Caatalyst

I'm not sure if this has been suggested already but it would be great to see some musical instruments added to the game. Now that base building and camping is starting to fall into place, I'd love to wack out the acoustic guitar and play a few tunes! You could have keys 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,-,= represent the notes (one octave). Lower ocatves for bass notes, mid range for say a guitar and higher octaves for something like a xylophone. Let's face it, who needs a gun and a bag on there back when they could have an acoustic guitar? Make music not war.

Hello everyone! I've been playing Dayz for about a year now. Up until recently I've been playing on a desktop machine: Gigabyte X49-UD3 Motherboard Intel i7 3820 2011 socket 3.4ghz Quad Core (Overclocked to 4.4ghz) 16GB Quad Channel memory (4x4GB PC3-12800 (800mhz) MSI Twin Frozer - NVIDIA Geforce 660 (with up to date drivers) Windows 7 64 Bit Premium (with latest service packs) Samsung 320GB SSD Drive I've invested in a descent case with good airflow, cooling and a Corsair 850Watt PSU. I haven't really had any serious problems with Dayz. I run with most settings at high / very high and at my monitors native resolution 1920x1080. I also use 100% for the rendering setting. Generally speaking the game runs very smooth except for when I'm in cities where my FPS can drop signifcantly. I assume that DayZ is not very well optimised at this stage due to only been alpha and I've not noticed any performance gains over the year I've been playing it. If anything it's probably started to perform worse as new features have been introduced. Anyhow, I purchased a laptop a few months ago for playing DayZ so I could have comfortable sessions in bed! I bought a custom build from Pc Specialist with the intentions of playing DayZ and other games. Here are the laptop specs Intel i7-4710QM Quad Core 2.50ghz (with core boost feature I think to 3.4ghz) 8GB Kingston Hyper-X Impact 1600mhz (single stick) Nvidia Geforce 870M Graphics Card Kingston v300 SSD card 120GB Windows 7 64bit Premium I have to say, playing DayZ on the laptop has been very disapointing. While I expected a performance decrease due to the dedicated graphics card having the mobile stamp I wasn't expecting to have to drop most of the settings to low / very. The performance is dramatically different and the game runs very poorly on the laptop. I've been attempting to apply as many optimisation tweaks as I can but with no prevail. If somebody could just put my mind at rest and tell me it's game over I will grit my teeth and accept the poor performance. I just wasn't expecting to lose some much FPS as the clock speeds are only different by a small amount. Here you can view the two graphics cards in comparison: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-870M-vs-GeForce-GTX-660 Many of the settings don't seem to make a huge difference in Dayz to performance. Especially when you're in cities it just gets clunky. I've made sure all the power settings for the laptop are locked on performance. This includes the Nvidia control panel settings. I've been monitoring CPU / RAM usage and they never peak, even close. If anybody could enlighten me I would be very grateful! Cheers, James

Cannot recommend the xp fix above enough!! The game runs so damn smooth now at high settings! I have left anti aliasing at low but SMAA at high and trees / grass rendering at max. I can't understand why win xp compatability mode makes the game run so much better.

Many thanks for the replies guys! that does make sense! I expected that the mobile graphics cards would be significantly weaker which is why I went for a new generation gpu (870M). I did just come across this guide though: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=216291078 The -winxp function in particular has given me a significant performance increase. I'm running 40-50 fps now on medium / high settings. I strongly recommend this for anyone trying to gain some extra FPS. The only problem I'm having is that the -winxp tweak won't allow me to minimize dayz without it crashing with a memory error message. Cheers, James

Hello Everyone!, So far I've had a lot of fun playing the alpha. I've not really played a sandbox game quite like DayZ and I'd really like to see this game progress and do well. In my opinion their are two main problems relating to gameplay right now that I would like to see improved; How the player interacts with other playersHow zombies interact with the playersI know there are a great deal of bugs and fixes are coming, but from what I've read on the feedback page and in the dev notes there isn't much detailed information on what is planned for the future regarding the two points above. I have some suggestions that could potential improve both of them and make game play more dynamic. Player Meet Player Currently, player interactions pretty much involve pirating. More than half of my encounters with other players involves somebody dying. Something needs to be done to make pirating / banditing more risky because right now anyone can shoot anyone with no consequences. In the games current state it just makes game play incredibly frustrating if you've just spent days farming gear at the airstrip only to get shot in the face the moment you arrive at a city where other players are. Improving Player meets Player by introducing Player vs Player vs Zombie Naturally, banditing problems occur more frequently in large cities where loot is high and more players are. I think the best way to tackle this problem would using the zombies. If a player fires a single shot, EVERY zombie in a half mile radius (quarter mile if using a silencer attachment) should head straight for that player's location. This will make them think twice about shooting, even if they did want to be a bandit it would require more strategy. In the current version of the game this wouldn't be very effective as zombies are far and few between and quite annoying considering they would be flying through the walls and because there is no variation amongst them. They all run extremely fast. Improving the Zombie While the existing zombies are cool, there is so much room for improving them to make game play more dynamic and allow for the point above to be introduced. Variation - Slow Zombies (would be the vast majority in the game) / Fast Zombies / crawling zombiesResponse to high imapct sounds and visuals such as gun shots, explosions etc...Physics - Everytime the player hits a zombie it should respond. If the player hits a zombies leg with an axe it should cut it off and force it to crawl. If a player blasts a zombie in the chest it should send it flying back. I still like the idea that severing the head is the only way to kill them, but introducing physical responses to every hit should make it much easier to tackle them solo as your moving round the map.More zombies in cities would force the player into thinking new ways to evade them. Imagine shooting a player only to find 50 zombies coming at you from all directions. You run into the nearest building up the stairs and cower. Zombies should also eat corpses making it even less worthwhile shooting players in highly populated areas. Flame Thrower Mass zombies call for the flame thrower! Thanks guys, I hope you like my suggestion. James

Thanks for the comments guys. Regarding the zombies, I was purely making suggestions to make game play more dynamic and further combat easy banditing. If zombies were to eat the corpses and by doing so ruining all of the dead players items then this would make it even less worthy assaulting in highly populated areas. It would be more worthy doing so where zombies can be tackled easier. The main point I guess would be to introduce more variation amongst the zombies and physics effects.