pillock

Devblog.

As far as DayZ is concerned, it'll be a small resealable plastic bag to put matches in to keep them dry. Vodka doesn't actually make you warmer - it just makes you feel the cold less. In the same way, cigarettes suppress hunger pangs, but they don't actually make you less hungry. They're going to have to make the mechanics more complicated if they're going to be used for that purpose.

Cigarettes are coming to DayZ. That might become a currency alternative to bullets (which may (hopefully) become too precious to trade away, given development time).

Maybe also small items like fishing hooks. Again, to save inventory space. It is a bit odd, though, agreed.

What happens is that you loot a town, collect some stuff into your inventory, and maybe stash some other stuff nearby. Then, you log on the next day to the same server, by which time it has reset, and the EXACT same loot items have respawned in the same places that they were in the day before prior to you picking them up. They're the same colour, same condition and in the same place. The stuff you looted is still where you left it (or not, depending on whether or not someone has found it or it's been deleted by the respawn mechanics. Edit: sorry, this happens in Stable 0.48. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's carried over to the new EXP build.

Defibrillators can't revive dead people people, anyway.

I'll reserve judgment until I've played it for myself, but from the way you described it, it needs a LOT of tweaking. You don't die from hyperthermia by wearing a jumper on a warm day; and you don't die from hypothermia by standing about in the rain for a bit, either. I know it's only an initial implementation (and I haven't played it), so as I'm not rubbishing the whole thing - but the way it comes across in your video, it sounds pretty way off.

Thanks for that - good video. Sounds like the mechanics need a fair amount of tweaking, though!

I don't think I've ever been lucky enough to come face to face with a bandit who's that bad a shot. Was it 3 times it missed you from 10 feet away? Unbelievable!

Keep plugging away, mate. Only real way to combat invisible zombies is to run for the hills.

Bear in mind that the game isn't finished yet. Building a base and collecting loot over time isn't really possible yet; but it will be. There are mechanics for storing items in containers like tents and backpacks and hiding them somewhere, but those mechanics don't work properly right now - we're due an update next week that should fix this to a degree (the update also promises to go some way towards sorting out the problems with using melee weapons, which will be very welcome and should make killing zombies less annoying). Base building will come in some form or other further down the line. You will be able to set up camp, gather supplies and operate from your base - even returning to it after you die. But you can't do it yet. If you give the game a chance, you will get better at avoiding getting killed so frequently - many people manage to keep their characters going for weeks and months at a time, even playing on high-population servers.

That's excellent! In that case, you should absolutely be able to either squeeze it into your mouth directly and drink, or perhaps collect it in a bottle or cooking pot. Presumably we will be able to boil water in the future, as this is one of the more obvious ways of making it safer to drink.

They could achieve this to an extent by fleshing out the character health mechanics a but more. So fresh spawns are weak and feeble; but a player who's survived successfully for a while, and has established reliable and consistent nutrition and shelter from the elements, and has remained free of injury and sickness, will have built up greater physical fitness. You can run farther and faster, can carry more kit, don't tire as quickly, less weapon sway, hit harder in melee, absorb damage slightly more effectively, recover from wounds and illness faster. They could be subtle differences in themselves, but added together would make a real difference to how your character performs - so you really notice how useless and crap your new spawn character is by comparison when you do suffer a death. This would be far more preferable, in my opinion, to arbitrary 'skill levels' for things like firebuilding or weapon cleaning or bandage application. "You have successfully caught 10 fish: Fishing skill + 1" - Fuck that.

In my opinion, when you die you should be kicked off the server and locked out for 24 hours. That way, you'd have to start again in a new environment in which you don't know the whereabouts of specific loot or players. If you're playing with friends, they could switch to your new server and find you again. There would be ways around it, such as your mates looting your body and storing all the kit in a hidden persistent container so you could collect it the next day. But it would be an improvement on what we have now, where you can sprint back to your own corpse, regear with the exact same loot, and carry on the same gunfight which you just died in - that doesn't seem very fair on the guy that killed you, to me.

Maybe. But in an interview published in June, Dean Hall said he expects the game to be "feature complete" by the end of 2014. Either they are significantly speeding up development, or else there won't be all that many new features added.

I think you should be able to wring out your clothes in order to dry them, especially when wearing wet clothes causes detrimental health effects. It's not too much of a leap from that to be able to collect and drink the water, even if the water might be dirty.

The point is, I think, that the game should allow you to make mistakes. Pouring canned drinks into a canteen or bottle to save space, then reusing the same container later for water might sound like a good idea, if you didn't know about the risk of bacterial contamination. Yes, you might get sick - and that would teach you not to do it again. Just because something might be bad for you, it doesn't mean the game should prevent you from doing it.

If you get killed by being rained on, I'm going to uninstall the game. It's supposed to be "authentic".

You read out-of-game guides and walkthroughs as a short-cut, or if you can't be bothered learning by playing. No in-game task should ever be too complicated that you can't figure it out by experimentation and practice by simply playing. Or it's a flaw in the game.

I don't think "outside study" is ever good, really. DayZ can easily get around this by using in-game features such as books to teach players about the more complicated aspects of crafting. All the rest should be intuitive and easily figurable-out by common sense. That's where the "authenticity" comes in: the more true-to-life the game mechanics are, the more easily people can put their real-world experience and knowledge into playing without having to study some website or youtube guide. I am slightly concerned at the moment that things like making fishing equipment and arrows is not very obvious - why can't I sharpen sticks with an axe, for example? And why do I need a particular type of stick to make a fishing rod? How would I ever figure out by myself that only one type of tree (Ash) gives this unique wonder-stick, except by pure accident? Basic crafting needs to be a bit more intuitive than it currently is, I think.

Players start steaming out of existence and leaving their clothes behind, one by one. All this phat loot for me to *searing pain*. If they did a selective wipe of duped gear and shit, this is how i'd expect it to happen. Quite literally the holy go to heaven and the heathens are left behind to play with their hacked and duped items. That's just about where reality diverges from scripture, because all those who were 'saved' are just teleported to a different place so that they can kill eachother over and over. I guess Vikings invaded russia, so a Valhalla heaven isn't too out of place ;) I am afraid I'm a heathen I am dead. If heaven involves Barry fucking Manilow singing "It's Christmas", they can keep it.

To be honest, it's better to leave the map in smaller pieces, if you have the inventory space. The full map doesn't zoom in as far so you can't see as much detail as on the half/quarter pieces.

Maybe the house you were in used to belong to that zombie before he became infected? He's just gone for a walk and suddenly remembered he left his fags in the upstairs room. No wonder he was angry.

So this is something I have only recently discovered. Maybe it's common knowledge, I don't know. As a new spawn, I have been able to reach "Healthy" status without having first got "Energised" or "Hydrated". This has happened twice now: I find enough food to get rid of the "Hungry" and "Thirsty" statuses, and after a little while the "Healthy" status just appears - both times I have been walking nearly all the time, instead of running; neither of those times did I ever get to the "Energised" or "Hydrated" status beforehand. This got me wondering what "Healthy" actually means in gameplay terms. I know there are hidden levels such as Health, Blood and Energy, which the game doesn't inform the player of explicitly. And everyone pretty quickly figures out that eating makes you "Energised" and that drinking makes you "Hydrated". But what is "Health"? For the game to tell you that you are "Healthy" is actually pretty meaningless and unhelpful in and of itself. Does anyone know what these levels actually translate to in real terms? What's the actual benefit of being "Healthy"? Is it more important than being "Energised" and/or "Hydrated"? The mechanics for your character's health seem to be pretty abstract and obliquely presented. Some more concrete feedback on the hidden mechanics would be preferable for players, I think - more intuitive and closer to how we, in reality, monitor our own physical well-being. I know we're getting weather effects - wetness, certainly, and possibly coldness as well? - and people have been talking about stamina and inventory weight and stuff for a while. But because you can run forever without getting tired, I assumed there was no benefit to walking instead - it now seems to me that there might be.

Were you walking or running beforehand?