pillock

Really excited about the new melee system. Hopefully the damage values have been adjusted so that it's actually an advantage to hit hit someone with a hammer or crowbar, for example, over with bare fists? Also, not sure what the hell this sentence is supposed to mean:

I think horses are ok if they are hard to fix up and maintain like so you have to find the parts like legs and arms and ears which should be really rare and it takes a long time then they should be really difficult to drive without crashing.

or worms. They're probably easier to get hold of, too.

In your bag? Er... why?

It's incredibly easy. Gritty survival horror? It's more like Supermarket Sweep at the moment.

I like the abandoned tumbledown village with the derelict buildings and the helicopter wreck in it (can't remember the name - begins with K. Kuynrrymamuhymhhh, or something). There's fuck all loot there, or anywhere particularly nearby, but it has a cool, apocalyptic atmosphere to it.

I don't think that's the right way of looking at it. In gameplay terms, we don't actually need hunting yet in order to survive (because lootable food is so abundant) but we've still got hunting mechanics. It's not a case of balancing gameplay elements, it's a case of just getting features in the game. DayZ is (apparently) on course to be "feature complete" by the end of 2014: zombies, as a feature, are technically in the game already so I wouldn't expect them to be perfected until well into next year; whereas, we should have barricading, vehicles, and everything else - in some clunky and unfinished form or other - all in the next 4 months.

Dean Hall spoke about it briefly in an interview I saw a month or so ago. Didn't give much detail, but they are working on it. I can't remember where I saw it, unfortunately. But anyway, they obviously need to get the persistence mechanics working much, much better before barricading can be implemented, otherwise it'd be pointless. I agree though, this is the most important upcoming feature as far as I'm concerned.

While I recognise that DayZ is not intended to be a driving sim, I do think the physics and handling need to be somewhat believable. I think skidding/sliding is essential so that it is possible to lose control of the vehicle if, for example, you go from road to grass at high speed. Crashing into solid objects should cause significant damage to both vehicle and occupants, too. Perhaps seatbelts could be one of the vehicle parts that you can find or fix on the car, and have an effect on your injury level in an accident. In reality they have a huge effect and shouldn't be something that's ignored, in my opinion. Off-road driving ought to be difficult and slow for unsuitable vehicles like ordinary road cars - in reality fields are very bumpy, making driving at speed pretty damaging to a car even if you don't crash, which you are fairly likely to do because the tyres have very little grip. Weather could also play a part in this, once those features are fleshed out, especially when it comes to going uphill off-road. Driving is not something that everyone can just do, especially with manual gearboxes (as cars most commonly have in Europe, to my knowledge), and there should be a fair degree of difficulty in learning to do it well.

Have you found a jet pack yet? I got mine from the secret cave network underneath Green Mountain. Also like the new tree-climbing ability - it's useful when you need to escape from a pack of wolves.

I appreciate that the final balancing of loot will come much, much later down the development line, but I do think they could make some crude changes right away. Mostly: we don't need this much food, and we don't need this many guns or ammo spawns. Even as testers, we don't need every survivor running round on full health with 3 guns and a backpack full of ammo. If they cut the numbers of food, firearm and ammo spawns by half, there'd still be more than enough to go around for everyone to survive and probably for everyone to have a weapon - it's just that you might not (hopefully) have ammo coming out of your ears. They could use the extra space for spawns to give us more everyday stuff like rope and knives and basic tools (stuff that really would be everywhere in DayZ's scenario), and it'd just make everything much more interesting, while still allowing us to 'test'.

Hacksaws: apart from garages, check the little wooden sheds in gardens, check the greenhouses, check car wrecks (scrapyards are fucking goldmines atm), barns, agricultural warehouses, industrial buildings, workshops, etc. I tend to stick to the smaller towns and out-of-the-way villages, and I check every room in every building. I find a lot of worthless shit, but I never go very long before seeing ropes, matches and hacksaws; I also find more guns and ammo than I could ever possibly use or even carry. I just don't find assault rifles or military clothing. But I don't want or need them, anyway. The only nuisance item to find is magazines, but SKSs are everywhere so I don't tend to give a shit. EDIT: Oh, and binoculars. I have no fucking idea where they spawn, haven't seen one for about the last 3 patches, and am starting to doubt whether they even exist anymore.

Bleh. I was being pedantic about the difference between pitchforks and garden forks. But it's not worth pursuing. Sorry to have bothered you.

Digging the ground with a pitch-fork is a ball-ache. You'd be better off using a machete or an axe, to be honest.

Well, I think you'r either trolling me, or you're completely bonkers. No offence or anything.

Your conscience, man! Either that, or your psychotic split-personality "other".

Give them 10 seconds

Farming is going to be introduced soon. However, it probably won't lead to us being able to eat vegetables, since they probably ought to take some significant time to grow, before which they will doubtless have been wiped by dodgy persistence mechanics that don't work yet, or else vandalised to destruction by some fucker who happens across your seed patch before it's ready to harvest.

They've said that the .49 update will arrive at the end of August. They usually implement updates on a Wednesday. The last Wednesday in August is next week. So that's when I expect the .49 update to be implemented. There's no information to say otherwise. I don't really get what this poll is for, except for the OP to imply a lack of confidence in the developers, for whatever reason. It's a bit silly, really. I didn't vote. EDIT: Hang on, I've just read this post above mine: Are you seriously comparing Cellini's sculpture with DayZ? What fucking planet do you live on? Might it perhaps, just perhaps be possible that some people don't regard the development of a video game as the defining purpose of their entire existence? He was only off climbing the world's highest fucking mountain, after all - anyone could do that any day of the week. I really hope you are taking the piss, and that I've spectacularly failed to pick up on it.

That's a good point. Cows and goats are in the game - we should be able to milk them. Maybe even the pigs? Not the deer, though, or the rabbits. Or the zombies. And eggs from chickens!

I've never eaten a vegetable outside of DayZ either, so it doesn't bother me. I exist entirely on pizza, Monster Munch and Fanta.

Whereas, I died four times this evening so couldn't give a toss!

Sorry, but if any of my clothes had fucking bullet holes in them, I'd consider them to be ruined. That said, a ruined clothing item is rags - by definition. I don't see why we can't use a "ruined" shirt to make useable rags. And we need to be able to make rags out of a bigger variety of clothes.

There's going to be a heavy duty sewing kit to fix things like riders jackets and raincoats. But yeah, they should be stronger in the first place.

I wouldn't be that surprised if it was the zombie that killed you. Those crawling bastards are so glitchy, I've had one double-hit me before. I've had them break an arm or a leg in one hit as well. It doesn't sound far-fetched to me that either it did in fact 1-hit kill you, or some glitch caused it to score multiple hits all at once.