Distortoise

A very dumb discussion finding root in some serious misconceptions. It's an "amorphous solid," meaning solid without crystal properties. This is the same category as gels and such. There's not much room for a proper debate past that. That said, pretty sure real life purification tablets have an obscene shelf life. There's not a whole lot in them that can go bad. The simplest ones I imagine are just solid iodine, which going by half life alone should last you a little over 30 million years :P

There's this other zombie game by Valve you'd probably absolutely detest by this measure.

I think you might be expecting far too much from the AI. Something Rocket stresses repeatedly on reddit is that the fact they're trying to populate a map the size of Chernarus with bots, synced to up to 150 clients, has never been done before. Because of that, they can't use any sort of traditional pathfinding on the zombies, and you need to if you want to see that smooth and sexy Euphoria Engine levels of fine detail on how they react to their own mass and such. Even the sort of all baked animations stuff you're seeing seems like a huge accomplishment when you hear them talk about what had to go under the hood to do it.

So I just went on Steam today and found that Planetary Annihilation has the nuts to try and sell an alpha for 90 bucks. Suddenly I'm more appreciative of the fact that the DayZ team has their head screwed on right and is going for the Minecraft model (maybe the PA guys misunderstood and got it backwards by accident?) Either way that reminds me: has there been any word on how early on DayZ will hit Steam? Like via Early Access like Arma 3? I'd prefer to get the game on Steam over independently, assuming DayZ even has other methods of purchase.

It's releasing Minecraft style, so we're getting it in alpha with increasing price as it goes through to beta onward. It might not be done until after Christmas but we'll have access to it well before then. The zombie sync thing looks like it's not going to take forever to fix. It just seems like there's some sync issues, as if the zombie's visual model is about a second behind where it actually is in relation to the player.

As far as headgear goes, I'm at least assuming they had the sense to put a 60s style goaltender mask in there. I mean at this point those masks are more closely associated with fictional bandits and lowlifes than they are, you know, hockey.

So long as they're not so fast that shooting more than one before they are on top of you is no longer an option. Fighting a few off without taking a hit every single time you cross a zombie and running from and losing more than you can handle both need to remain viable options for survival regardless of however they tweak the zombies. Basically just make them fast enough that the mod scenario where one guy with a standard pistol can carefully put down a horde of 30 zombies as they slowly shuffle through the door with careful headshots no longer happens, but a guy in a house with, say, no more than 3 or 4 can still put all of them down before they get close enough to bite a piece out of him.

The only thing really bugging me in that video is how the zombies are registering hits before they animate any attacks, even leaps. Alpha stuff, but everything else looks fit to go for a paid alpha besides that. I mean, can we still run from zombies in Standalone? Cause I'll be sad if we can't :(

Eh, I don't know. How much do DayZ and CoD's demographics overlap? Especially with console competition stripped out if only the PC version is out around that time or indeed, the console versions never come to exist. DayZ is also a very slow and methodical game relative to CoD's atmosphere of immediate gratuity. Basically I don't really see a massive number of people holding the two up against one another and having to make a decision on only the one of them.

Not really, whoever is squatting that domain name is trying to milk it since DayZ's about to roll over another milestone. This sort of thing is common for web domains related to an existing brand that aren't owned by the brand owners. Either way it means whoever owns it is likely holding it ransom for an absurd amount of money if Rocket approaches them trying to buy it.