Crayfish (DayZ)

Thoughts on this? I can easily do this. Not sure that it needs the line of sight ray-cast spamming. Could it not work so that *any* time a zed hears you but can't see you he goes into "investigate that area" mode. The only when he makes visible contact he goes into a sprint.

Having less food and drink around is making for excellent gameplay, you really do start getting desperate to find some. Obviously the fact that there is none whatsoever needs to be fixed. I've died of starvation for the first time today and my second guy is about to die of thirst. There is a pump nearby, if only I had a water bottle. Other than that the Zombie changes are excellent, their vision seems spot on and it's very neat being able to lose them in the city streets.

I'd just like to say... Props and respect to Dwarden, even the best games designers need great support. I'm glad you're there to help out. Also the rest of the BI team for making such an excellent and versatile engine.

YES Consider using the current humanity icon to back this up. The icon flashes along with the heart beat noise.

The flies/crows thing was an interesting idea but as has been discussed, doesn't really suit the ambience of the game. There are two steps to fixing the humanity system: 1. Create the right balance for losing (and gaining) humanity. 2. Be able to use humanity as a tool for identifying trustworthy players. For the first step the following alterations should be made: 1.1. Self defence should not lower humanity. The only kills that count as murders are ones where the victim has not fired their weapon in the past 30 seconds. Identifying an aggressor is almost impossible and very easy to exploit. The rules for determining whether one person has fired upon another may seem obvious to us but are incredibly vague to a computer. This solution only allows a player to shoot another player without losing humanity if that player has recently fired their weapon. It can be gamed (by shooting a player when they are engaged in combat against zombies for example) but does protect peaceful players for 90% of the time. It also catches the majority of malicious sniper attacks. 1.2. Shooting a player that is unarmed or has their weapon holstered would cause the player to lose double humanity. 1.3. The only way to gain humanity should be time. For every day that the player plays the game and does not kill anyone, one murder's worth of humanity is restored. Every other way of regaining humanity would be exploited or gamed. In this system the humanity is gained the first time the player connects to a session on a day subsequent to the day when he murdered no other players. The second part of the humanity system is where this post gets back a bit more to the original topic. How do we use humanity to assist players that want to play more peacefully? The first question to ask is what are we trying to simulate? My feeling is that what we are simulating is the "hunch" we have about other people from their body language. In order to do this we can implement the following changes: 2.1. Subtle skin change for facial expression. Players with low humanity should have a permanent sneer. Not useful for long range encounters but definitely evident when grouping. 2.2. Text chat appears in a slightly different colour relative to their humanity level. This simulates our ability to judge someone from their manner of speaking. 2.3 Shooting a murderer should not affect a player's own humanity. This is fairly obvious and has already been implemented. Finally I do think as a quick fix for identifying bandits. If we're keeping the global "x has died" messages, it would be good to try out allowing all players to see who they were killed by. That would give more peaceful player a much better idea of who the killers on the map are and allow for revenge and vigil-ante behaviour.

YES... But give new players a map, with private notes for where to find basic equipment - handgun, beans, compass, etc.

These are what I consider to be the three bug fixes that would give the highest bang-per-buck in terms of player experience: 1. The "galloping horse" sound effect when sidestepping. Seriously, it's incredibly immersion breaking. 2. The backpack bug. The number one cause of losing valuable equipment. Surely this is as simple as "if (free_slots < slots_needed) break;"? 3. Zombies spawning 10 feet away from you. This one has got me a couple of times. Some sort of range (and possibly LOS) check on zombie spawns would be great. These are the features that would in my opinion improve DayZ the most: 1. A two level zombie aggro system whereby they are attracted to movement at a greater range, but only at a walk. 2. The ability to lower or put away a pistol so you are carrying no visible weapon. 3. Make the crossbow more powerful (should be a one shot kill for Zs) and allow more bolts to be carried.