pillock

Bloody bureaucrats. Can't even beat a few defenceless animals to death without some busybody sticking their oar in. Political correctness gone mad, I tell you. Next thing you know, Chernarus will have turned into some sort of Stalinist nightmare.

The live ones aren't very happy about it either.

My vote is for the Fox Cub Clubbing Club. A group who runs around in the forest with baseball bats looking for small animals.

I think the long-term aim has got to be to provide for all play-styles within the same server - this will come through balancing the loot distribution, weather and health mechanics - and not to rely on different servers having different set-ups. A big part of the appeal of the game is that sandbox element - different people choosing different ways to play within the same 'world' (ie. server). That should be perfectly possible to achieve. But this is for further on in the game's development. I don't think the challenge or difficulty level that's presented now (or at any time during the alpha phase) is representative of final goals for the finished game. And it really doesn't matter at this point.

As long as you don't mind being the hunted as well as the hunter.

I wonder if the player tracking mechanics will extend as far as telling you to which server the player has combat-logged?

Praps we'll be able to find panniers to enable bicycle inventory. In the pics shown in the report, there isn't a "parcel shelf". Also, the light runs off of a dynamo on the front wheel.

A few things spring to mind when looking at the small object manipulation video: Firstly, it looks awesome! But, if you drive a vehicle such as that 4x4 Skoda thing into a lamppost with enough force to knock the lamppost over, it's unlikely you'll be using that vehicle again, except for spare parts, isn't it? On top of that, anyone in the vehicle at the time is going to be seriously injured. The "fun vs realism" argument is valid up to a point, but I think this is a bit too GTA for final implementation in DayZ. That said, the physics demonstrated in the video and possibilities it opens up are very exciting. Related to this, I'm guessing that 'manipulation' of dead/unconscious bodies means that we'll be able to drag or carry them - either to pull an injured comrade out of harms way, or to hide the evidence of your having murdered someone? (This was mentioned a while ago as a design goal.) Would this apply to animals and infected as well as players? And if we can drag bodies, will we be able to drag heavy-ish objects, like the picnic tables in the video, or large pieces of trees you've cut down, large pieces of machinery, etc? Will we be able to push cars that have wheels but no working engine? Will it ever be possible to attach a rope to a vehicle and tow/drag stuff behind it? I'm getting ahead of myself, probably, but decent, believable physics and the ability of players to manipulate and apply those physics to as wide a variety of in-game objects as possible can potentially bring the game a massive new level of immersion in the environment and gameplay value along with it - because that means players can improvise... with 'stuff'. And that's what a sandbox really is. Hoping the devs go to town on this aspect of the game!

Sorry to quote myself, but:

They are working on wolves and bears, I believe. They will pose a danger for people hanging around in more isolated locations, and probably be at least as dangerous as infected.

What I mean is: server hopping isn't playing the game. It isn't fun. It's just looking in a few buildings, swapping servers, then looking in the same few buildings again. It's incredibly tedious. I've spent many hours at a time playing DayZ, but I can't imagine spending hours at a time just server hopping the same area repeatedly. I'd go mad. I struggle to understand the mindset of somebody who is so desperate for a single in-game item that they'd spend hours of their life performing the most boring, chore-like bit of meta-gaming possible, rather than actually playing and enjoying the game. I've never found an M4, either - not since they were spawning in every castle and military building on the map, anyway.

A few hours? Who in the name of fuck has got the patience to server hop for a few hours? Do these people not have ANYTHING interesting to do in their miserable lives?

Still, they might have a video you could copy, if you ask nicely and don't bring the Naginata with you when you knock on their door. Or the police might have one already.

Don't worry. I'm sure your neighbours will have made a video, so that they can pass it on to the relevant authorities.

The way I read that bit was the 'sleep' system for infected (where they are evenly distributed throughout the map, but remain unspawned in areas without a player presence) is being replaced by a system that spawns most - if not all - of the server's available infected in the areas where players are present - thus giving the appearance of having more zombies on the server. I hope this means that people who try to loot up on empty servers will have their day wrecked by having to deal with hundreds upon hundreds of infected all by themselves.

Why... did you even think of that as an example?

Definitely. We don't need to know how many skill points we've accumulated in the UI (though doubtless someone will mod in a display). It's best if players don't even notice any difference until they die, and then they realise how crap their newspawn character is at doing the tasks they'd improved on in their past life.

I transcribed this bit of Brian's presentation to make sure I understood it correctly (07:59:30 ~ish): (I'm still not entirely sure I get it) So... Does this mean that if you are on an empty server, you get all of the maximum possible infected for that server spawning in your location "bubble"? And if the server is full, the infected are distributed in numbers according to the locations of concentrations of players? On the one hand, it's going to bring the infected threat to the forefront of the gameplay; but on the other, it seems that concentrations of infected will be able to be used by players as a gauge as to how many other players are in in their proximity "bubble" of the map - which is something Brian earlier describes as a "ridiculous" piece of meta-gaming.

7:50 is more accurate. Otherwise you have to sit through 10 minutes of that foodfight bollocks.

It sounds like you found that notorious truckers' bar. I think the name is "Dusk til Dawn". Be careful in there. And don't look round the back. (You wanted to know where all the zombies have been for the last few months?)

I wouldn't mind seeing some monsters in the game. Anyone seen Troll Hunter?

The thing about that is that you need to be able to track the animal when you lose sight of it. Because you will: a deer can get about half a mile away in the time it takes to say "Bugger, he must have seen me." It'd be awesome if some kind of animal (and people!) tracking methods were included in DayZ. But it also requires that the animal AI is given some kind of stamina mechanic, or else endurance hunting would just consist chasing a deer around forever and ever.

Well, next time you'll know not to participate in early access. Lesson learned, take the positives from it.

Doesn't matter. I want more wildlife to wantonly slaughter.

The way I see it, making permadeath a matter of starting again from absolute scratch each time, combined with difficult basic survival would do two things: 1/ make it more risky to go out seeking combat, since you have more to lose if the other guy wins (unless you are a new spawn); 2/ make cooperation with strangers actually worthwhile. At the moment, neither of these things is true. For new spawns, combat might seem an attractive option, to acquire gear quickly - and there is nothing wrong with that. But if all you do is fight other players at the coast, it ought to be difficult to make progress beyond that - ie. your character will die of wounds sustained or starvation or exposure to the elements before long anyway. Making progress and getting away from the coast should be tough. It should require equipment and preparation for the journey: boosting your health/fitness to a level where you can survive a long journey on foot, or finding a vehicle to do it quickly. But finding a vehicle either requires that you steal it by force (risk of death) or spend time fixing one up (need for sustenance and survival in the mean-time). At the moment, you just point yourself in-land and hold down "W" for a while - and that's not good enough, in my eyes. I have no problem with the idea that the coastal spawn points are full of blood-thirsty bambis, scrapping over what little resources are available there. But I think making progress towards higher-level gear and 'safer' locations where you can survive in the longer-term should require effort - and that requires difficult survival mechanics. If a player has spent time and effort acquiring gear + 'soft skills' (whatever they turn out to be) then the prospect of losing all that and being dumped back among the coastal bambi-fights might persuade more people to avoid combat if they can. If cooperation with other players made survival tasks easier, it might persuade people not to kill everyone they see. Because death in DayZ has never been particularly difficult to avoid, or even much of a set-back to the player when it does happen, I think that's why such a large proportion of people go out seeking battle. Exploring the large available area needs to be difficult in order for it to be rewarding - that requires survival over long-distance journeys and long periods of time to be difficult, and for the price of not surviving to be worth avoiding death above all else.