rickyriot

Yeah, I mean the bottom line for me is that no matter how much I like DayZ (and I do) there is no way in hell I am upgrading just to gain a few FPS. Sure, I'll need to upgrade some point in time, but ultimately as I have done "my bit" by having a decent enough spec PC I believe it's up to the devs to do "their bit". Ultimately if they don't they lose a player - and I can assure you I wouldn't be the only person who thinks this. I shouldn't need to add the caveat that it's not currently optimised for several reasons (from legacy issues to time/resource constraints), that it's an alpha and that it's still in development.

Don't disagree with either of those, although I have to say I've not looked at the min specs in some time. Which runs contrary to the point you were first making. I'm not trying to get into a fight about this, I appreciate what you are saying, but effectively just now DayZ runs like treacle at times and it's clear as the towns have been added the devs haven't optimised them. I was trying to defend myself on the stairs of the Novo tower the other day and it was a joke. I think I must have ended up about 10FPS. Time of course will help, I'm not complaining just a little disappointed. I also accept that turning down the settings helps. But I am on very low for just about everything and running at a 1600x900 screen res, and it's painful in some of the towns.

If anyone writes, "the reason the game is bad is because you bought and AMD, you need to use an Intel", then you are an idiot. Yes, Intels do provide better performance in general, but they are also more expensive, and the truth of the matter is that DayZ should not struggle on some of the better AMDs. Yes, it's not optimised and it's still in Alpha. Mine, for example, is a stock speed 8320 Octa-core. There is absolutely no way that should struggle render as badly as it does. I don't have a great card coupled with that chip, but again, it really shouldn't struggle. Especially when other comparable titles seem to do OK.

Notes have been utterly pointless until the persistence was introduced (reboot, and the note is gone). I have to admit I am not sure if notes are part of the persistence settings. I do believe that they could be used well as the game develops, and I certainly had fun using them as a trolling tool when they were first introduced. However the bottom line is that you don't really have time to read the notes and if you do very few have the patience.

I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong with that. I have a PC that runs Watchdogs at fairly high graphical detail, and it's well known being an open world that requires a high minimum spec to run it. DayZ on the other hand, even at the lowest graphics quality struggles to get about 15 FPS in some towns, which is pretty much useless for any PvP. Just saying, turn it low and if it's still shit, upgrade, is not the answer. The answer is for the engine to be optimised and to support things like multi-core CPUs. Right, onto the OPs question. I did spot the new renderer in the 2015 roadmap list and I genuinely look forward to it. I would say though, and this is just a guess, that it's all part of the encapsulation of the differing DayZ elements, allowing for better maintenance and improvements later on down the line. For example, if you wished to port DayZ not just to the PS4 but to other consoles then it makes sense to not have it directly hooked to the current rendering engine. You would however wish to port over the logic for, say, the animals and their AI, no need to reinvent the wheel, and if it's separate from the rendering engine then it makes that job much easier. I do, of course, hope for some considerable improvements on the client side when this new renderer is implemented.

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Going by the geopolitics of the 20th century the message I get is that the Polish are far too trusting and it's backfired every time.

I have been a clan player in the past, and have been part of clans at the top of clanbase ladders, but those have been specifically clan games (MoH:AA, CoD) where the maps are small, teams are small and you can't really survive when everyone else is on coms. With DayZ I am very much a solitary player, there are three main reasons for this. In no particular order... 1) The game isn't really at a stage where clans are all that viable. There are clans who play it, but they are not dedicated DayZ clans. 2) I'm currently without a mic, no point in team up when you can't communicate. 3) I hate people. Having to listen to their shit over comms is far more annoying than the disadvantage of not having someone covering your back.

None? Hmm.. sorry about that, for some reason I thought there was.

Edit: source 3PP to be removed from future builds of the game? :D Clearly this is a bit of banter. 3PP is going nowhere, but it is good to see the devs hold 1PP playstyle in such high regard, hopefully meaning that they will start to look at solving some of the problems associated with that viewpoint.

Yes, definitely. Clearly we don't want full realism with a crop taking 6 months to grow, but 5 minutes in real time is a bit short. Also, it seems a bit daft that they go rotten on the vine so quickly yet you can put them onto the ground and they don't seem to ever go bad (not that I've sat there and watched one, I'm a busy man I have paint to watch dry). I also don't know the condition with persistence on these. If you look at the picture I posted of my garden shed full of tomatoes, would they still exist after a server reboot. You would like to think so, but then considering from just two green houses and the expense of a few minutes I had gathered over 200 ( 2 greenhouses x 8 plants x 13 fruit = 208). If everyone was to do that you could find the server bogged down with a mass of tomatoes.

Wheelchair

Anthropologists believe this is how early man hunted; in a group and driving an animal off a cliff or hill to it's death. Certainly a less dangerous way than trying to engage in combat with it. Interesting to know that this sort of thing works. I am sure a few of us have tried to sneak up on a cow armed only with an axe in hope of an easy meal only for the bugger to run off once you get within swiping distance. On a side note, I still chuckle at the sight of a zombie bothering the local wildlife. I've been hiding in bushes as I heard a zombie make a noise and thought it had seen me, then a deer came rushing by me followed by a trolling zombie completely ignoring me.

If you are looking to properly fulfil the needs of a human diet then beans, squash and corn would be the perfect combination. It's what the Mexicans have lived on for millennia and what the Incan and Mayan cultures were built on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_cuisine A classic, well done.. :)

I was in Balota on the experimental server that had very little food. I decided to do some farming, here are my results... http://imgur.com/gallery/aJqOs

My bug bear, KoS camping snipers. Who will sit on a populated server, wait in a busy town and just spend time taking people out without any interaction at all. I'm an experienced player, don't run down the middle of the road, don't fire off weapons if I can avoid it and don't eat, repair or reload out in the open. These are all things we should have learned within the first few hours of playing DayZ (whether mod or SA). However the sniper gameplay is very difficult to combat, especially so if you are a lone wolf player (which I am). Don't get me wrong, this isn't butthurt, I can deal with it in the sense I just respawn and with the level of loot available just now it's not too difficult to bring your character back to some sort of decent level. Sneaking around buildings, hugging walls, sticking to the shadows, avoiding triggering zombies and doing all the stealth things that should extend your life then to get an instant kill from a bullet fired from nigh on a km away really does rip my knitting at times.

Thank you. You seem to be one of the few that have actually seen this thread for what it is. As a forum admin you will be able to see the edit history and see that the final line was added immediately after posting (2:17/2:18 server time). The edited time has now changed as I amended the title to reflect the Producer/Programmer issue. For those who think this is hardcore players lauding it over 3PP players then you are being a bit paranoid. The thread is all about a significant member of the development recognising what 1PP brings to the game and as such offers hope to us 1PP players who wish for this viewpoint to be improved in some areas. Ok, the title is a touch "tongue in cheek", but come on people, turn that frown upside down. ;)

Ok, guys, just a quick heads up. I know Hicks is a producer, not a programmer, and thought I had amended the title when I first spotted my mistake. I certainly amended the text, but clearly just didn't submit the edited post. I'll change that. However, his actual position is a bit irrelevant for the point I am making, he has quite a large voice in the development of the game and his opinions will be listened to. Clearly the "removing the 3PP" is joking, but it seems that many lack a sense of humour, what Hicks' words do demonstrate though is that the devs recognise the benefits provided to the gameplay while in 1PP mode, thus for those of us who much prefer this viewpoint but accept there are flaws associated with it; such as ratio of player compared to environment, camera position, interaction with windows and ledges, etc, it can be seen as a positive towards fixing those issues.

Right, so here's a funny thing. It's been some time since I reinstalled DayZ, and I've generally been playing on the experimental branch so lots of incremental updates. As a test I decided to remove the local content (the option via Steam) then reinstall. 6Gbs of download and a strange thing has happened. I've not gained a huge amount of FPS, perhaps a few frames here and there, but what I have done is stabilised what I did have. So when I was running in a town and hitting 20-25 FPS, it would fluctuate, now I am at a constant level. Also the GPU, via Afterburner, is now showing a 99% usage whereas it was in the high 70's previously. A solution? Not really, I have a feeling what I have done was specific to my machine (some shitty cached file somewhere that might have been causing an issue, I don't know) but certainly a reinstall has improved things - although not massively.

If it's any consolation the new BattleEye Client is running on the experimental branch. Apparently a big improvement.

I was setting myself to log out, so I sorted out my gear and headed to the pub. I had a lockpick so headed to the top room and decided to lock all the doors behind me giving me a little extra cover in case there were people around who had decided to follow me - I presume there is still a 30 second delay between clicking exit and your character disappearing from the server. Anyway, this got me thinking. As far as I know the only way to unlock a door is via an axe or a lockpick. There might be other ways but I tried shooting one once and it didn't open. I am sure I am not the only person to use a house as a location to log out and I wondered what would happen if you had logged out with neither axe nor lockpick (or any other object to open them if it's possible) and logged in to find yourself into a locked room. Has this happened to anyone yet? I am not sure how persistent the door locking is, but I suppose this is a possibility. If so, what would you do? Providing lockpicks/locking of doors it also introduces the situation where you have windows which in real life you would just climb out of, but in the game this is not possible.

So as it had been a while I decided to get Afterburner running to see what levels the cpu/gfx were at. At a location to the West of Balota (not too complex a scene to render; trees, a barn, some houses) and it's sitting at ~24FPS with the GPU at ~73% and CPU1 at ~68%, with other cores (and bare in mind this is an AMD so technically it's just 4 cores doubling up) all running much lower. This was at a 1600x900 resolution with the lowest AA (as it really kills the 7770 card) and pretty low graphics details all round. Now you see if the whole thing was being maxed out and running like a dog, I suppose I'd just have to deal with it, but nothing is being maxed out and the frame rate is still low.

Well I started playing games on a ZX81 and started programming on a C64, where you worked with 8 bit registers for data storage and 16kb banks of memory. I am one of those old men who would be shaking their fists in the air and complaining that kids have it easy today and that modern programmers are lazy and rely on ever increasing technical advances in order to get better results rather than doing optimisation and relying on solid and efficient codebase. Now I have got that out of my system, I accept that the development roadmap for DayZ was perhaps a double edged sword. Using an engine that Rocket already knew well was always going to allow for a quick start up. Rather than spending 12-18 months building from scratch, they had something on the go within 6 or so. However that engine has been shown to have a low level of expansion and future proofing. So in many ways I just have to grudgingly accept that there are legacy issues with the engine. It is extremely annoying though, having a stock 8320 (which is comparable to some i7s and i5s and certainly better than i3s) yet it runs like a dog when you get near the apartment buildings to the North of Cherno. Granted my graphics card is a bit lacking (a 7770, which is some way down the list) but this is running at 1600x900 with the graphics quality set pretty damned low.

You are completely missing the point though, Intels in general perform better, nobody is arguing that. It's the fact that in comparison to the specs most people have DayZ is running badly. I repeat, at no point should the argument about FPS result in the comment, "but you shouldn't have bought an AMD", when many other comparable and in fact far heavier processing games run considerably better.

It's not quite as clear cut as that. Here is a performance table.. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html Also, when you say FX, that covers a lot (a LOT) of ground, especially when you consider the differences between the Vishera and Bulldozer variants. Now I am not arguing that Intels in general don't perform better, but then you pay for what you get. What we need to get away from is telling people that DayZ is running badly because they chose a bad CPU. Mine is a 8 core 8320, which is a good chip, it's the fault of the game not the chip that DayZ runs so slowly.