BeefBacon

What new engine changes will we see ultimately? New sound tech, animation, the way the player interacts with the world are the ones I can think of off the bat, plus what I assume are additions to the renderer like the dynamic lights. Are there any features I missed? I have vague memories of a new particle system or something coming in at some point - I don't know if that's a thing. I assume there'll be changes to the physics system, I think you might have mentioned that in regards to vehicles. Of course I understand if there are any features you don't want to announce just yet, but I thought I'd ask. As a sort of side note, I would love to see proper volumetric lighting - proper god rays. I've been playing Stalker a lot recently and it is honestly one of the nicest visual effects I have seen in any game - you don't see it often.

I just use Steam's voice chat feature when I play with my mate, but same thing as Teamspeak I guess. We use it to just chat shit for two hours, or however long we're playing. It's no fun playing in silence, and the voice comms in-game aren't exactly conducive to lengthy conversations about TV shows or the depressing hilarity of US politics while we run across the map. We're not going to turn it off just because we've spotted someone. In an ideal world we would, sure, but it isn't practical. Third-party comms are definitely an exploit, sure, but I'm not convinced there's some sort of malice behind it. I like to chat with my friend when we play games - especially games like DayZ where there are extended periods where nothing really happens. It certainly creates an issue when a group seems to be able to communicate telepathically, but I don't think there's any way you can prevent people from doing that. People would probably be more willing to use the in-game comms if they were better.

I don't think it's necessarily about fixing it, I think he just wants to know if other people have experienced this. I don't really use Reddit so I don't know if the mods here are the same as on Reddit. There will be boats, by the way. Not sure exactly what kind of boats, but I'm pretty certain there'll be boats.

I can just see that getting annoying, but I did consider it. I figured lower weight capacity is a good way to simulate that without actually losing items - you'll suffer some serious debuffs (what exactly those debuffs might be I'm not sure) so you'll want to get rid of items anyway. I could probably get along with losing items from a ruined backpack, however - it is ruined after all.

I'm pretty sure Rust doesn't use BattlEye. Have you tried changing your name? You can edit it in the bottom right of the screen on the main menu (last I played).

Some people play on multiple servers, and thus have multiple characters. They can't necessarily remember the blood types of all of their characters. Why should you have to keep an in-game note of something your character should be able to remember anyway? I don't see why this is such a contentious issue. You use a blood test kit, your blood type appears in the inventory screen. This doesn't create some new meta gameplay or anything like that, it just helps you to keep track of multiple characters.

If you're good at something you should be able to do it well. Is BI doing a good job? Arguably yes, arguably no. Criticism is fine. "omg behmia ur a bunch of fucking scamers i want a refund, dean hall can suk my rocket" isn't. BI should get rid of the timeline. They've already stated that it's no longer accurate to DayZ's development, and hasn't been for a very long time. If it's no longer relevant, it shouldn't be described as such. Having said that, I'm having trouble finding it so maybe they have taken it down.

Oh you tease. I've been checking the forums every day to see if "Exp Update 0.61" has popped up. I guess I wouldn't mind seeing a night battle - everyone equipped with flashlights on their weapons and so on - let us hear the new sounds and see the new lighting effects. Also, I'm curious how the new dynamic shadows will be affected by shadow quality. Presumably we won't be able to just disable shadows and be able to see lights through walls again.

Yeah, that makes sense - I hadn't thought of it that way. Thanks for the reply. I'm keen to see what you come up with to address the issues inherent in 3pp even if, as you said before, it's just to make 1pp more popular.

I know this must have been asked before, and even then it's probably best left to one of the dev Q&As, but have you looked into... ray trace occlusion? I think that's what it's called; when stuff that you can't see in 1pp doesn't render in 3pp, as a means of eliminating 3pp wall-peeking. Assuming it was something that you could implement flawlessly without any bugs, is that something you'd do? I guess I mean that both in the personal sense (is that something that you in particular would like to see added?) and in the wider sense (would that be on the cards and actually have a chance of being implemented?) I mostly play 3pp because other people mostly play 3pp - including the friends I play with (I don't think they've even tried 1pp). The wall-peeking annoys me, though, and I don't like having to do it just so I'm on an even keel with everybody else. If wall-peeking was somehow eliminated I would have no problem with 3pp, and I think that's a view shared by most people who prefer 1pp.

A shove would be nice, like in Left 4 Dead - though not as powerful of course. A simple solution to the one-punch thing is just to nerf fists. They're stupidly powerful. Hell, I've seen healthy players killed with a single punch to the head - fists are more powerful than a crowbar, it seems. That doesn't seem right at all.

I never played the mod. I watched plenty of videos, though, and it looked neat. Saw mods that added a lot of STALKER content, and I'm super keen on a STALKER-themed mod for the standalone. I expect that vanilla will have a pretty short lifespan, though that isn't necessarily a problem. I'm looking forward to how DayZ evolves when the community gets their hands on it. If you'd said this a few years ago you might have been right, but this isn't 1995 any more. Hell, Half-Life 2 started development in 1999 and was released in 2004 - that's a good 4-5 years right there for a game that's practically ancient. As others have pointed out, Skyrim and Fallout 4 took many years to develop, as have many other games. Some games take 6 months. Some games take 6 years. Most big games tend to take longer - indies are usually smaller in scope and so often require less development time (unless they're unfunded, of course). BI isn't a huge studio, and the scope of DayZ is fairly large. Just throwing money at the devs doesn't magically make them work faster, in fact - as I've pointed out in the past - it actually made them work slower. The huge early access sales lead them to make DayZ a bigger, more ambitious game rather than just a version of the mod that didn't require Arma 2, which was pretty much the original plan.

I see the dropping player counts as more of a return to a sort of baseline. An alpha game should never have thousands upon thousands of people playing it - that fact that a game that hasn't even been released yet had that many players is pretty impressive. The people playing DayZ are effectively alpha testers. When DayZ hits beta or when it's released - certainly when modding becomes available - the number of players will shoot up. I've not played DayZ in months. I play a few hours of each patch and then I move on. How people have managed to put thousands of hours in is beyond me.

I can see this being a mod, but I don't think it's in the devs' vision of the game. To expand on this, and it really would never exist in the vanilla game, it'd be neat if the profession you chose affected your starting gear as well, and if spawns were all over the map. All classes should spawn with a weapon (with some getting better weapons and gear than others at the cost of more specialist skills) but it was very, very survival focused. Think the 'Misery' mod from STALKER. Again, it would never be in vanilla but I'd give that a shot if it was a mod.

Good idea. I have no idea how activated charcoal is actually produced - whether it just occurs naturally when you burn stuff or you have to do something special to it - but being able to produce it would be great. Could maybe be found randomly in fireplaces in houses too, assuming it occurs naturally without any sort of special intervention.

So use a torch. Use night vision goggles. If it's so dark that you can literally see nothing without a light, I'm sure the devs will brighten the nights up a bit so you can at least see basic shapes. I see no good reason why the gamma exploit shouldn't be removed if it is possible to remove it.

The (current) general wear and tear of Chernarus suggests that is hasn't been very long since the outbreak. That's subject to change, of course. It's probably been less than a year since society collapsed, so I could definitely see at least some telecommunications infrastructure remaining intact. Having said that, the phone assets are probably just left over from Arma 2, when Chernarus would have had power. Probably just an oversight. You never know, though.

Huh. That's actually a really interesting idea. I like it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty much certain that this is already a thing. Magazines can be empty. They can be half full. Certainly in .59 they were always full, but in .60 they are randomised - as are weapon attachments. As for bullet crafting, I doubt we'll see that. I can't imagine that making a bullet it something you could do without specialist equipment. I could see a mod introducing ammo crafting, however.

Well. I guess just adding way, way more face options would make this a non-issue, right? Maybe even a couple of different animation sets so players each have a slight variation in the way that they move. I don't want floating names, and I sure as shit don't want any kind of reputation system, or tagging, or any nonsense like that.

Well when there's stamina I expect travelling on foot will become more difficult - or at least slower. Certainly you won't be sprinting everywhere. But yeah, a debuff to stamina or perhaps movement speed (or both) would be good. As a side note, I think players should spawn in a worse condition. We should still have bandages, a flare, whatever, but our clothes should be ruined and we should be soaking. First port of call should be finding dry clothes and warming up if necessary. So many items of clothing go unused because the clothes we spawn with are simply better. Spawn with ruined clothes, and people are more likely to want to find replacements as soon as they can.

7 Days to Die has a system where if you die your maximum health is decreased. With soft skills, perhaps death could mean players suffer a skill reduction. Obviously when you die all your skills will probably be reset to 0, but maybe if you die again your skills should be decreased even further - meaning players are unlikely to want to keep dying since it'll just make the game harder and harder. This means that even players who have only spawned 10 minutes ago will want to stay alive, rather than just saying "fuck it" and letting themselves get shot because all they have is a child's backpack and a farming hoe. There should be a cap, of course, it'd be stupid if you died 10 times in a row and then couldn't do anything because your skills are so low - and it would make geared players on the coast killing freshspawns more of a problem - but it would make death more impactful than "you died, now wait an hour or join a different server."

Well, it was. The DayZ dev team used to be pretty small, and was originally going to pretty much just remake the mod as a standalone game - clean things up a bit, add a few improvements, things like that. When the standalone proved extremely popular, the dev team and the scope of the game was expanded, and they embarked on a more ambitious project. Yeah I'm hoping the alpha won't poison the well, as it were. I know a lot of people are whining saying they're giving up or whatever. I expect that when 1.0 eventually arrives they'll change their tune. I play a few hours of each patch, then wait for the next one. I don't get how people can plough thousands of hours into a game that isn't even finished yet.

I... what? CoD and Battlefield are extremely iterative and are produced by very large studios. They do not have the scope of games like DayZ and Fallout, and they have teams dedicated to making sure there is a new CoD game every year - I'm sure you've heard stories of how those developers are being ground to the bone so they can meet deadlines. Why the fuck would you want BI to be a videogame sweatshop? As for Fallout - please do regale me with stories of major content updates that Fallout regularly got over its lengthy development cycle. Fallout is not the pinnacle of gaming - it can be compared to many games quite easily. Skyrim, for example. Basically any Bethesda RPG. If DayZ had just been released in 2017, or whenever, without early access then nobody would complain that it took so long to develop. They wouldn't complain because they wouldn't be privy to the game's development. Let's say Fallout 4 had announced it's release to early access back in, I don't know, 2009. Do you think that every week there'd be a game-changing new feature? Do you think there'd be a major new feature every year? Developing a game is one thing, but making sure the game is always in a playable state so random people can test it is another. That's why you hear about the devs doing internal testing and seeing that there are 'blockers' preventing them from releasing it to the public. Most of the time you don't have to worry about that. If anything this is an indictment of the early access model - sometimes it's too early.

Games take a long time to develop. Bear in mind that we've seen the development of DayZ pretty much from day one. Most of the time we're only privy to a game's development several years in. Games aren't announced, produced in 6 months and then released in perfect working order. They're worked on, then announced, then they're released. The early access model just sort of switches that order around a little bit. Throwing money at the devs doesn't magically make them work faster either. If anything it makes them work slower, because the early success of the standalone led the devs to make DayZ even more ambitious - rather than just a standalone version of the mod. If you want to play the mod then play the mod - you shouldn't expect the standalone to be the exact same thing just with a new coat of paint. If it really bothers you, wait for 1.0. Nobody knows when it's coming - it could be next year some time. If 1.0 doesn't meet your expectations then fair enough, but it seems stupid to declare the game worthless when it isn't even finished yet.