BeefBacon

I do. I want that. I just don't want a solid third of the map to be literally nothing but forest. You're really blowing this way out of proportion. Chill.

Eh, so a couple was an understatement. Whatever. My stance still hasn't changed. The old Arma 2 map was empty. Have they now overpopulated it? Arguably. But, again, the stamina system will make travelling on foot more difficult, thereby making the map larger. I don't know how prevalent vehicles will be, but I expect that the vast majority of us will have to walk. There's still plenty of forest. I really do fail to see the point in having a solid third of the map be nothing but forest and hills. If you want to hide your stuff, use a barrel. You can't rely on the mod's meta forever.

Something unique would be nice. Though having said that, the Tisy military base is fairly unique. A unique civilian complex or structure would be nice. As it stands, however, adding a couple of similar-looking villages is fine by me. Villages tend to look pretty similar, after all, especially if they're only a couple of miles apart. Some sort of large industrial complex might work - maybe expand the existing one, give it a unique building or two.

...because the game isn't finished yet? I'm seriously unclear as to what exactly your point is. The map has more stuff, therefore it's less good? Travelling along a road for an hour and seeing absolutely no buildings of any kind isn't exactly my idea of engaging gameplay. The whole northern quarter of the map used to be totally depopulated. Just trees and hills. Now it's trees, hills, and like three villages. Again, remember that the stamina system will make travelling on foot substantially more difficult. You won't just be able to sprint through forests in thirty seconds flat. I like the extra little military checkpoints. They give you a small chance to pick up a nice jacket or a magazine or something without having to risk going to a big military area like NWAF. You don't find three cans of food in a house, same as you don't find a ton of gear at those checkpoints. If you actually want good gear, you have to go to a big military location. These places are still major draws for players. However, making it so that these locations are the only draws for players sort of defeats the purpose of having a huge map, or rather doesn't take advantage of it. Apple trees are fairly evenly spread, but the way apple trees will work will be changed. In what way I'm not sure, but I expect they'll no longer be the reliable infinite food source that they are now. Overall I'd like to see the difficulty ramp up, but then we're getting right back to the beginning: the game isn't finished yet.

What... on Earth are you talking about? Chernarus objectively looks better than ever befoe. Having played Arma 2, there's virtually no difference between the villages. There's very little distinction between areas. There are still huge unpopulated areas. Remember that the stamina system is coming with 0.63. You won't be able to sprint around. The map is going to become a lot bigger. Arma 2's forests cheated. The treelines had low pines to create the illusion of density - the new Chernarus actually has more trees. With more players per server, it makes sense to have regional hotspots. Obviously having too many lucrative loot locations with only 60 players can present a problem, but with 100 players it should work pretty well. it spreads players all around the map rather than clustering them all around NWAF. I expect it was easier to hide stuff in the DayZ mod because players were at one of, like, 4 locations. Why even bother with a huge map if nobody bothers to visit 90% of it? More unique buildings would be nice, but it's not as if Arma 2 had more diverse structures. It actually had less. But yeah, if each village or at least each town had a unique building or landmark of some sort, that'd be fantastic. But seriously. What?

Yeah people are pretty squishy. I doubt there'd be much difference between a bone arrowhead and a steel arrowhead when it comes to punching through somebody's chest. Now when it comes to armour that's a different story, but I think plate armour has fallen out of use in recent years. Wooden, stone, bone and composite arrows will probably do for arrow types. Bone and stone should be pretty much identical, with wooden arrows being fairly ineffective. Finding ancient stone arrowheads sounds incredibly far-fetched. Perhaps the crafting time between stone arrows and bone arrows could be different or something. Being able to craft metal arrowheads might reduce the importance of composite arrows somewhat, unless crafted crafted metal arrows are less accurate or something. Nothing you can craft should be as good as something you have to loot, except in certain circumstances (the improvised backpack being superior to the child's briefcase, for example.)

Isn't kuru some ridiculously rare disease that only exists in, like, the deepest darkest jungles of Peru or something? I don't think you can get kuru just from eating whoever. That's besides the point, though. I think it's a balancing mechanic. It's not difficult to kill a freshspawn and harvest them for meat. It's to limit the attractiveness of a readily available food source. I suppose the alternative would be to have players yield only a very small amount of meat.

That's still combat logging. Yeah I guess I wouldn't be too opposed to logged out players sticking around in the server for a bit longer. 5 minutes seems a bit excessive, but maybe 60 - 90 seconds would be okay. I would say, however, that damage from non-player sources should be greatly reduced. That is to say, if you log out in a bush and a zombie or a wolf or whatever spots you and starts wailing on you, it should do a fraction of the damage it would normally do. This means that if a single zombie happens upon you it's unlikely to be able to kill you before you disappear, but if you log out to escape a horde of zombies they'll still mess you up. You should also be immune to weather effects and things of that nature.

Yeah I don't think it's supposed to be like that. Watching the Gamescom footage you can see that even when your character reloads, you're still looking down the sights and it looks pretty goofy. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be like that. That being the case, it's reasonable to assume that the recoil isn't working as intended.

I'm a big fan of the white checkered shirt + jeans combo with an assault vest and hunting backpack - or whatever backpack I can find. Or whatever vest I can find, frankly.

Not bad, though a lot of the visual effects and colour grading obscures the actual in-game footage, which is something I tend to avoid unless it's for a transition. I like the photograph collage look, and some of the motion graphics were pretty nice too - though, again, ease back on the effects. The text at the end is also difficult to read - maybe accentuate the drop shadow, or bring down the brightness of the background while you fade the text in. Also not keen on the font but that's just me. In all, great work. What software did you use?

About what specifically? You quoted my entire post.

Well, no, pros play at 4:3 stretched to make it easier to hit distant targets. Distant, in this context, means like 30m away, not half a kilometer. The eye zoom compensates for the fact that a monitor displaying a videogame does not accurately depict the visual acuity of the human eye. If you have a wide FoV, you'll have difficulty spotting anything beyond a couple of hundred meters. If you have a narrow FoV you'll be able to spot distant targets, but you'll have severe tunnel vision. Zooming compensates for the fact that we can't have both a wide FoV and be able to pick out and identify objects at a distance. Most monitors simply aren't big enough and can't display enough pixels for that to be possible. Playing at a lower resolution (which I do, for a small performance boost) makes it somewhat more difficult to spot and identify distant objects. What might be a vaguely man-shaped object on the horizon at 1920x1080 becomes two pixels on lower resolutions. This means that players with smaller monitors or lower resolutions will be at a marked disadvantage compared to those with larger monitors and higher resolutions. Being able to zoom levels the playing field a little bit. I'd actually go one step further and say that your game resolution should affect how much you can zoom. If the devs won't remove 3pp because it'll upset the playerbase, I'm sure they can preserve eye zoom.

Yeah I actually didn't bother reading it a few hours ago because I thought it was the old one.

I think it's less what you're saying, and more your attitude. I get that people can come across as a bit fanboyish, but all that happens is that discourse degenerates into everyone becoming very defensive and accusatory. It depends. In DayZ fog is more volumetric. It's not just a simple Z gradient where the environment stops rendering after a certain point (see early FPS for glaring examples of this) it's a bit more advanced. As such, I don't think it helps much with performance, but then I don't think it harms performance all that much either. It's a visual effect rather than a sneaky optimisation measure. I agree, though. I hope they don't remove zooming. I don't consider the performance hit to be a good enough reason to remove it. If zooming results in a momentary judder, then so be it.

I'm pro eye zoom. It helps to compensate for low screen resolutions. Human eyes are pretty good, after all, but screens only have so many pixels. We have to choose a balance between having a decent FoV and being able to see distant objects with any definition. Zooming allows us to change that balance on the fly. I hope they don't remove it, or at the very least make it a server option. I don't think it would ruin the game, but it would take a lot of getting used to. I'm confident that if a lot of people say that they really don't like it, the devs will listen and change it back.

I don't believe anybody has said that any previous version of DayZ will fix everything. What we have said is "0.60 will really improve the performance!" and it did. "0.61 will really improve the audio!" and it did. 0.63 represents the beta milestone. It's a big update with features that have been talked about in status reports for years. It's possible, even probable, that the new player controller will come with its own set of bugs and issues. The difference is, however, that these bugs can then be squashed because they are no longer working with legacy tech. They've not bothered with bugfixing before because it'd be a waste of time, since everything was going to be replaced anyway. I don't know if they're trolls, but I do agree. Who's got more Gamescom pics?

Well, let's see what 0.63's new tech will, or should, fix. I played tonight. My interest in DayZ picked up over the last week or so. Found several kiwis, and they all showed up just fine. They'll eventually be able to knock down doors, amongst other things, but besides the navmesh a while back, and the ability to vault over objects, zombies have barely been touched. Given that they want more zombies on the server, however, it stands to reason that they intend to make changes to the way they behave. I suspect this will be addressed by the player controller which affects all aspects of player movement. The new inventory system that you mentioned should address this. Player controller. I, personally, haven't seen zombies clip through walls for a very long time indeed. Doors, occasionally, but that's usually a lag issue rather than anything else. Netcode is a problem in DayZ, but we know that's something they're working on in preparation for 100-player servers and more zombies. I don't know if netcode changes are coming in 0.63, but we shall see. Sounds like either a netcode or an inventory system. Probably the latter. See 0.63 I didn't know you could interact with trash. I guess my only answer to that is that games crash sometimes. Which is why they're putting together the new engine. Without the graphics upgrade, it'd just be a pig without the lipstick. They're getting rid of the pig, and replacing it with Karen Gillan. Bear in mind that it wasn't just a graphics upgrade, it was also a performance upgrade. Given that Arma games tend to run like shit regardless of your setup, the performance boost is much more relevant. The graphics upgrade is just a nice perk. It's still not fully there yet - you'll be lucky to break 40fps in Novo - but it's a lot better than it was, and that's without extra optimisation passes. In short, 0.63 should fix most of the problems you're having. Game development isn't so straightforward. Try to develop a game at the same time as you're developing the engine for that game, and things can get pretty messy. You could argue that DayZ's development process could have been better - there's a lot that they've done wrong, but there's a lot that they've done right too. Hindsight is 20/20. In an alternate reality, there's a DayZ that was released in 2015. It was shit.

Well, not really. The scope of DayZ changed immensely mid-development because it, initially, proved immensely popular. The devs realised that these changes couldn't be achieved with the current tech, so they decided to make something new. Right now, a two year setback sounds about right. They're not learning the new architecture, they're developing it. Hopefully, before very long, that'll be developed - past tense. Remember also that what the DayZ devs are working on right now will form the framework for Arma 4 and other BI games. They can't stick with the same old tech forever and, as I understand it, Enfusion is going to be a much-needed upgrade from the Arma 2 and 3 engines. We are seeing the elimination of old problems. Zombie AI and pathfinding is now greatly improved - remember when they couldn't even go through doorways or upstairs, and they just walked through buildings like they weren't there? The game now runs and looks better, whereas it used to look outdated, and ran like shit. It's hard to point out specific improvements relating to gameplay because they've made no new gameplay additions. When we can compare the old with the new, it will be clear where the improvements were. When modders can start playing around with the new scripting language, they will tell you where the improvements are. We're seeing improvements. We're seeing progress. It's just taking time.

When did I say don't worry about the white supremacists? When did I even imply that they weren't a problem? If anything I have said the polar opposite. The problem I am raising is that violent tactics do not stop neo-Naziism as an ideology, and if anything it does a lot more harm than good by pushing people who are simply right-wing even further right. The disparate groups broadly referred to as Antifa are thugs, and perpetuate a violent, far-left ideology. That doesn't make all anti-fascists bad, I'm saying that being anti-fascist doesn't make you good. You're a fan of naming fallacies, so I invite you to keep burning that strawman. And why do neo-Nazis exist? Sometimes it's just because they're hateful, vile people, but you'll find that most of the time they have legitimate concerns - real or imagined - that drive them to believe what they believe. We need to address these issues, and address why they believe what they believe. We need to tell and and show them how and why they are wrong, not beat them into submission and hope that they shut up - because they won't. White supremacy is not "mainstream" but it is certainly on the rise - as all forms of extremism are. I also agree that white supremacism probably represents the most immediate threat. However, extremism whether left or right, religious or secular, should be challenged at all times, not just when it is convenient. You are right. Extremism if left unchecked will grow. So check it. By supporting violent tactics, you are not supporting a solution, you're just creating yet another problem. I made it a political thing, not you. It's my fault. And Emu's fault. But mostly my fault.

You're a star. Something that I didn't notice before - rags now take up four slots instead of one, but bandages only take up one. I wonder if that's how they're going to balance bandages against rags since rags, currently, are objectively better. I'm also wondring if they'll include the need to sterilise rags as well, or else face the risk of infection. I guess we'll see in [REDACTED] when 0.63 is released.

Buggernuts. I only caught the last 3 minutes of the Twitch stream. I thought it'd go on for longer.

No idea, but there was talk of letting people who didn't go to Gamescom play the demo, so they might end up releasing that prior to 0.63 experimental. No promises, of course.

As well it should be. End-game loot shouldn't be something you can just sprint to in 20 minutes.