alleycat

Why are there no zombies? I mean they game is supposed to have far more of them?

The night sky is a painted texture for the most part and not affected by light sources.

It is pitch black without moonlight.

Are you sure? If you test it now (22:00 central european time, the moon is already up ingame and in real life) so you will have some ambient light.

1 I dont buy the idea that clouds cause more reflective light. (need to see that for myself before I believe it) 2 YOu cant make a blanket assumption how much gamm everyone needs. Monitors have wildly varying settings.

I have clouds on normal, and night is pitch black IF there is no moon present. (Have you guys tested it under teh conditions I stated? It has to be absolutely MOONLESS. Which is only for a short time after sunset and before dawn (because its a near full moon in the real world today). I will test it ingame again but cant connect to any server.

What time and date have you tested it on?

Go for a walk in an a slightly overcast night, or in a moonless night. And in a forest. I can assure you wont be able to see your own hand in front of you in real life. And the basic issue remains. Either we enforce the immersive darkness for all players (willing to play at night, once the servers get different daytimes) or it becomes irrelevant and highly dangerous for those who dont gamma

The night time improvements still apply, because people still have these cool shaders when using a flashlight. And besides what other choice is cthere? If there is a tiny bit of ambient light = gamma cheat possible. And if you dont gamma cheat, you will lose out in the more hostile areas (anywhere but weapon-less shore lines)

Are you aware that clouds wont brighten the terrain lighting? All nighttime light you see reflectin on the terrain is a directional light, which is the moon light.

Updated first post with more detail

That is just a bit more annoying, but it wont prevent people (including me) from rather doing that than risking being eaten by a gamma cheater when having invested an hour of gaming time sneaking into the NW airfield.

It does not, the night sky texture (stars, clouds) are still bright, no matter the settings. Because they are basically painted into the sky texture. The only thing that will not be "gamma cheatable" is the actual terrain lighting levels.

How to make friends and keep them This is a two part post. The first is about how to make friends and the second, how to keep them is more of a suggestion for developers. Story time: For the fun of it I patrolled the coast and chased after new players I found. Greeted them and after some convincing and chasing ("Hey I am friendly") some took the risk and entered a chat with me. I asked to trade items and offered some of my stuff for free. Handed out things like melee weapons, maps, food etc. Most players were thankful and happy about it, ranging from grabbing the free stuff and bolting, suspecting a trap, from glowing thanking and cheering. Even partied up with some and we traveled for a bit. That is how you make friends. Approach players and trade/hand out stuff. Now for the problem, how to keep friends. Even if you take the huge risk of engaging in a friendly conversation, your good deeds will never count. Because they cant tell who you are (lack of name display). To fix this, I would like to suggest a name tag that is displayed. Like so: http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/721993905112026251/57572733F565E3DB76F1D04BFD8C8B51BBE4F820/ I coded this for my arma3 server. It basically shows the name of the player you aim at within a specific range. In dayz this could work like this: -If you are within 5m and it is daylight and you aim at a persons face, his name would display. Why do it? It is very important to identify if someone was nice to you. Because if you ever come across that guy you helped out at the beach again, but in balota, with everyone being armed with rifles, there is no way of recognizing that guy and people instantly shoot when they are armed and near good loot areas. This way players could build a reputation (if they frequent the same servers often) for being a specific type of player (trustworthy, carebear, bandit) without having "hard indicators". Currently the game gives no incentive to be good. Last night I hesitated to shoot a guy in balota, both of us armed to the teeth. We both backed away, then I turned around and kept walking and he opened fire after a few seconds, I hid and ran away. All of these nice streams from rocket where players party up and socailize never happen with complete strangers, unless its at the beach and now one has good loot or even guns. Also I suspect the closed alpha testers probably feared becoming bandits because in a smaller test group it is EASIER TO GET A SPECIFIC REPUTATION. If you keep shooting people on sight in a community of 100 players, you will get known for that (if you can be identified). And if you are being nice and helpful, the same applies (if you can be identified).

On top of that, the game should really add things that incentivize carebearing. In the mod we had the bandit system, which was flawed in some way, but no system or incentive to be a carebear at all in retail would be bad.

No they dont break immersion. Not being able to regognize a player breaks immersion. Also nametags can be limited to a really short range and only if you exactly aim at a players face. I am not talking about floating names 100m away. read the post

Thanks but I rather would have a systemic game mechanic that incentives socializing with other players

Which model? Show proof

There is no nice way to say it. You are talking out of your ass. I script too! And if you had a bit of actual scripting experience or a basic comprehension of counting and math then you would know that the new inventory system alone + the thousands of high quality 3d items are worth 30€ and that is so much content it probably is near arma3 in terms of pure amount of model geometry and textures. Also your own fault for server hop farming balota and crying you got bored because you got the best loot. Be a real man and instead of farming balota on empty servers, try doing it on a 40 player server in daylight. That is a savage battle royal and there is no way in hell you can get bored of too much loot because you wont live long enough to enjoy having it. And do not wave your server hosting experience around like a badge of honor because it makes you look like that gives your opinion more weight than that of an average player. And stop using ... between sentences because it makes it very hard to read and it undermines your credibility as a scripter if you are not handling basic readability of what you write. 100% bonus for stupidity for this No you cant mod in variation easily. All of the backpacks in dayz are new models, new textures, new UV maps. (do you know what a UV map is?). Let me explain this in a metaphore: Creating a new model from scratch is like creating a marble statue. Replacing a texture by dropping in a camo pattern with a photoshop mask is basically folding a paper plane. Also show me these 100+ weapon mods. I bet 95% of them are simple rips from FPSBanana exported for arma3. Try to find weapon mods for arma3 that are custom made from scratch, I bet you wont find more than 3 or so authors doing that.

FLIP THE GODDAMN SERVER TIME BY 12 HOURS SO PEOPLE WHO HAVE JOBS CAN PLAY DURING DAY AND NOT IN SOME WASHED OUT GREEN GAMMA NIGHT WITH A TINY CONE just wanted to put it more consise.

Night time is TEDIOUS. Not because of the pitch black darkness. Because of the narrow cone of the flashlight. The eyes are forced to focus on a small part of the screen all the time, and that is even worse indoors when you look at close objects, because the cone is even smaller. I find it very tiring, Small circle in center of screen, surrounded by darkness. A fix would be to make the flashlight cone wider and reduce the range to balance it out.

Night time was fun in dayz mod, because there was flares, which provided great visibility around the player. Atmospheric night time + actually seeing stuff was fun. But in retail we get a flashlight with a small cone, which is tiring for the eyes and furstrating because you can only concentrate on a small part of the screen.

They can simply widen the cone

Wait, servers are ALL synched to czech local time? Means europeans get screwed over during gaming hours? How about we get that fixed right now? Like drop everything else and fix that? Or allow servers to offset the time?

It is physically not possible to pass out willingly in real life from too much running. Read this again. You can not willingly run yourself unconscious.