Funkmaster Rick

Ignoring the kiddies, the answer is basically: Yes your rig will run it, no your rig will not run it at 60 FPS. Rigs that routinely run Crysis with 60+ FPS will fail at DayZ. It's the engine, not the rig. Your GPU/CPU combination will probably average about 30 FPS inside cities (and you should expect sub-10 FPS drops every handful of blocks). With some optimizations and telling your card to over-ride DayZ on certain functions, you'll probably get it up to 45 FPS inside cities. You should still expect sub-10 FPS drops no matter what, though they'll be significantly rarer if you've optimized properly.

Heh, now that this topic is (mostly) back on track and we're through with plugging other games... A giant wall around the entirety of Elektrozavodsk, if possible. I kind of expect all the spawn zones to be completely barricaded off for the first couple of weeks. Followed by locations like Rify, the milzones, and smaller towns like Msta and Myshkino. I foresee the castles being fortified and occupied. I predict somebody will wall off Black Lake and turn it into an impenetrable cottage. I also expect a slew of bambi-traps where people barricade high-value lootzones and then leave a door open, only to close and lock it behind the poached bambi. Basically, I figure I'll see a good two weeks to two months where the building system is used solely for the purpose of being a dick. So why not just go full-bore and wall off Elektro?

I feel like the whole scroll-wheel magazine option should probably be removed. With it's awkwardness, it does not seem any faster to me than simply switching mags via inventory. And the problems it's caused me over the months have been horrid.

I think a lot of the current thinking on DayZ gunfights is along the lines of Mobility vs. Readiness. A good fighter knows how to blend the two together, when to sacrifice one for the other, and so on. That said, I really like the idea of being able to run full-out while firing entirely inaccurate shots to the side or behind you. I feel like this game needs more options for cinematic shit like that. Who knows - once they add scorpions or some other automatic PDW, it might even be useful from time to time. At the moment, it still smacks loudly of the hardcore military simulator the ArmA series aims for, rather than the survival-oriented trust-killer that DayZ is meant to be.

A few days back, some dude heard me walking around on Rify. He said "Hello?" in direct voice instead of sneaking up on me to try to Mike Tyson my ass. We swapped complaints about FPS issues and optimization advice, as well as a few comments about the new additions. I didn't even feel compelled to shoot him, either for fun or for my own safety. We just chatted, friended on Steam, were chill to each other. It was fuckin' weird. I don't think that represents a trend towards friendliness yet. What I have noticed is that almost nobody goes to NWAF on full servers because they're cowards. They expect someone's there, and they've probably got two or three friends with them watching through scopes. While a long-wolf player can get away with looting most cities simply because of the ability to hide and break sight-lines, this is obviously a significantly harder prospect at the airfield. Sure, trees and stone fences, but it's not nearly the same. All the good PvP now takes place in the Berezino-Svetlojarsk-Novodimitrovsk triangle. The old NWAF-Stary Sobor-Vybor triangle is less populous than it used to be. The Zelenogrosk-Green Mount-Rogovo line seems less hot than it used to be in the mod. I'd imagine the Elektrozavodsk-Chernogorsk-Balota run is still a newbie hotzone, especially with Cherno's new residential neighbourhoods, but it's been so long since I was tempted to go down there that I don't even know if people still use Sniper Hill to shoot bambis. Of course, this doesn't stop manly men from striding where they please, so if you're looking to fully kit your gun in pristine gear and grab all the 6-slot camo clothes, NWAF is still your goal (and don't forget to hit up Zelenogorsk and the Pavlovo/Veresnik milzones on your way). If you're already kitted or can settle for less pristine gear, head to the Northeast for fun times. But no, I'm not really noticing more friendly players. Though it's possible some of the old vets are taking breaks, allowing newer players who haven't had their trust slowly whittled away to run around trying to hug trees and shit.

Is it weird that I want a blacklight to see all the bloodstains better?

The short answer is no. At the moment, nothing really runs DayZ smoothly at all times. Even if you've got a wunderbar rig, you're gonna be looking at sub-10 FPS drops in certain parts of some of the bigger cities, and should expect about 30-40 at the best inside most cities. I've seen some exceptions, but you're definitely going to have to play around with your card's settings directly. I found that setting the antialiasing and a handful of other things to run /directly/ on my GPU, basically ignoring the DayZ settings, helped a lot. And you're DEFINITELY going to find that Jasmer here is unfortunately wrong in DayZ's particular case, though his assertion is valid for the vast majority of games. Specifically, I believe the engine they're using has a tendency to take calculations best run on the GPU and send them to the CPU instead - I've heard it said this is because the engine's designed to expect that your graphics card can't handle it, but that could be bullshit. All I know for certain is that setting my GPU to over-ride DayZ's decisions in some cases has resulted in drastic improvements to performance. I still get sub-10 FPS on occasion when inside bigger cities like Cherno, Elektro, Svetlo, or Novo, but I'm getting a fairly the rest of the time, and 60+ in the wilderness (with a few drops here and there just for spice, because I guess cow farts cause framedrops in addition to global warming =3 ). Mess about with your card's settings for when it runs DayZ - I'd wager you'll find a way to improve it, and it's not like you can really hurt anything messing around with these sorts of settings. EDIT: In case it matters for your reference, I run a GTX 560 with quad-core 3.4 GHz.

Yeah, I'ma go ahead and guess you didn't practice safe logging techniques. At first glance, it looks like a zombie was near enough to kill you, or a bandit, while you were logging out. Don't forget that you're technically in-game and able to be killed for something like ten or twenty seconds. Of course, finding safe spots to log out can be tricky if you haven't been playing for years like some of us. There are places near lootzones and pathways you can use, but anything without a solid mile of a lootzone or road is a risk of some level. Of course, it's still possible it wasn't your fault, the game being a pre-release alpha and all. It's been a long time since I had spawn or reset issues, but I'd imagine they're still possible. On the bright side, the rubberbanding is much better than it used to be.

My good sir, it's entirely possible you've too much time on your hands.

Clothing spawns. Duh. The real trick is finding matching ones so you can look like a total badass. Plus they've still got the old bandanas in the game, which can't be retied for the face. Looks spiffy once you get it done. Old-school bandit style.

You know, they speak English in Scotland. While they have an odd dialect, it is technically English - regular old dictionaries routinely list words originating in Scotland. =3

First off, melee weapons kinda suck right now. Still viable, but takes a lot of readjustment. Handful of new guns, mostly aimed at CQC. Craftable backpacks, hunting and fishing. Lots of new cities in the NE. Berezino to Novodimitrovsk are the new PvP zones, in general. NWAF is sometimes still looted, but more empty than it used it be. Mosin is still the king of guns.

Aside from the splint exploit, most of the servers I've seen recently have a two-hour restart cycle. The admins of those servers naturally want to keep them populated in a game where restarts are the only way to refresh loot spawns, but I'm still highly annoyed at how many good fights or roleplay scenarios have been interrupted by a restart, never to be completed.

I've played more than a few games that were being developed as I played them. Alpha, beta, pre-alpha, even a couple of games I wouldn't call more than a proof of concept. If you want to see a game where the developers have given up, take a look at The Stomping Land, or Chivalry. Great concepts, decent games in their own right, but they each had a slow and reasonably obvious spiral where every fix broke five more things. And then the devs walked away onto other projects. Still playable games, but definitely not destined to reach their full potential. DayZ looks on-track to me. Yeah, it's slow, and the features the majority wants aren't considered high-priority tasks. This is good. There's a difference between building an entertaining game, and trying to directly entertain people. When a developer starts doing the latter, it's at the cost of the former. Things look good. Keep trying to ignore the glitches and exploits, just like we all did back when we played the mod.

Title says it all.

I think knowing exactly how many bullets it takes to kill someone is a terrible thing. You should never know. Shooting someone should be a risk, even if you're on the roof of a tall building with a sniper-mosin using third-person to magically see things that can't see you. Even if you shoot someone in the calf, the question should be, "Did I hit an artery and he bled out almost immediately, did I just hit meat and now have to track his bleeding ass down, or did whatever he was carrying in his cargo pants completely stop my bullet and he's coming for me right now?" This game will never be able to /completely/ represent real physics nor anatomy. Seeming randomness, however, /will/ help to mimic this part of life. As for the point about nobody using the new weapons, well, they will. You just have to put it there, and someone will use it. At least until they find something better. Which is the whole point, am I right?

I recommend you spend a lot of time walking instead of running, find places to sit down and chill, admire the Chernorussian scenery: some of it is rather beautiful. DayZ is indubitably a game of patience. Find things to do or ways of playing the game that slow you right down. Experience tells me that the slower you take things, the more likely you are to judge situations accurately, make the right calls, and survive. Helps with tactical awareness, too - more time to gauge the ground, get familiar.

Heh, wow. I played for maybe an hour today. I walked through Stary and actually had to kill three zombies. It wasn't just a pleasant walk through town this time. So, it's a step in the right direction. Still think the zombies spot a little too far away, a little too quickly. It would be totally awesome if they had to /confirm/ in some way that you're human before rushing you - after all, they don't fight other zombies, do they? I like the idea of being dressed in camouflage helping me against zombies as well as humans. I like the idea of learning their triggers, and then learning how to sneak around zombies without ever having to swing an axe or fire a shot. I think it would deepen things. But yeah, I like the improvements to their animations and effectiveness. It was a good move.

Traveler: here's how it works. 1. Log onto server, spawn in fresh. 2. Proceed to nearest medium-large military loot zone. Grab some food and water on the way, but eat/drink it right away - no use saving that shit. 3. Search military loot zone. 4. Finding nothing (it's already been looted five times on this server), log out. Find server with zero players. Log in. 5. Loot everything. If barracks are already looted on /this/ server, too, repeat step five. 6. Now geared-out like a paramilitary specialist, log out in safe zone. 7. Find high-population server. Log in. Locate to high-value loot-zone. Kill everyone ever. As you may have already figured out, any easily-repeatable plan with this few steps is boring as all hell. Don't play this way, ever. But it's worth noting that a lot of the players you're going to run across do just this. That's how they get well-kitted in less than half an hour. I don't play like this because it's boring. I hate that it's so easy, and really passive-aggressive - it's like saying, "I don't want to play the /whole/ game with all of you plebians, just the part that starts with me being more powerful than you and ends with you dying." But you know, I can't really blame them entirely. As long as 90% of the players out there maintain a shoot-on-sight mentality, this kind of path actually becomes tempting once in a while. And as long as one player on a server is playing shoot-on-sight, then everyone on that server kinda has to in order to protect themselves: that two seconds when you first see someone and tell them you're friendly, hit F1 and wave, will probably get you killed if they're playing shoot-on-sight and use that two seconds to ready and aim their weapon instead. So I kind of understand why a sizable minority of players prefer to get geared up alone before even thinking about interacting with other players. Heck, there doesn't even /really/ have to be a shoot-on-sight player on the server to force people into this kind of ultra-defensive mentality; as long as people can change servers or spawn in with little or no warning, it's impossible to tell when one of these players might show up. But I guess that's supposed to be half the point: you never know who might shoot you.

Regarding soldiers leaving guns and ammo at military bases, if they had /any/ kind of warning they'd have packed up as much as they could in /all/ of their transport vehicles. No military in its right mind would want to leave weapons behind to fall into the hands of untrained civilians - what chaos that would be! For everything else, allow me to direct you to the words of Chris Rock:

Well, I already made a Christmas wish in this thread, but for Chanukah I want to be able to /completely/ remove my shirt on male characters. That way when horses you can ride are introduced, my buddy and I can grab Mosins and Stetsons to be gay Cherno cowboys. Fuck yeah, cowboys.

I have an idea. Force all official hive servers to first-person. Give the option to unofficial servers or servers running on a shard. So the people who absolutely need magic powers of clairvoyance can have the option to enjoy a lesser gaming experience, the realism-junkies get their hardcore simulation. If predictions about how third-person players represent the larger portion of the audience are true, then this option would relieve the developers of a large amount of fiscal drag to boot; hosting fees can be paid for by those who wish to support magic powers.

What about persistent, server-specific memory? What if each server (or your character file, presumably in an objective database) kept track of your location on itself for, say, five minutes? You log out on one server, log into a second to ghost. When you log back into the first one in your new position, you spawn in your old position anyway. I wonder how feasible this is. Also, quite whining about how this is alpha. The forums are here for us to complain about bugs on. That's the whole point. We signed up to report bugs, contribute ideas, and recount experiences. Don't bitch at anyone for doing those things. Well, as long as they're being nice about it.

What if repeated exposure to traumatic situations (being shot, killing others, zombie orgies, etc.) caused psychological damage? What if future exposures had a chance to trigger panic? Your character might start making noises like when in pain, perhaps the occasional jitter. Stuff that might give you away, but with minimal impact, ideally. I think the idea of someone being shot at and then immediately shouting, "Wuagh, no no no no no, not again!" to be absolutely hilarious.

I concur that M4A1s are far too available at the moment. I'm sure this will sort itself out as more weaponry is added to the loot tables. In the meantime, I'll enjoy my silenced M4 with scope and bipod.