icehex

Pervious suggestions I found: blood trails left by wounded players/animals; amount of blood left in trail depends on wound 'severity' New suggestion: walking/running on grass tramples it (just as it already does when crawling on it), and the grass stays down for a sufficient amount of time, perhaps for 5-15 minutes, or a 24-hour period. Scope: players, zombies, animals, and vehicles (when implemented) Motivation: --- increases lifetime of player-to-player encounters It is already somewhat rare to find a player outside of main spawn areas, or outside of hotspots such as military bases. When you do meet in the distance, the player could easily weave around buildings/trees and escape visual range, and then proceed into a random direction to disappear most likely forever. Tracking would allow for the encounter's lifetime to increase. --- encourages players to be mindful of the paths they take Water and roads are not trackable, but water gets you wet/soaked, and roads make you stand out more and increase the chance of meeting other road-takers, so you have options with pros/cons for which routes to take, and why. --- fear of being followed by a potential tracker A vulnerable (or any) player can play mind games with potential (real or imagined) threats in order to decrease the chance of being tracked. Should I merge tracks with other tracks I find? Run through water or a road? How long would it take that bandit to catch up to me? Is he even following my tracks? What if someone else found my tracks and is following me? Should I try to emulate the walking pattern of a boar, or maybe a zombie? --- thrill of tracking another person One could feel like a badass such as Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead. And/or maybe the bandit that killed your buddy is trying to make a run for it? Maybe you're bored and want to see where this random trail takes you? Are these tracks from an animal/zombie (random tracks) or a person, and how could I tell? Maybe they are car tracks (2 parallel lines/curves) and I'd like to steal someone's car. Guess on feasibility: grass can already be trampled when it is crawled on, so this seems trivial to add for running/walking. Does information of trampled grass get passed through the server network right now? I don't know, but info does pass on for cut-down trees and bushes. This would be more difficult to implement if it isn't already. But, if we have blood trails, we can have trampled grass, which might be easier to code for altogether. Lifetime of trampled grass: if the time is too short (less than 5 minutes), it would be useless. If it is long (10-20 minutes), one could perhaps always track a target, so the targeted player would never be able to escape. If it is very very long (24 hours), then this would add much more to the network load (??), but it would also increase the chance (by a lot) that a tracker would come up to crossed tracks, making it more difficult to follow the initial set of tracks, and adding to the beauty of the feature. For the very interested readers: Below I linked a quick find I made when google searching - a book from an SAS (British elite Special Air Service) veteran with information on the 'real' process of tracking. Click here for a google book link and read the first paragraph on page 39.

I don't think it is beyond the scope of the engine. Here is a suggestion I made about tracking, maybe you guys would be interested in that discussion. As for advanced animal AI, I'm going to get dreamy: - animals flee from gunshots, not just gunshot wounds (currently they do not run from loud shotguns that don't hit them) - introduce animal AI movement functions that involve the distance to the closest body of water; one big fear is probably that any animal AI would run off the map eventually, if forced to travel longer distances. This can be prevented by bounding animal movement between a set path that is a function of an animal's spawn location and the nearest water - add hostile animals w/ appropriate AI (bears); zombie AI can probably be used; also, add bear hide coats! They can't give us everything at once, but at least there will be a record of ideas, right?

I agree. It should be more taxing on the tracker to track than it would be to follow a target visually. Ideally, tracking ought to be effective only when the person being tracked chooses to stop, for example, in the next town in order to loot, or perhaps in a random spot in the woods to build a fire, or maybe somewhere to camp for passerbies.

Zombies are still glitchy indeed. However, they are too easy to kill even when several in number (so I disagree with OP on this point), as you can sidestep/whack them without ever getting hit by that zombie ball. +1 for zombie hordes that the server can handle. Melee weapon damage on zombies is OK, but rifles (AKM, AK101, M4) kill them too easily. 1-shot headshots OK, 1-shot bodyshots seem too easy. Sometimes if you get caught in the middle of the town with a horde coming by, you should have a very hard time escaping. This would encourage more careful play: watch your surroundings for zombies / don't corner yourself. Right now I don't care if I agro a zombie, ever, so I don't even look for them, unless I am near hostile players; I would guess this is common for players with even little experience. Overall, so the server can handle this, I could imagine adding random horde spawns outside of towns (numbered 10-30 zombies) that are given a walking direction towards the center of town, plus a random angle between -45 and 45 degrees to the direction (so zombies will occasionally miss the town). Buff the zombies against rifled weapons, giving real difficulty when being confronted by a horde. Of course, there aren't very many zombies right now because of the server-side load (I imagine), so more improvements would have to be made to handle even 'small' hordes.

My friend had the same issue and it took a bit of troubleshooting to get it to fix itself. We did quite a few things before the problem was actually fixed (like verifying integrity of cache and reinstalling DayZ), but the final steps that led to a fix were: -1. The issue is: upon joining a server, it kicks you out of it with a message box saying "Confirmation of Changes: Session Lost". This happens for any server, on both regular and experimental DayZ. 0. Back up any files as needed through all of this. 1. Close out of DayZ and shut Steam down. 2. Uninstall Steam (if you plan on saving your game installs by making a backup-copy of your Steam\steamapps folder, make sure at least that DayZ gets removed from your steamapps folder; uninstalling steam will remove all games within the steamapps folder) 3. If you have any of these Folders, delete: %AppData%\Local\DayZ %AppData%\LocalLow\DayZ %AppData%\Roaming\DayZ Note: %AppData% is how you get to the specific folder location by using the start menu search option, though you can get to that folder by going to C:\Users\usernamehere\AppData\ 4. In each of the three %AppData% folders, also make sure there is no BattleEye folder. Delete if you find. 5. Now go to C:\Users\usernamehere\Documents and look again for DayZ, BattleEye, and this time also for "DayZ Other Profiles". Delete any you find. Note that this may be where your custom settings for the game are stored, so you'll have to re-do all the settings (you might run into the infamous Resolution issue after having your video settings reset; google around for easy fixes to this if need be). But if the game actually works, who cares, right? 6. Reinstall steam by using the install file located on the official steam website. 7. Do not copy back any folders you backed up, not even steamapps. 8. Download only DayZ through steam, so that it is the only installed game. 9. Run DayZ and see if it works. 10. Restore any backups you had and hope this doesn't break DayZ. Restoring your steamapps won't break anything as long as you removed DayZ from the backup files. Re-download games if you had them deleted during uninstall. And, hopefully, enjoy! In essence, the issue for my friend was neither a networking issue, nor a DayZ server issue, nor a hacking/cheating issue where the account may be limited, VAC banned, or BattleEye banned (my friend did not hack/cheat/abuse and the steam account is not limited). The account was usable from a different computer, so the problem was purely on my friend's computer. There is probably a much easier way to fix this issue, such as by deleting the specific files which cause this problem, and letting Steam re-acquire them, but I don't know which files those would be.

For anyone reading this that's come here for new info (or to post a complaint!), click here for an update from Dean Hall. He gives out a lot of good info about the project, planned features, and projected timelines. He also addresses some issues if I remember correctly. Also, here is a link to the DayZ blog with weekly updates. To answer your post LoK, the above video is invaluable in that it shows that the DayZ Dev team is moving forward and looking ahead to produce content that players would want to enjoy. I can't find a link to that anywhere on this forum; same with the tumblr link. I surmise one can get to it through the DevTracker, but at this point it has been long pushed down by many other twitter updates, and the average person will not sift through all of those messages to find something they would consider truly worthwhile. Also, a lot of people won't go googling around for new information; they'll come here with the assumption that all updates they'd care about will be mirrored here, and will be very easy to locate. All information sources ought to be linked like a web of main sources. If you consider this website a central hub for DayZ, then it should have obvious, permanent links to the other sources. Furthermore, UK's Rezzer presentation by Dean I would consider a kind-of-a-big-thing that should be showcased on the front page. There needs to be movement on pulling the important parts of the DevTracker and making them obvious until their lifetime passes. Lastly, these non-permanent updates can be made more obvious when they are not only pinned but, say, starred, so they stand out from the rest of the permanent pinned topics in the announcements section, like the FAQ. It's very important to keep the community up to date, I'm sure all agree. But someone needs to be actively pushing around to make sure all PR is handled appropriately, with the goal of maximizing ease of access, and maximizing dissemination of news.

And to add to that, devs that release content and devs that fix network issues or collision issues are likely separate people. The content devs will keep chugging along at what they do best whether you like it or not. The issues about which people are most upset are still in the works for fixing, as they are quite a bit more complicated than new content, and again, they are likely fixed by other devs. So be happy with spray paint, survivors. Oh, if persons would do a bit of research before raging, they'd find out that the issues have been addressed and are being tackled immediately. This goes to combat logging and rubberbanding.

Keep up the good work gentlemen! Bringing reality to the overzealous randoms: Let's see... A standalone of good quality needed a year from 2012 to 2013 in order to fix up the ArmA 2 architecture and provide the much smoother and much less laggy framework you can play on now. Adding to that, going from a mod to a full game requires work and learning that they had to do without a lot of funding (the mod was free, and expressly relied on ArmA 2 mechanics). One can easily find video updates on what has been done over the year, like Mocap for the zombies. Add to that that nobody's money was on the line over that time period. So kindly consider that before being angry about your wait. DayZ Alpha was released Dec 16. It has been 18 days since the release, over which they've made their millions, and had time to do work. Subtract 8 from those 18 days, for, roughly, the Dec 25 through Jan 1 break-time that is acceptable for Christmas and New Year's. This leaves them with roughly 10 days of awesome funding, during which they released a patch, fixing some major (and the only I could find, of this type) network issues - namely the item lag and rubber-banding. When exactly does one expect them to hire another handful of devs to help on the project? Interviews take time to do. Some companies take up to a month screening possible recruits, leading them through 2-3 interviews, etc., etc., I shouldn't even have to say all this. I'd prefer new devs to be best of the best, with a true heart towards DayZ's unique characteristics. Normally companies release patches monthly. The (major) fixes we received in roughly 1/3 of a month, with still the same size team. 'Modding' an existing engine is not a trivial task, esp. considering the ArmA 2 network architecture - it was completely trusting of the client. You probably have no idea how much has to get 'modded' in order to make it work for a competitive FPS game, where the client can no longer say "I now exist over there, across the map" and you instantly get teleported. It's a lot of work, and it was probably a big part of where your 2013 in waiting went. It's doubtful the alpha will continue for 2 years, or anywhere close to that. The original reference was an obvious exaggeration, to particularly push your buttons. I don't blame anyone. We all exist to learn new things (hopefully).

The castles/ruins aren't necessarily deserted. The items seem to spawn under each floor level. If you drop an item at a floor level, it appears under the floor as well. Just needs fixed. There has to be more than 5-10 seconds in surrender before logging; way more. In regular combat, you may end up waiting for your opponent to leave a building; if it takes 10 seconds for him to be able to log out, he will successfully log out, and exit the building on another server. It might be a great idea to add a vicinity check to logging as well; say, if you are within 200 meters of another player, you cannot log out; in that case, you could compromise a lower surrender timer. I _STRONGLY_ agree there has to be a fix to the server hopping issue. Loot cycling is both easier and safer now than it ever was in DayZ Mod. A good portion of the servers have their high-level gear looted by a much smaller portion of the players. Add this to players spawning inside a building you just cleared and deem temporarily safe, because they are server hopping for loot. There is nothing wrong with a player spawning where he logged off because he could no longer play at that time, but if so many are server hopping, the probability of a legit "this is where I logged off last night" spawn is extremely dwarfed. Edit: Perhaps use a vicinity check when logging in as well. Refuse spawn until area clears. The side effect is that friends would not be able to log out or log in the same predefined area. But there will be no urgency related to this as, if they are in combat, they must not combat log anyway, and if they aren't, then they can take the extra minute to spread out and log. Those logging out in a popular area that are forced to wait for a random player to leave their immediate spawn area would have to live with it. The probability of this is small anyhow, and is avoidable by players not logging out in popular areas. It's not desirable anyway, as who would want to spawn next to a non-friendly and risk the disadvantage?