melancholymastermind

Something like a million copies have been sold. Of course there are going to be repeat after repeat after repeat of discussions. You better get used to it and over it, and stop being such a negative influence

Now don't go all Kill Bill on me right away! This is more of a musing than a suggestion, I am certainly not saying this SHOULD be in the game :p One of the things that I feel is really missing from DayZ when you compare it to zombie apocalypse shows and movies is "useless" survivors. There are always a few of them. They don't really bring anything to the team, they cant shoot worth a damn, run from melee combat and are honestly a burden on the wily hero's. For the less honourable folk they are both cannon fodder for a bit of amusement and bait for luring in would be heroes. But the question is how could you get this into the game obviously no player is going to want to play some useless survivor so AI is the only answer. AI being my thing I came up with this idea (we are talking much later in development, when zombie ai is more complete, and path finding and all that is more robust) : Sacrifice say 10-20% of the maximum zombie count for civilians or some modifiable server value Civ's have a small chance to spawn somewhere on the map that is without players Civ's don't die/interact unless a player is near enough (it would be too process intensive). movement all the time would be good though. Especially grouping A Civ looks just like any other player from a distance (perhaps up close you could tell) A Player can "befriend" a Civ or take one hostage A Player can give a "befriended" Civ simple orders like wait/follow and perhaps hold fire Civ's start with just clothes Civ's will run from gunfire/zombies Civ's hide inside buildings If you "befriend" a Civ he/she will follow you around. kind of like a pet. If they see another player they run and tell you, same with zombies/loot. The longer a Civ stays alive as your friend the better gear they get. Although they do not actually take loot from the game world. Never anything higher than say a pistol, and they would suck with it. Taking a Civ to some location or end-game type mission would give you some benefit (cant think of what other than loot at this stage) They are a burden and would be more likely to alert zombies, or cause another player to see your group. The price of having them along. Im not talking about having hundreds of Civ's running around, perhaps based on player count. Their presence would change a lot about the way you approach (apparent) players. 1 player with 3 Civ's in toe from the distance may seem like a full player group for example, and a group with many Civ's would be intimidating (or too good to resist)! An additional benefit from having them around is that from time to time they give you something, like a bandage or water or food. If you get hurt they will try and heal you with what you have in your pack, this could happen at a slower rate and be easily interrupted. After keeping a Civ alive for a long period of time (along with yourself) they could upgrade themselves to the point where they actually have a pistol. They will cover you and shoot (terribly and slowly) at anyone shooting at them. If you kill a Civ they die just like a player and can be looted. They would have clothes and 1 weapon and perhaps a few throwaways. With older Civ's having more (but not substantial by any means) stuff. They could even upgrade over time without a player around, so that some Civ far out north might get upgraded enough to have a pistol. You could find him fighting zombies, or hold up in a house. If done right they could not only be helpful, but also add a lot into end-game and interaction. The apparent number of survivors would go up and the chances of coming across another survivor across the map would increase. Additional suspense would be added with increased encounters (especially if a Civ looks identical to a player unless your right in their face). You could have players defending a Civ camp (constructed by players) that you can bring Civ's to for a reward. One of the Civ's in such a camp could become a trader for between players if the camp got big enough. Bandits could kill everyone in the camp including the trader so others would need to protect it. A boat could come to the south coast and take Civ's away. All manner of ideas come to mind. So yeah, I know its not really DayZ but it was an idea and I thought I would share :) Most of you will probably not like the idea, and that's fine. just keep calm when you tell me.

I would love scary, FAST zombies. I would love it if Zombies were as dangerous as players. So much so that a firefight between two groups may see a temporary ceasefire to deal with a horde that caught ear of the shoot out. That level of a threat. More speed = less intelligence required to make them dangerous. Just make sure the sound/visibility system is robust too so that bugged aggro's are kept to a minimum.

I understand what you mean completely. In todays age their are new AI methods that are just not seen in games at the moment. DayZ is one of those rare games where its sort of by an AAA company but at the same time its by an Indie guy. With such a long development cycle no doubt they will attempt some aspects of the game in multiple ways before its done to see what's best. Regardless of Civilian or buddy's being in the game or not, I hope they try something more engaging considering the world size even with Zombie AI (see my adaptive AI thread for example) When I say Civ's I'm talking about the residents of Woodbury in The Walking Dead that were just extras. How many people lived there again? I cant remember. (I haven't seen the latest season so if they turned out to be psycho's or something sorry) The Civ's I see in a game like this would only run and hide in a firefight and maybe fight 1 zombie. Quickly finding a local safe spot to be not seen by players (unless "friended") The ability to accurate and quickly find local positions that are clear of player view cones would be key to any form of success. They would need to be good and reliable and getting out of the way. Its not like the map is small. They could hide in a building 2 blocks away or lie down on the other side of hill. The idea is that if you choose to allow one (or more) to accompany you, the risk of them revealing you or aggro'ing zombies is the balance of the reward of having them assist with healing or giving you food/water when you are desperate. Plus whatever end-game goals are cooked up Giving an order to a Civ to search a building while you search another would speed up looting but increase the risk of them agrro'ing zombies or alerting players. They could assist with carrying gear say if you give them a backpack. A guy/girl with military gear and/or a rifle would of course always be a player. Civ's would never get loot like that as then you might feel like relying on them :P Of course if anything like this became a part of DayZ which I don't see happening it should be server side controlled with the option to add a set number if desired. Maybe Modding will be robust enough for me to make such a thing later?

Years ago when I was working on the Ultimate AI mod for Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising (lets NOT get into a talk about this game please) and I was faced with this issue as well. In the original game, getting shot, even on "hardcore" was not very realistic. You could take more bullets than any man could and keep fighting. I spent MONTHS tweaking and testing, and the end result system was mostly accepted by the players of my mod. Basically, if you got hit by a bullet graze in a limb, it was a fair effect on your ability to handle your weapon, or run long distances. A solid hit on any limb would all but put the limb out of action. An arm would see innacurate weapon fire and large sway. Leg damage would cause even slight jogging to use all your energy (basically meaning you cant run) A solid body hit on any non limb (that passed/missed your armor) was almost always a death shot. Should you not die instantly, you would be bleeding and fast. Generally you had only around 5-10 seconds to bandage yourself before the bleeding killed you. It also gave the added side effect that often you would get hit by a heavy grenade or mortar blast, but survive, only just long enough to see yourself bleed out in a second or so. It was an effect people really liked as it felt reaslistic. you were not instantly killed by the blast, but you are not going to survive it

I was actually thinking about this last night. What I would like to see, would be a system in place that has a zombies energy or speed directly related to a few situational things like : a ) The Number of nearby zombies b )The number of living things nearby c ) The amount of dead bodies nearby As any/all of these statistics for a zombie increases, so does that zombie's energy level (kinda like getting all riled up by the smell of blood/flesh) which in turn allows them to react faster and move faster. So for example, you are being chased by a single zombie, he's stumbling along not really keeping up with you, but as you travel through a town, some other zombies see you and join the chase. Now you have 4 behind you and this time they are sortof jogging, looking all excited. You run and more zombies join in. next thing you know a small horde is sprinting after you with blood in their eyes

Hey all, What do you think about this idea? If you get hit by a blunt melee weapon (or really any heavy melee weapon) you have a change of being knocked over from the force of the hit. Or if a zombie jump attacks you, it could knock you over Also, if you sprint and look backwards you have a chance of stumbling, bringing you to a stop and putting you in crouch position (like you've just recovered from the stumble) Also, things like jumping over a fence and similar should have a chance of you stumbling if you are not in good shape.

I would like to see more realistic damage from weapons. Get shot in the arm? Cant hold your M4 well. Get shot in the leg? Cant jog/walk Stuff like that

Check in cars, sedans mainly. There are sooo many. very few people check the cars so I often find them even in completely cleaned out towns. And to whoever said above, yes they spawn WAY to much

I ran into a guy in a room, he told me to freeze, I put my hands up. I only had some bandages and a can of food so he let me go. he said "you seem cool just leave the building ok?" So I got up, ran past him, out the door and got several blocks away. As I was running I could hear the guy going "hey man, come on, just leave OK" Next thing I know, Im snapped all the way back into the room, still kneeling down in the submit position. Also, if you run, crouch and immediately bring up the escape menu and just happen to do this during a rubber-band your character will keep moving through the world indefinitely. Often in huge leaps

I was soo disappointed that this was removed. I begun writing a diary and leaving pages in houses across the south coast. Then it stopped working :( So sad

Not entirely true in general, although this may be the case for ARMA. Translation of one skeleton animation to another of similar design is quite possible, and is something I do regularly when converting animation files from one model to the next.

I dunno if this has been suggested before. It would be extremely cool if you could see the hat you are wearing when in First Person. A baseball cap should have its brim visible across the top of the screen, and the brim (an actual 3D model) should block the sunlight. Its annoying to be facing a guy with the sun at his back and being barely able to see despite my hat and sunnies. Sunnies are coming apparently but I didn't see anything about hats.

apparently you have either never worn a baseball cap, or at least never worn one the right way. When you have one on, the brim of the cap is ALWAYS visible in your view. And not surprisingly if the sun above about 30 degrees in the sky, that brim blocks the sun so you cant see it. You don't have to look up or anything....... Picture a scene. You are facing one guy down a street. It is about 4pm in the afternoon and the sun is low in the sky and sitting above your enemy. in all the ARMA engine glory because the sun is on the screen HDR kicks in and everything gets dark, glare washes everything out and seeing your enemy is quite difficult. If you were wearing a baseball cap in this situation, the brim would block the sun from your eyes making things much easier to see. HDR wouldn't kick into overdrive because the sun is hidden behind the cap

Looting a town (cant remember which) when this guy comes running out of a building, obviously new spawn yelling out for help as a zombie came charging out after him. I pulled out my firemans axe and layed the zombie down. The guy had nothing so I dropped him some water, bandages and a compass. He said he was new to DayZ and he was waiting for his friend, so I kept an eye out until his also new spawn friend showed up. Gave him some bandages food and another compass, and for being a good bunch, I gave the first guy my spare firemans axe and the second guy a knife (hey its better than nothing right). Then I went on with my day It was my first char in DayZ on a lowish population server. I was wondering around the north area for hours and hours and hours without seeing a single soul. I had sooo much gear. Eventually I wondered (not entirely intentionally) back to the south coast and ran into these two chaps.

That last one rocks. Just spent 20 minutes setting up the curves to what I like and Im looking around freely now. SOO much better and more natural. Only issue I have now is that using TrackIR makes you slow to a walk if you look left or right too far, but this doesn't happen if I hold ALT down.

It would in all likelihood require each hat to have a separate FP model to be used for this purpose. Another way to add to the realism and additional gameplay mechanics through loot

that hurt my brain a little

Watch the Movie "The Colony" it looks into the evil inside men when the world goes to shit. I absolutely hate getting KOS'd however its too early to even bother talking about fixes. There are many mechanics still to come that will drastically alter the game and how we all play it. At the moment there is : No End Game Too Little Loot No Loot Spawning No Zombie Spawning Shit Zombies Easy Survival As each of these are added/fixed/upgraded the game will change and so will how people play it. That will change (mostly) what/why people KOS which will in all likelihood make any "solution" no longer applicable. How about we wait?

I have spent years researching and creating artificial intelligence for autonomous robots and for mods and indie games. I would love to see adaptive AI being applied to the zombies in this game to keep them fresh and a challenge as the game gets older. I am happy to share any adaptive AI concepts with you if it something that interests you for the game and not already on the table.

This particular approach should not really be thought of as any form of intelligence in zombies, The AI concept here applied the way I am thinking would instead give you a game where after yo play for 100 hours and think you have seen it all and know all the exploits, the AI will come out with slight alterations to its most successful actions which it tests and gains confidence in over time. This happens over and over theoretically constantly showing adjusting behaviours to keep it fresh. And think of adding the public hive into the equation and having all zombies share the top mutations across all servers. That would be very interesting That is basically whats going however it is not learning simply adapting through randomisation. In other words it does not know which action should be chosen for the particular function that is being mutated and whether it will work or not. It randomly chooses one and then that mutated queue is available for selection next time the function runs, which could be hours/days away. Server restarts would hopefully be reduced later on in development so that servers run for many days or even weeks. However this could either be saved to the hive or saved to disk so that a single server/installation continues to adapt over many restarts

More thought and time being required to create your character each time you die would probably help to curb this mentality that your character is a carbon-copy throw-away that holds no value. I would like to see them add more incentive to want to keep a particular character alive that isnt just about loot. With talk of tats and beards growing it sounds like they are heading that way which is good.

Sorry about that everyone, again. I was oncall and would you believe it got a call. So Im posting a reply instead of updating. I did not create this thread to just ask the devs to add adaptive AI into the game (which I hope they do whichever established or personal route they take) but to adapt this new AI concept I have developed in particular into the game. this could get confusing but its futile to explain in depth everything behind this now without diagrams to assist. I advise to read slowly This artificial intelligence works on a 3 layer structure designed to maximize complexity while minimising processing time. The Sony Aibo robot I own was released 13 years ago and contains a risc processor that runs at 50mhz! In other words very little processing power is required to implement this particular concept into a game and favours having a "dumb" AI already in place to directly control the zombies. I favour the modular approach to coding and having looked into ARMA modding before the coding is similar (I am using that loosely) to OPEN-R for the Aibo. In other words Im confident it will work in DayZ if they chose to implement it. Firstly before I even get into the AI itself I need to cover the adaptive part so that you understand how it fits together. Each level of the AI has functions that either control the ai level below them, or the current AI in the game for the lowest level. Each function has a probability rate, that decides how likely it will be "randomly" chosen to be in a queue for its level. Each function has requirements that dictate success or failure. This is used to alter the functions probability rate up or down accordingly. For example a function for moving towards a target entity would have the condition that the group became closer to the target entity to be successful. If a function needs a target but the ai has none, that function would fail without being executed. Most functions would have some value/limit or condition that would cause them to immediately fail, but not all have to. Each function controls the below AI by having one or more preset queue's of lower level function(s) that will successfully complete this functions requirements. (that's a mouthful) Each queue has a success/failure ratio stored and modified when the chosen queue's last lower level function succeeds or fails. Preset queues start with 100% success rate as they are set by the programmer. Finally each function effects any number of the monitored statistics for succeeding and/or failing. If the AI is particularly "content" (doing whatever it is designed to be doing in other words) it has a very small chance of creating a "mutated" queue in the function that just completed. Mutation is simply copying the queue and randomly replacing one lower level function in the queue with another randomly chosen one. That's where the probability rate comes in. all functions have a chance of being chosen, regardless of probability rate, but it is more likely to choose a function with a high probability rate than one with a low probability rate. The new queue has success/failure rate set to 50%. Most of the mutations will be abysmal failures and quickly the ratio will drop extremely low. So if there are more mutated queues than a preset number, when the function that queue belongs to fails the queue is checked to see if it has the lowest ratio among mutated queues and is removed if it does. Conditions for a function to even start are key to failing a queue before taking any action and waisting ai time but they are not required. There is more chance of seeing the AI do seemingly idiotic and completely unrelated actions to a situation if requirements are not set. This can lead to some interesting and probably hilarious outcomes however so like I said not all functions need requirements. Levels of the AI Top Level - Emotional/Physical state reactive ai This AI monitors and alters things like desires (how badly the zombies want brains for example), excitement (blood or death in nearby), stamina (if they have it), company ( used to help grouping or mega hordes), being attacked by players and how many etc. Its an averaging of the units under its control which would preferably be a single horde but could be all at once. It would react off already in-place functions that return states of zombies or positions and other data already provided by the ARMA engine. Finally this AI also controls the single goal (top level function) of the group. This might be "move to city" "move to forest" or of course "find flesh to eat". Once a goal is started it remains until the middle level AI has completed its queue, or an event occurs that causes a new goal (such as group members being killed or one finds a player) Middle Level AI - Activities This level of AI takes the queue chosen by the top level AI and evaluates the functions in turn to see if they are valid (required target type exists, not too full, not too hurt etc.) and if they are passes each function in the queue in turn to the lower level AI for execution. It waits for the low level AI to return that it has either succeeded or failed before moving on the to next function in the queue. If the low level function fails it immediately reports to the top level AI that it failed and does not execute further functions from the queue. Middle Level Functions would include things like "move towards target" "circle target" "wonder around" "eat target" "group together" etc Low Level AI - Actions Things are most complex here for the AI. The functions that are passed to this AI will directly control what the zombies do in the game world. This AI's purpose is to evaluate the function passed by the middle level to see if it can be executed (like before) and then execute it. Functions at this level would be things like "walk to position" "crawl to position" "run to position" "stand attack" "crouch grab" "push" all the individual actions a zombie is capable of doing. The low level function contains the code that uses the top level AI's current state to decided which zombies under its control are ordered to do what. They are almost exclusively timer based that gives the AI in game its finite order then waits, evaluates and then reorders until the conditions for success or failure are met. So for example moving towards a city or forest would likely want the whole horde moving, but attacking the player may only want to initially attack with the closest few zombies. To see it as a whole think of it like an organisation chart. At the top you have Top Level Ai functions or Goals. Below them are all the Middle Level Functions or Activities. Finally across the bottom are the Low Level Functions or Actions. As the AI runs, it begins by following the preset queues created for it. These will be generally successful as they are designed by the programmer to work. As time passes and the AI completes actions and activities and goals the probability rates of the various functions fluctuate according to what is happening in the world, including player interaction (a valid activity could easily fail thanks to a player killing some of the zombies in the group for example). This will change which functions are chosen by the AI. The ever changing inputs of a live server gameworld and player interactions would also help to allow mutated queues to succeed that would otherwise fail in a test. Mutation and Evaluation of these queues will create simple adaptive emergent behaviour from the AI. The speed at which new behaviours emerge and are tested is very slow, and could require hundreds of hours for non preset actions to start actually occurring (at the choice of the programmer of course, fast learning is possible with stricter conditions on functions) Finally before posting this mammoth thing I will give an example There is a zombie horde in a lucky position where regularly bambies come along and get eaten. This keeps the AI content as they are eating regularly and not getting hurt (silly bambi's). Every time a player comes near or attacks a zombie with an axe/weapon the goal is switched from whatever it is now to attacking back and trying to eat them. As this happens over and over (silly silly bambi's) a mutated queue is created for the attack player functions (hey its happy) which has the AI run to the forest before the attacking the player. Due to their current world position this works, and is valid and succeeds multiple times. Later on other players who are facing a horde may see that instead of heading towards them as normal, this horde reaches them by heading towards the forest and then towards them. The more it succeeds the more it happens. On the flipside if you are fortified somewhere and a huge hordes comes down on you but you hold them off, this will cause the functions in use to fail, lowering the chance they will try that again either now or later on. It is entirely posssible that this entire thing only makes sense to me, and Im sorry if thats true LOL

Sorry about that everyone I was at work when I started this but Im home now and have time to explain properly. In hindsight yes initially it sounds silly to have intelligence in zombies. And that is not really what I am talking about. Think more along the lines of a swarm of ants. zombies are so mindless that the decisions on where they move and what they do without player interaction is most likely controlled through group based artificial intelligence that has a single ai unit controlling a large number of zombies (even all of them). There are many scenes from almost all zombie movies that hint at a possible either new intelligence or remnants of the old intelligence still residing in the zombie. In the very first episode of "the walking dead" the little girl zombie stops to pick up a teddy bear and keeps it. Later on in the series that guy with his son in the house. The wife zombie walks up to the door of her old house and attempts to turn the handle. You see things like this all the time. But regardless to whether they are have smarts or not, I am talking about adding adaptive choices to the artificial intelligence that controls how the entire zombie population or large hordes of zombies act in the game world, rather than the individual zombie. Note : I am still editing this post with more information, but I wanted to answer that now

You have pretty shitty ninja skills. that guy came around the corner and surprised you, and there were 2 more members of the group than you knew about and finally you were expecting death at the end because you had no exit plan. Ninjas always have exit plans