Shodex

Walk Like A Zombie You're making your way through Elektro when you spot somebody in the middle of the street with a raised M4, chances are he's not planning on being friendly. Luckily for you he hasn't seen you, but if you cross the street he just might. You could try and flank around, or wait until he leaves. While you're weighing your option you see a zed cross the street not far from you. The bandit looks right at it and crouches down low, letting it pass. Eureka, you found your way out. Getting up you take a deep breath and let your arms go limp. You've spent enough time looking at zeds that you've got a good idea of how they get around looks like, doing your best to impersonate you shamble your way across the street in plain sight. The man looks at you then backs off a bit. If he was close enough he could tell quite easily, but from this distance you've fooled him. After crossing the street you manage to slip away unseen. --- Quick description of my idea, a new stance that makes the player walk like a zombie. The genuine living dead would know the difference, but a survivor from afar might not. It's a bit of a silly idea, but one that came to me earlier and I thought I'd share. Could provide an interesting way to sneak past some bandits, hiding in plain sight. Hell, you could even go full Walking Dead and be able to smear yourself with zombie bits. But that's a whole other discussion.

I agree, I specifically said it'd be no use against Zeds. What it would be useful for is a player off in the distance, it'd be a way to hide in plain sight and not draw any unneeded attention to yourself. As I mentioned in my post, anyone close enough can easily tell you're faking it. I get the sense that you only skimmed the thread.

Just have the player lie there in a death-like pose. It's not OP if you can't shoot from it. Zeds would still be able to attack you and it'd take the amount of time to go from prone to standing (more even, since you'd be in a weird position) to get up. It'd also introduce a need for confirming your kills. You shot at a sniper but can't tell if you hit, quick look from the binoculars looks like he's dead but you can't be sure. Perhaps a quiet breathing sound can be heard if you get close enough, one that the player can mute temporarily but if you mute for two long you'll have to stop and make a noticeably louder gasp. Good for if somebody is passing by you. And of course, there's nothing stopping your enemy from shooting your head again for good measure. I like the idea of playing dead.

Since I normally try to be friendly I, like all of us, know how frustrating it can be to lose a fully geared character by some sniper in a bush. Or even worse, some fresh spawn wanker with nothing but a fireaxe. But here's the thing, just because I try to be nice most of the time doesn't mean I haven't killed people for their loot. And since DayZ's combat can be very unpredictable (even if you have an M4 if a bambie can get up-close before dying you might be dropped and disarmed with only one punch to the head), I always try to put myself in a position where I have the advantage. For unarmed players or people with only melee, this usually means I just point a gun at them. For players with firearms however, I don't even bother. I try to quietly approach and set myself up to take them out without risk of them returning fire. The thing is, this is realistic. I know it sucks to be on the losing side, but it encourages you to be more watchful. Or better yet, do as I do. Play on Hardcore servers. What is really bullshit is being killed by somebody who saw you by abusing third person. In Hardcore first-person servers it's different, if they can see you then you can see them. The playing field is equal, and if you're really careful you will be able to spot them before they make their move. And when they do make their move you can more easily escape and put yourself at a point of advantage. Killing on sight in regular servers leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but doing so on hardcore makes me feel more like I've earned it. Whereas getting killed in hardcore servers makes me feel, while still frustrated, more like I deserved it. TL;DR, too bad. KoS is a part of the game and it's a part of guerrilla warfare. Try playing Hardcore.

Wh-whats this smell?

Step One: Go to the options menu, mute ingame music. Step Two: Play this.

Credit for the screenshot is not mine. http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/1w40rs/you_dont_wear_pants_in_elektro_byze_tribute/

I don't like achievements and I think Rocket would agree with my reason. Achievements are an arbitrary element to the game that encourages you to go down a path you perhaps wouldn't have naturally. And that natural decision making and free form exploration is what makes DayZ... well, DayZ. There should never be anything telling you what to do at any specific point in DayZ, ever. Be it though objective marker or achievement, it would create artificial incentive that was not spawned from the player naturally reacting to his situation.

Item Suggestion: Firecrackers Firecrackers can be found in many convenience stores in just about any town. Traditionally they're used mostly for celebration, but in the zombie apocalypse they have two rather useful purposes. They make a lot of noise, which can be used to divert zombies when used effectively.The noise they make can mimic gunfire, to decoy other survivors in the area. Place firecrackers to the east and circle around to the approach your target from the west.Rarity: Fairly uncommon, realistically they wouldn't be hard to find but there is certainly more pants and beans in the world than firecrackers. How to use: Using matches you'd light them and then they act basically like a grenade, you'll drop them on the ground and become scarce. After some time they'll start going off.

This would likely not be hard to implement, but making it seem realistic is another story. What sort of makeshift device can light fireworks off when somebody comes near? That said, I don't like it. The cities would be littered with long forgotten firecrackers waiting to be set off. Timed explosives take thinking, "Where will my enemy be in 2 minutes?" "Where do I want to be when these goes of, can I make it there?"

I would love for the ability to launch colorful fireworks off in Elektro, attracting all sorts of mayhem.

I don't have Standalone but I can tell you right now it ain't happening. I had a similar build a while back and it couldn't handle Arma 2. So in short, hell no.

The last thing you want is to give incentive for people to get the most kills. Leaderboards are fun in a competitive environment, but I don't think of DayZ as competitive. In a competitive game like Call of Duty or Battlefield your objective is directly counter to the enemy's. But in DayZ every player has the exact same objective, survival. What makes people hostile is not competition, it's the simple fact that you can't complete your objective without destroying somebody else's. DayZ should not be competitive. The deathmatch mentality is the worst part of the game, killing should be out of necessity and nothing else.

I think they should be left in, but made a LOT more rare. Where the hell do you even find a clown mask in real life? I can't speak for a rural Russian area, but I personally don't find them just sitting in people's cupboards and on sale at the local gas station. It's weird. I'm sure they exist. The Dark Knight had them, so clown masks for sure exist. Just I don't think they're very common.

What do you think the most important upgrade should be? I'm thinking the GPU, depending on my financial status I've been hoping to swap out for a 860 when they are released. I doubt an extra gigabyte of VRAM will be much use if any at all. Unless you plan on using a dual monitor setup or upping your resolution. The culprit of the low performance is the 50 in your 650, it's simply not a gaming oriented card. A quad core will be a hefty improvement over a dual core, but the quad core is still outdated.

I should be able to run it just fine. Was getting 20-25 fps average in the mod until I tweaked some settings (tweaked them up, no less) and got it running at 40-60. So I should be fine in SA, but I thought I'd ask just in case anyone with similar specs wants to give some more detailed info on how it runs. Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1 Monitor Resolution: 1600x900 (odd I know) CPU AMD FX-6350 (6-core, 3.9GHz) RAM 8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 668MHz (9-9-9-24) Graphics 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 I do have a 120GB SSD but it's not for games unless that extra speed is really needed, it has more than enough space for DayZ but I'd still prefer to keep it on the Internal HDD.

Might be a silly question for the community, but I'm going to ask anyways. I, like all of you that haven't already, plan on moving to the Standalone and dropping the mod in the future, but I'm worried about my computer. Despite much tweaking my performance in the DayZ Mod is pretty laughable, and I know that the large brunt of this the Arma 2 engine not being well optimized. In town my FPS seems to drop to 20, out of town 30 on average and 40 if I'm really lucky. I'll dump my specs at the end but I can run Planetside 2 on highest settings and still get generally 60FPS. Now DayZ SA is on an updated engine, though still the Arma engine. And I know that in the current state of the games my performance won't be any better, more than likely worse, but when the finished product is more stable should my computer be able to run it well? I meet the specs given on Steam, but I also meet Arma 2's specs. This is less of a question about specs and more of a question about optimization, will Standalone run better than Arma 2? Again this is a tough question for people who aren't devs, but I'm more or less just wondering if Rocket or somebody else has said something regarding this that I may have missed. I'm a little paranoid (DayZ does that) as I don't want such a big graphics leap to completely destroy my frame rate. In the spoiler is a summary of my specs:

May have already been suggested but it's tough to search for. (Hell, it might even be a feature in SA already I haven't played) I've seen some threads talking about ways to prevent the dreaded kill on sight. I'll make this quick as it's a pretty simple concept. So basically, you're sneaking through Cherno with your backpack and pockets filled with loot, and somebody with a little less loot picks you off from behind. It happens. I've done it in desperate situations and so have you, but we all agree that it sucks. Now lets say this guy picks you off by putting a sniper round in your back. How about make it so that sniper round wrecked some stuff on it's way into your spin. A hole in the cantina, a leak in the bloodbag, etc. Attacking somebody runs the risk or wrecking some of the potential loot. This, I think, would be a simple and easy to understand way to encourage holding somebody up instead of just filling them with lead. Just some brain storming, thought I'd put it out there. TL;DR Shooting somebody up might destroy some of their loot, so don't shoot people up so much.

It's good to see this is implemented already, I was sure it was. I imagine a leaky blood bag would cause extra damage, You wouldn't eat an apple covered in blood, water from a bottle could leak into flashlights and ruin them, etc. Maybe just a small chance, but I do think it would be cool for certain items to have that small chance of causing further damage. Bloodbags especially, since they're pretty hefty and you carry a lot of them. You could run the risk of multiple bursting and doing lots of havoc on a backpack.

I don't agree with them never losing you, that's unrealistic. But the shambler makes for a more interesting game than the runner. The zombie isn't the meat and potatos of DayZ, we all know this. It's more the gravy, but you don't want too much gravy. Slow zombies aren't a test of skill, they aren't an immediate threat. It's a battle of attrition. They'll attack in droves, and never lessen in numbers. You can outwit them, outrun them, outgun them, out maneuver them. But you can NEVER outnumber them, and thats what makes them scary. It's not the mad dash through the city, it's the slow wait as they shamble their way up the stairs and into the room you're trapped in.

In the least I'd like to see the default outfits look a little bit like you're somebody who is just going out to the shop. Finding military gear and the likes isn't unbelievable, but at least a little dirt on the starting t-shirt would be better. Or something more like the standard DayZ mod outfit.

This is good to hear, as I'm sure performance will increase greatly as the game becomes more and more polished as well.

The specs were merely an afterthought just on the off chance somebody would ask. I'm asking about optimization, and whether we know any details on how the game should run on release. Will the performance be similar to DayZ mod? Worse? Better? Does the updated engine have optimization fixes? Etc. As I said, in theory I can run DayZ with my specs but only actually trying it can tell for sure so I don't need to ask.

This is really tough for me to agree with, as none of us have actually been through a zombie apocalypse. So we aren't the best to say what it might actually look like, it's all up to our imagination. My imagination just happens to lead me to the conclusion that it would look just like DayZ or The Walking Dead.

You're right, but generally immersion comes from when the fiction is so well thought out and practical that it can suspend your disbelief. If DayZ had no sun, I'd wonder where the sun had gone and why the zombies were able to effect our planet's orbit. And in deed, I'd be extremely terrified as to where all the bunnies have gone off it. Are they plotting against us? Have they built an underground tunnel system to escape the apocalypse? How will I be able to get to Wonderland? You can build immersion in a world that is unrealistic, but this is done by paying attention to the details. So much so that it FEELS realistic. True atmosphere goes far beyond the simple aesthetic appearance of the world. There is one thing that will constantly remind you that DayZ is a zombie apocalypse, the zombies everywhere (or at least for the standalone players, the promise of zombies everywhere later).