Dagwood

Thought I would share some observations I've made and maybe get a little discussion going. Currently I would break player activity into two broad groups: looting and killing/interacting. During the first hours of an average survivor's life, they run from town to town or base to base and gather gear. Survivors will cover vast ground, and their incentive to travel is based upon loot scarcity. If desirable loot is in the area, traveling stops. If desirable loot is elsewhere, players travel. Currently the killing/interacting activity is concentrated around a few areas for various reasons. What I want to talk about is the looting phase of a survivor's life. So far, gearing up quickly has been achieved by visiting as many loot spawns as possible to maximize your potential for finding what you want (like cranking a slot machine as many times as you can in an hour). Our ability to survive and improve our situation is almost completely based upon a little diligence and a lot of luck. Now, with the gradual implementation of various means to "acquire" the things you need to survive (butchering, cooking, leather working, fishing, etc), it seems that (eventually) survival will be more focused on working for your gear rather than only scavenging. What's important to note here is that most of these looting alternatives are relatively tool-intensive. This means that surviving by these methods will make traversing the map like we do now quite difficult. When loot tables are leaned out and surviving by scavenging alone becomes insufficient, I believe that players will begin to travel less, and tapping an area for all of its potential resources will become the more efficient approach. Players will be more likely to board up a house and use it as a temporary base of operations. I believe that this change in player mobility during the gearing process will also change how pvp and "endgame" plays. Does anyone agree? Is the game doomed to play how it does now; as a looting/running simulator? Or will these new features slow players down and provide opportunities for more immersive gameplay? More diverse player interaction? TLDR; we can't carry enough shit on our backs to have all of the tools for survival AND our shiny tactical gear. This will slow our roll. Discuss.

It's pretty common sense. Why would anyone bother to use any of those features if a quicker alternative is lying all over the place? The devs know this too.

But can you see the long term implications? Canned goods won't always be as accessible as they are now. So cooking your food won't be something you can choose to forego because it's too time consuming. You won't have another option.

Killed a boar and couldn't complete the action to skin it. Is this another situation where I need to press F11 before starting the action? Or are boars just bugged right now? Also, can somebody tell me how much leather and of what animal I need to craft the leather vest?

Not to mention holding a derringer steady enough to hit the broad side of a cow at 100m would require a significant amount of skill/practice. As far as the barrel length affecting bullet trajectory: the game currently differentiates between different weapons and how they perform based upon the cartridge the weapon fires. So for instance, the magnum and the repeater have identical ballistic profiles, even though the repeater has a much longer barrel and should have a higher bullet velocity as a result. Hopefully this is not the intended method for handling weapon performance, and merely a placeholder.

Thanks for the quick reply. How much inventory space does each tanned leather occupy?

Being able to hit/see someone at 1k+ meters brings a lot more cons than pros to the game. If it could be done without negatively affecting performance, I would be all for it. But that is not the case, so it's not something that will likely be looked into by the devs until final development or post release development. We'll live.

Too cold for freshspawns but just warm enough for geared players? Sounds like a good place to get shot in the face

I doubt it will be anything that critical in pvp. Maybe medical. Hopefully the majority will be survival based skills. Like not wearing your knife out as quickly when harvesting sticks from bushes. It wouldn't give players enough of an advantage to incentivize xp farming, but enough that you would value your character's life more and fight to survive frustratingly difficult situations, (dying of disease for example) rather than suiciding in an attempt to easily retrieve the gear. If it's done tactfully, I say bring it on

I believe soft skills refers to how our characters will become more skilled at certain tasks the more we perform them. For example, the more we skin and butcher animals, the more yield we would get as this soft skill progresses. But I don't think these manuals should affect our skills at all. It should be as you said. They will be relatively unuseful to veteran players, but possibly a godsend for uninformed players.

If performance wouldn't be an issue, I'd like restarts to be as far apart as possible.

Sorry, let me rephrase that. I don't want to need to adjust my FOV every time I approach a town or engage in a long range firefight to be competitive. While you're doing that and I'm not, I am at a disadvantage. So then my options are a) do the same as you and adjust my FOV situationally, or b) don't do it and be playing with a disadvantage. "You don't have to play with gamma turned up at night. But if I want to, tough shit" ya, that's logical

Renderer renders everything around us, whether we're looking at it or not. So I don't think adjusting your FOV would improve performance. It does give you better eyes for different situations, which is why it needs to be looked into. Nothing breaks immersion like sliding a bar back and forth everytime your sight lines change.

There's a skyrim mod that forces you to prep food and rest and such to survive. Can't remember the name right now. Frost something.... But when you booted up a new character with that mod, you spawned with a survival manual of sorts like you suggested. In addition to this, rocket stated that he liked the gameplay that mod fostered, and looked to it for inspiration (don't know where I read it, don't ask). I could see assorted "manuals" being super market spawns. Definitely. And as far as item descriptions being helpful to ignorant players, I think this is a great idea. I would be way more excited to pick up an item and experiment with it to discover it has some use rather than having to look it up on the internet. How do you think what they're calling "soft skills" would work in conjunction with these manuals? Would they affect how effectively we can perform these actions? Or should it just be explanatory?

Well considering the fact that you were standing on top of an office building, I'm going to guess that you got shot from somewhere else. If you saw the bullets coming through the floor, that's pretty sweet, whether it's legit or not. But a 3rd party shooting you from a neighboring building seems more likely. It can be surprising when you die with no sound or anything, but that usually means it was a headshot. Lesson to be learned: don't stand still on the roof of a building in a city .

And some people that survive disasters didn't necessarily "earn" that right to survive. Dumb luck is a thing. Some players will be hardcore survival experts; capable of surviving with just a few tools. Others will be much more luck dependent. If they don't find enough canned peaches, they perish. I think both smart and not so smart players inhabiting the same space will provide unique opportunities. If every player has to learn all of the tricks to survive, no player is different from another. Those "dumb" players should be at a disadvantage, but they shouldn't be unable to enjoy the game just because they're new. Their odds of survival should reflect their skill and experience. Two players spawn in the same spot on two identical servers (loot is in the same place on both servers). One knows every survival mechanic (cooking, crafting, foraging, etc) and the other only knows how to interact with items in the environment (can opener, wells, reloading, etc). If the "noob" finds a screwdriver and some canned food in the first town, he'll survive the first hour, as will the experienced player. But if all they find in the first town is an axe, some rope and some matches, the experienced player can craft a bow and hunt while the other player will starve until they find canned food. This is how I imagine the game panning out.

Cooked food should digest faster and help warm you up. Being cold should increase likelihood of infection, therefore warm food can strengthen your immune system indirectly. I think we want to avoid the game becoming too tedious. Being forced to cook your food would be one step toward tediousness. Gaining an advantage, or value being placed on cooking food is a better mechanic in terms of how the game will play. This way, the people that want to take better care of their avatars will be rewarded for doing so, but it is not the only way to play the game.

Trying to get a buddy back into dayz and thought we'd try using handheld radios and direct chat exclusively for communication. I only tried them once when they were first implemented, and don't really know the ins and outs of using them. Can somebody with some experience using hand held radios give me a quick crash course? My main question is how our radios are overheard by other players in our proximity. Will what I am saying/hearing over the radio be broadcast in direct chat around me? Thanks, Dagwood.

And the way loot respawns will force us to move around the map or starve to death. The game will change. You must be patient.

For 30+ it's amazing how well you still piss and moan like one of those 16 year olds you were bested by.

When the map is swarming with infected it won't feel like you're surrounded by empty nothingness. You'll be grateful to have all of those little spots to hide. And a building with a congregation of infected outside the front door will make finding other players that much easier.

If you have a quality rig an aren't happy about how your game is rubbing, please, don't come here and complain about it before you take steps to fix the problem. My rig ran the mod just fine. Maybe not on high settings, but it ran smooth. The situation was not the same with the SA. Pretty, but clunky as all hell. Yesterday I decided to do some google searches and see if I couldn't make some improvements. I altered some in game settings, changed my launch parameters through steam, and adjusted my config files. My game was running below 20 FPS in many situations, and now after making these changes it hasn't dropped below 30 FPS once. If dayz is making your computer run like its underwater, all hope is not lost. Even I you're practically computer illiterate like me, you can make dramatic improvements.

The iron giant linked the website I used. And like another said, those recommended settings are just a guide. I tweaked my config files several times before I was satisfied. Edit: all knowledge is uber

A lot of work? He's just using feed to draw in his prey. Not so much work, but definitely more proactive.

Running with 3 people seems to work well for me. If we have a group of 4, we tend to further fragmet into two teams. This way if one player comes under fire when we're looting/scouting around an airfield, he has somebody close by to assist him or quickly get a revenge kill. I've learned that spreading yourselves out to gain maximum angles will often weaken the group.