AshleyP

I've been playing this game since it was called Operation Flashpoint - back then it had Russians instead of zombies - and so I approach it more as an infantry combat simulator with zombies, which means that I kill every living thing that comes near. I've generally moved to the standalone now, so I barely touch the mod any more. You know, I'm not a good shot, I have no inclination to learn about the mildot system, I don't play computer games professionally, but I find that the lessons of Sun Tzu's The Art of War can be applied to computer games, so that even a nobody with no skills can kill and kill again. This post is not an opportunity to laugh at dead people and I'm certainly not trolling just out of boredom because the weather is poor (cough) besides which, the screenshots are months old. 1. "Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. ... The general who is skilled in defense hides in the most secret recesses of the earth; he who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven." Sniping is essentially a form of active defense; in DayZ "he who is skilled in attack" has a helicopter and some teammates. Defense essentially involves making yourself invulerable and then letting the enemy kill himself. The dockyard cranes are as near to invulnerability as you can get in this game without cheating. They're essentially armoured, elevated bunkers. They're generally close to good loot spots, which are a powerful lure, they're impossible to assault, the zombies can't get up there, and in the spot above you can see (a) the woodyard (bee) the warehouses © the town and the field beyond (d) the helicopter spawn point. And no-one can see you. It's great! You just wait until zombies start spawning in one of those spots, and then wait for the enemy to kill himself against one of your bullets. 2. "By discovering the enemy's dispositions and remaining invisible ourselves, we can keep our forces concentrated, while the enemy's must be divided." It's tempting to hang your rifle out of the window and fire off potshots at anybody who comes along. Don't. If you miss, you lose the element of surprise; I can't count the amount of times I fired on someone and, as if by magic, they vanished, because they combat logged. Unless you can hit and kill the target reliably and in a single blow, don't fire. Don't ever speak. "He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them." From the target's point of view, they are running around and then suddenly YOU ARE DEAD. There was also a small number of targets that didn't die, even though I plugged them full of bullets; in which case it's time to log out, because you can't beat hackers. But what about multiple targets? On several occasions I engaged squads. One typical track in the game is to drive up to these warehouses in a Humvee or jeep and loot them. Usually someone hangs around at the jeep whilst the other guy loots. Wait until they're separated and then shoot the overwatch and then wait to see what the looter does. Consult the following screenshots: Taken two months apart on the same server. I have no idea what the "1, cease fire" message means. In both cases the targets attempted to counter-snipe after I had killed their comrades, but sadly they had no idea where I was, because I shot sparingly. It's entirely possible that you might end up sitting in that crane for long periods doing nothing, because the looter logs out; but otherwise you would spend long minutes running through forests. Imagine the fear those players felt, when they suddenly realised that the jeep they were counting on for safety had become a death trap and their friends were dead. When they realised they were trapped in a warehouse with a killer outside. That is your reward. 3. "If we wish to fight, the enemy can be forced to an engagement even though he be sheltered behind a high rampart and a deep ditch. All we need do is attack some other place that he will be obliged to relieve." This is the funniest one. Players get upset when their friends are killed. Which is hilarious. And understandably so. Considering the following two screenshots: Jon seems to have been a five-year-old child; he was helpless, and I think I shot him twice in the space of a couple of months. In the first screenshot he was providing "overwatch" for a looting session, not that it did much good. His friend drove off, and then drove back, and ran around in circles for a few minutes in order to flush me out. But because I was mindful of lesson (2) above I did nothing, so he decided to countersnipe by getting into a crane. I think in the end I shot at him, but the shot hit the ladder - and in a panic he ran off the edge of the crane and died. Thus "the general, unable to control his irritation, will launch his men to the assault like swarming ants, with the result that one-third of his men are slain, while the town still remains untaken." 4. "Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated." I am a thoroughly mediocre gamer, reason being that I play computer games for entertainment; they are not my life. Probably the most famous of Sun Tzu's maxims is "if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." In my opinion Sun Tzu is wrong. I'm reasonably sure that Roger Federer knows his opponents as well as themselves, but still he loses, because skill is important, and skill comes from practice and natural talent. You can mitigate a lack of practice and natural talent by being smart, taking the easy shots, waiting. I did quite well in Aces High II despite owning a crappy joystick and no fancy headgear, simply by knowing my plane back to front and attacking from unexpected directions and never letting the red mist cloud my mind. I was a terrible shot so I only fired at close range or when the target's apparent motion was static. Contemplate the following: In the top screenshot I've killed a man called Jack (the other kill was coincidental). In both screenshots the targets ran around like ants for a minute or so beforehand. I could have tried a deflection shot; at this range I probably wouldn't have missed. With practice and training I could have used the mildots to estimate the correct deflection, but what if they suddenly jinked? So I waited until they were static. If they had kept moving I would not have fired. 5. "A kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life." Sun Tzu was also big on variation. The above screenshots are months old; I no longer use that spot. It's dead now. I can't think of a practical way of assaulting it - short of silently spawning just beneath it with a satchel charge, setting the charge, and then swimming away - but it can be neutralised with covering fire, and of course hackers can have you. There are other sniping spots; the trick is to find somewhere that has cover, that you can observe, that isn't obvious, and that actually has targets. For example, there's a clump of rocks in a forest on the western edge of the map, overlooking the road that goes up to the north-west corner of the playfield - you know the spot - but it's frustrating because almost no-one goes there, and the few targets that present themselves are cars driving at speed. Only engage cars when they are moving directly towards or away from you, because that way you don't have to deal with deflection. So, if you've learned one thing from this sermon, it's that shrewdness can compensate for a complete lack of humanity and talent - which was also the lesson of Barry Lyndon - and... really, that's a powerful lesson for real life as well. It's why Kim Dotcom is richer than you, it's why Alex Chilton died poor. Of course, Kim Dotcom would have been richer if he had split before the FBI decided to make an example of him; he's still very rich, but you have to wonder what kind of reception he would have if he went to prison, and I imagine that preys on his mind. The other prisoners would treat him like a particularly comfortable sofa. With that mental image I bid you goodnight.

How come? The CZ75 has a slightly longer barrel than the game's version of the MP5K (4.6 vs 4.5 inches).

"Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god, Crom, and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the Earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered, and the Earth shook. Fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters. But in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield. We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. Only this: This you can trust."

On a tangent - if the grenades are ruined, do they blow up in your hand? Or if a zombie swipes at you and hits a grenade, do you blow up? That would be awe-inspiring. You'd think, incidentally, that a game with a couple of mines, set in a port area, would have sticks of dynamite locked up here and there. Perhaps the developers could simply remodel the satchel charges.

Does anyone remember Storm of War, which later became Il-2: Cliffs of Dover? I remember parallels between Bohemia and 1C: Maddox. The original IL-2 was clever and had the framework of a great game hiding underneath a mass of broken functionality and bugs, but over time they patched it into something reasonable, and there were lots of great mods. Falcon 4.0 and Grand Prix Legends followed a similar pathway. In both cases open sourcing development kept the games alive long after they would have died, albeit that it didn't really help the original developers. This is one of the reasons why the gaming industry has embraced casual games, and the kind of incremental Call of Duty model whereby the game is basically re-released each year with some new guns and maps. The cost and risk of an ambitious new title are too high. Cliffs of Dover was essentially released as an Alpha, just like DayZ, but crucially it was sold as a finished, full-price product. They're both niche products that were surprisingly successful, they both had development issues; in both cases the team worked hard and really believed in the product. My impression is that Cliffs of Dover had a smaller budget and a smaller market, and ultimately the parent company pulled the plug. The developers split up (Oleg Maddox, the CEO, was "unpersoned") and now it's in the hands of the modders. Hopefully DayZ will turn out better. It's great that they acknowledge that it's alpha. Things could have been so much worse. As I've said before, my worry is that offering it as an early-access alpha at a budget price they'll bring in the hardcore punters, but if that initial burst of cash isn't enough to finish development they're going to hit a brick wall. At which point the temptation will be to patch it into something that doesn't crash, release it as DayZ V1, and then charge again for DayZ2, which will be the actual finished DayZ 1. I mean, that was basically what happened with Armed Assault and Arma2. The latter was the former, finally finished. Although to be fair there was a lot going on behind the scenes.

There's another thread about blank player names, which always rings alarm bells when I see them - I assume it's a trick to stop the admin from kicking them. I was on a server yesterday that had a couple of players with the exact same name, with (2) after the second chap. Was it simply two players playing a silly trick, or someone who had been disconnected during the login process, or an attempt to duplicate gear... a glitch in the matrix? Ghosts? Aliens?

Perhaps that's the reason for the sudden cold snap - the developers are trying to rationalise the persistence of oranges by making it so that the environment is just above freezing. That might explain why the zombies keep attacking you. They're actually trying to hug you, to keep warm. But because they're zombies it comes across as aggressive flailing. All the more reason for this game to have molotov cocktails and/or a flamethrower.

This is one of those topics where most of the replies will be bullshit along the lines of "I would check them out, ask to sit next to the fire, run off and get some meat, carefully scope out the situation before alerting them in side chat etc". In reality? You, me, everybody in this thread and in the game will be thinking "free kill". If I see someone next to a fire I'll hang back until I'm reasonably certain they don't have friends, then I shoot them. Then I wait to see if their friends come along. Then I bug out in the other direction. I don't need to loot their kit, I have plenty of my own. I do however need to kill them. If I light a fire I make sure it's on an empty server because I fully expect the other players to do the same to me, and lights are visible for miles around.* Two reasons. (i) they're a potential threat (ii) there are few more effective ways of asserting your dominance than by killing someone, few more effective ways of surviving than by killing everybody else. Fewer targets to track, more loot for you. It simplifies things. "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have." * On a tangent, I remember the first few days of the standalone had street lights - do they still exist? In the mod you could light a fire, cook and boil your supplies, and extinguish the fire in less than a minute, in the standalone it seems you have to stand around for ages before your meat cooks / you heat up. No, just no.

I can second that - yesterday I made a fireplace out of rags and a bundle of twigs, plus a log, and no stones. The matches ignited it just fine and it burned for a few minutes at least (I bugged out once I had warmed up, so I don't know how long it lasted). As I understand it you cook food by putting it in the fireplace's slots. What would be great is if the game had an isotope testing kit, so you could identify fissionable rocks. Then all you'd have to do is refine sufficient fissionable material (using a bucket and some of the rope, and some alcoholic tincture - just whirl it around your head) and then by assembling some of this into a motorcycle helmet with some .22 ammo as a trigger you could construct a portable nuclear fission bomb. Obviously you'd need some kind of timer. It'd be ace.

Seriously, how in the name of living Christ are you unaware that DayZ is developed in the Czech Republic? You're banging on about how they're a bunch of pampered California surfer dudes, waffling on about how they can't possibly understand non-Californian weather etc - I can't even comprehend how little you know about the game. They're called Bohemia Interactive for crissakes. After Bohemia. The game is full of Czech names, European conventions, it's modelled on the actual Czech Republic, the bloody font is named after the place, I mean what part of it is even remotely Californian? Yes, Dean Hall isn't Czech. He's from New Zealand. Which isn't California either. Are you aware that there are games developers outside California?

On the other hand, a bunch of programmers based in the Czech Republic - which is where DayZ is developed - might well have more experience in cold weather conditions than you. Did I mention that DayZ is developed in the Czech Republic? It's developed in the Czech Republic.

Apart from drying hoses, they're also used for training: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill_tower The one in the game doesn't seem to have anywhere to hang the hoses, unless they snake down the stairs. I popped off here to see if I could find a picture of a Czech fire station, and according to the brochure this is what Czech firepeople do all day: As you can see they (a) clean snow off trees ( b ) clean dirt off upturned lorries ( c ) clean dirt off tractors (d) help pigs give birth. On a more serious level the text implies that they would, if DayZ was real, have been on the front line against the zombies (the "radiation accidents" aspect is worrying - what happened in 2006? The lull in 2007 and 2008 worries me).

That's an interesting question. My assumption is that Chernarus is a backwater, and that most of the population commute elsewhere; I imagine that cargo arrives at the docks and is driven off into the interior, and that the few industrial areas and lumber zones in Chernarus are on the cusp of economic viability. I did a bit of Googling, and drifted off into a tangent - the town of Pripyat had a population of 49,000, and existed to support the Chernobyl plant. Pripyat plus the reactor is an odd shape (a NW-SE rectangle) that would dominate most of Chernarus, if it was transposed onto DayZ. I have to assume that some of the 49,000 were pensioners, children who didn't work, some of them must have driven the buses and worked Pripyat's supporting infrastructure. My hunch is that Chernarus does not have enough dwellings for 49,000 people but at this point my methodology is all over the place. Then again, it seems the entire population of Chernarus consisted mostly of middle-aged farmers and businessmen - the SA has chavvy-looking women - but then again that's not fair, most women would look chavvy if they had been forced to hunt and eat human beings for six months. As for scale, the pub building at least is descended from a model used in Operation: Flashpoint, which had a handful of enterable buildings that were scaled oddly. I assume at some point in 1999 the team settled on a scale and stuck to it, and everything that has happened since then is a consequence of that decision.

My worry is that they'll fold some of the new updates into DayZ, tart it up a bit, and then release it in its current form as the finished product. Then they'll work on an update with the new engine, which will be released as DayZ II, or DayZ: No More Space in Hell or something. For which you will have to pay another £19.99, because it's a whole new game!

Bohemia does have a habit of reusing models but the fire station is definitely a fire station. It has a drill tower and follows the same basic pattern of fire stations around the world (this one in the UK, for example, or this little mini one). As for the militia connection, you'd have to ask someone from the Czech Republic whether this is a throwback to the Cold War or a peculiarly Eastern European way of doing things. Perhaps the fire departments were once managed by the people's militia over there. The presence of military weapons in the loot table is probably something to do with Bohemia's odd sense of humour, or their prodigious alcohol intake. Life is short and brutal in Eastern Europe, they have to laugh because otherwise they would cry; and the harder they cry, the more they must laugh.

What this discussion board needs is more gifs of people being shot. Let's talk head wounds next. I've got a folder of gifs of people getting shot in the head - the chap with the RPG from Iraq, you've all seen that one - and then we can move on to helicopter chain gun rounds vs soft squishy human flesh. This board would really benefit from that.

It would be an interesting novelty if you could use string or rope as a garrotte. Against ambulatory players it would be almost useless - unless they were logging out, or away from the keyboard - but if you've put someone in handcuffs it would be a great way of offing them silently. Perhaps you could have a mechanism where the other player has to mash the movement keys in order to break free, but if he reacts too slowly it's over for him. Alternatively, get this, a functioning bayonet. Not sure how it could be made to work in the game from a programming point of view. The obvious answer would be to code it as a kind of short-range projectile weapon that fires invisible bullets to a range of six inches, accompanied with the appropriate animation.

I'm old enough to remember Operation Flashpoint, which looked like this: There was no grass at all. The bushes were magical - as long as you remained inside them the enemy were programmed to not see you, even though they knew you were there. Notice the pub model off in the distance, which hasn't changed much since 2001. ArmA introduced spartan grass although as nowadays it was purely a graphical effect: With Arma2 they seem to have gone mad (and this is relatively light foliage): The obvious solution is to revert to model from ArmA, and have spartan grass again. Just enough that the game world doesn't look awful, but keep it neatly trimmed so that it never interferes with your vision. Long grass didn't work in the single-player version of ArmA2 - imagine playing DayZ but against players armed with grenade launchers, armoured vehicles, and aimbots - and it makes no sense in multiplayer.

That's actually the Master's TARDIS. There's one in the new-ish village in the north-west. As far as I can tell they aren't functional yet, but once they patch them up you'll be able to travel to any time period and relative dimension in space. Watch out for a tall, dishevelled man with a big scarf - he'll try to meddle with things.

Looking at that screenshot, two more ideas spring to mind: allow the player to lock the door (perhaps spawn a "skeleton key", for the same of gameplay, instead of having one individual key per house), and give the shotgun breaching rounds so that you can blast the door open if need be. In reality I suspect that most houses in a zombie apocalypse would have the doors open by default, or even ripped off their hinges - the zombies would have smashed their way in long before you got there. The houses with closed, locked doors would be the risky ones, because they would be more likely to have people inside them. Closed, locked doors with condensation on the windows.

The mod has always had a gameplay model whereby the zombies spawn in towns, although I remember there was an update used very briefly which had zombies spawning in the countryside. It was taken out for performance reasons, if I recall, and I miss it; it made the forests a little more dangerous. I used to play a flight sim called Aces High, which had a terrain-holding system. Once one of the game's three factions took and held a certain percentage of airbases, the map was "won" and reset. I've been pondering a similar model for DayZ. My suggestion, and this involves adding some features that can be turned off if required: 1. Rework the current zombie spawns so that the server admin can set the zombie spawn rate, from zero to lots. This lets the server admin implement "classic" DayZ if he wants, or alternatively have a map with no zombies at all. 2. Block off the northern edge of the map so that the players can't access it. Cover the dividing line with a radiation / plague zone that kills the player if he gets too close, as in STALKER. This would also solve the problem of the map having a visible edge, which has always been one of the game's bizarre reality-breaking features: "Hey, why don't we make it an island, like in Operation Flashpoint? Or put in radiation zones, like STALKER?" "No, that would be unrealistic. STALKER is science fiction, DayZ is reality. Let's make the terrain come to a dead halt instead. Just like in real life." 3. Optionally spawn zombies north of that line. The server owner can set the spawn rate, again from zero to thousands. These zombies are given the goal of walking towards the southern shore, perhaps flocking towards Cherno and Elektro. if the zombies breach a certain threshold for a certain amount of time, make it so that the map is "nuked" by the authorities and (a) all the players are killed ( b ) their tents, vehicles etc are destroyed in a blinding white flash of nuclear fire. Thus giving the players an incentive not to simply kill each other. Perhaps have it so that the zombies are given the goal of demolishing the hospital or the central government building in Cherno, and if they succeed - simply by whacking it with their fists, thousands of fists - the map is declared lost. The admin has power over the zombie spawn rate; if he sets it to zero, the map will be essentially Classic DayZ. In combination with point 1 the admin could turn off all the zombies all over the map, turning it into a player-vs-player funfest. Voilà. The idea is that if the players do nothing or just fight amongst themselves, the map will eventually become overrun with zombies and then everyone will die and lose everything. Initially the southern half of the map will be zombie-free, but over time all the loot will be scooped up, and the players will be forced to head north. At which point they run into a zombie horde, so they'll have to fight hard to get what they want. The key things are (a) determining the performance hit of having thousands of persistent zombies on the map ( b ) giving the server admin power to turn these features on or off as required. I would pay for that game. I would pay again for that game.

I reckon that if you find each one, and plot the coordinates on a map, and then draw lines between the coordinates - and then travel to the epicentre of that polygon... you'll never come back.

Imagine you have a bucket of water. Stab it with a knife. It goes slop slop slop. Then throw a ball-bearing into it as hard as you can. A big fountain of water goes everywhere. That's what a bullet does to the human body. Velocity + mass hitting water - and the human body is essentially a bag of water - equals big shockwave, blood everywhere, nasty. I would rather not be stabbed *or* shot, but I surmise that stab wounds leave more tissue intact and in a combat situation would take more time to stop the enemy from shooting you in the head. It's been a while since I read John Keegan's The Face of Battle, but one thing that comes through is that arrow/crossbow-based combat results in a lot of wounded soldiers, who were probably going to die of infection but might survive on the battlefield for a while, whereas cannot and gunshot equals large masses of dead soldiers lying dead, because firearms are simply more lethal. The velocity kills.

There's a thing I learned from action films, called "slicing the pie". Instead of walking up to the corner and running around it, you take a step back and sidestep around in a circular motion, as if the corner was a pivot and you were wheeling around it: In that example the first thing the baddy will see is your right elbow. Once you've killed the other guy you can sit down to have a nice steak and kidney pie, which is where "slicing the pie" comes from. In my opinion rate of fire and magazine capacity are the deciding factors; if this was a real war you would toss a grenade around each corner, wait for it to blow up, and then charge ahead with your finger on the trigger spraying rounds all over the place. In which case a PPSH with a 75-round drum magazine would be the best choice, or some kind of riot shotgun that you can bumpshot, albeit that with everybody wearing body armour that's less optimal. In the game, an M4 with a 60-round magazine.