well, and I know a snappy line when it hits me, and that was one of them.

Location one is a spot towards the north-west of the map, in the woods north-west of Zelenogorsk: I have found that standing in the little purple patch gives me a profound sense of well-being. Location two is this hilltop north of Petrovka: And location three - bonus location - is this little circle of benches just outside a toilet, I forget exactly where: It's great! You can sit on the benches and watch people go to the toilet.

Yes. Some kind of all-over netting festooned with rotten, week-old meat. Plus a backpack and a gas mask (so that you don't pass out). The undead will assume that you're one of them. The living will try to avoid you. The snipers will be baffled, and won't want to loot your corpse. The meat might deflect some of the bullets, or slow them down a little. Obviously there's a risk of infection - if the rotten meats gets into a gut wound, you're done for - but, hey, even the aliens from Aliens were vulnerable to something. Alternatively, pig suit. Put it on, pretend to be a pig. But look thin and diseased so that none of the other players kill you for food. Make sure that it doesn't have a sexy butt, for obvious reasons (desperate times). Rabbit suit?

I remember it from Dangermouse, the top 80-90s Cosgrove Hall animated classic. Dangermouse' sidekick Penfold was in the habit of saying "crikey, DM!" whenever shit went down. In fact here's a t-shirt with a giant CRIKEY on it. Not only was Dangermouse amazing, he was fantastic as well; when it came to strength, speed, and general competence he was a veritable powerhouse. The greatest in fact. So, nothing is forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten. Er, that was from Robin of Sherwood, the sissy version of the Robin Hood tale from the 1980s (again). It pains me to think that the 1980s are are far-away nowadays as the 1950s were in the 1980s. But, yeah, whenever someone shoots at you in DayZ, call them an accursed mountebank. Get on the blower and say "desist, you damnable recidivist". What is this voodoo ague that drives men to perform the most fiendishly pernicious acts in defiance of all reason?

9-year-old kids can occasionally be quite shrewd. Suppose they had no intention of going into the fire station, and just wanted to watch a town full of bandits converge on the place and shoot each other up? So that they could sit back and laugh their little tiny Joffrey Baratheon heads off. Not so stupid now, eh?