Chroma

i tend to stick to anything under 120ms Some servers will kick you if you are above, because you tend to increase lag to everyone else.

Playing on ZombieSkelper, looting NWAF, nightfall. To whomever was running towards me from the ATC and caught a round, i apologize! Id just been jumped by a zombie in the Firestation, then drew agro from another outside, and saw what i assumed was yet another zomble lurching from the ATC, it was only after opening fire and noticing the sentience of a directional change towards cover that i held off and pegged it. I would have stayed and chatted, but had someone just opened up on me, then screamed friendly over voice comms i would have figured they where full of shit. Hence i bugged out around the jail and headed northeast passed the wall and into woodland. Scanning for movement. Not really my playstyle, i very rarely KOS and i feel kinda bummed about the whole incident, i noticed you where still mobile as i bugged out and hopefully you survived the encounter. So if you're reading this, here's my formal apology, rest assured the server isn't generally populated by KOS douche-bags, but sometimes accidents happen. Not that that's really an excuse, the distance between us would have allowed time to hold fire for a proper visual, but i was still jumpy from thinking round three was inbound :/

Ive only just realised this is in Gen instead of OT... i'll ask some kind mod to move it ;)

they should implement some of this: or any number station broadcasting from Green Mountain, just to freak people out even more!

Strangely enough this is what calms me too... I'm a total loot whore though! Resorting inventory relaxes me :)

I wholeheartedly disagree that its taking it too far, sure its a game, but your still mindful of societal norms, irrespective of simulation. You're downright hardwired to recognize patterns and seek familiarity, programmed to assess risk, and game or not if its out of place then its deemed psychologically as a threat, masks (be it payday or gasmasks) illicit a fear response because it emphasizes a party is trying to hide intent. Read into the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. Simply because its a 'game' means nothing, societal norms still hold true. Take as evidence Horror movies, those elicit a fear response, jump scares cant hurt you because 'rationally' its all taking place on celluloid, but people still get a fright regardless of rational logic. Its essentially the same thing, you wear a mask and you will be perceived as a threat, game or not its a basic human response. edit: spelling errors.

They offer no tangible benefit other than to hide your appearance, and empirical evidence shows that if you need to hide your appearance then you have something else to hide. Who are you more likely to trust to conduct business? Someone with an open friendly appearance, or someone hiding underneath a facemask? Human interaction and communication relies more heavily on body language than anything else, and a large portion of that comes from facial expressions. Common sense dictates that if someones hiding their face then they're not being honest nor trustworthy, therefore shoot first and ask questions later ;)

Go with the single 256gb Raid-0 performance is fairly negligible on a desktop, the theory that two concurrent read/writes is faster than a single operation doesn't really hold up in reality. A desktop doesn't really do the things to justify the overhead of stripping (and people often forget that there is a VARIABLE overhead) For instance if you want to read a sector, the raid controller (in a desktop setting normally software controlled by the OS) has to figure out which drive the information is on, this leads to a LOSS in performance. On a server setup where you're running a database receiving several hundred queries a second on a dedicated hardware RAID controller, this overhead is more than paid for and performance gain is noticeable, but i assume you're not going to be running a dedicated enterprise rack, at most your queue depth to the hard drive is going to be well under that required to see any noticeable throughput gains. As for boot times, you wont gain much, because the consumer grade controller you're using only does an initial boot till the OS can take over, think of gains in the 2ms range here over a single drive, similar to application load times, you'll gain perhaps 2ms over a single disk, so you can load up photoshop a mere 2ms faster than a single disk (which is already ridiculously fast) but your sacrificing 128gb to achieve next to nothing. In synopsis, unless your doing something specialized, using EXPENSIVE dedicated hardware, your gaining nothing but EPEEN to those who don't know any better ;)

HELL YEAH! BUSH WOOKIES!!!! They would be fun if craftable rather than just a standard loot drop in a barracks. Wrapping rifles in burlap and leaves would also kick ass! I'm in no way a bandit, i can definitely see the appeal of disappearing into the woodland to avoid the clown mask brigade, recon an area for a while and then move in to loot before making a retreat back to safety!

Sorry for the delayed response, Epoch and the like are completely free, just like the DayZ mod. If you go down the mod route, get hold of DayZ Commander and it'll let you download the mod (and others), keep them up to date, and let you filter through servers. It simplifies the experience and makes it almost painless. But id suggest the SA over the mod any day of the week ;)

I'd be polite and offer it a beer. He can call up some friends, they show up. Call out for pizza, play some xbox, listen to some tunes. It'll be fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILpv2UVtJCU I couldn't help myself :D I personally don't find DayZ SA to be too bad, even if i play on my laptop with an ATI HD4330 and i5, i seem to get 30fps stable everywhere, with some buffering whilst cities fully load, don't get me wrong, it doesn't look pretty but its playable and smooth! Its definitely a world away from trying to run Doom on a 386sx, o figure people just complain on the optimization because they simply like to moan or they're from a console environment where there's a standard to benchmark against, rather than a wide range of hardware to cause issues.

I'm kinda against it. Say you found a body in the wild, with signs around it like HEPATITIS and HIV, would you rummage around the bloodstained corpse? Bloodstained rags from an infectious corpse would be the last thing id want to dress my wounds with!

i just make a batch file to rename some folders and have it execute in the launch parameters in each steam client. example: -name1.bat on name1's steam account and name2.bat on name2's account. Then move between my documents/DayZ my documents/DayZ Name1 my documents/DayZ Name2 Simples.

There are pros and cons to both. The Mod is a pain in the ass for a first time user to set up (especially if you're coming from a console background) and steam doesn't handle it well (i use DayZCommander to mitigate some of the headaches) there are also mods of the mod, Epoch, Overwatch, etc. and different servers to filter through depending on which mod you use. The mod also has possibly the worst inventory interface ive ever used, and until you are used to it it will be a complete nightmare, this is also throwing in all the additional controls you'll need to quickly get used to using (I've got an MMO7 mouse and a G13 gameboard all configured and use most of my binds in tandem with the keyboard, so there are a LOT of controls to get your head around) Both are badly optimized, so don't expect it to run great at this point. The Standalone wins here because its still being actively developed so performance "should" increase eventually. The Standalones interface is also far better, still clunky but far more usable and intuitive. Where the standalone falls down is content, there really isn't much, so you're gaming phases at this point is 1: get healthy 2: get geared. 3: pvp rinse repeat. Where as in certain mods you can focus on establishing a base, or building vehicles, or trading. Those are not in the SA yet. For a new user coming from a console, id suggest the Standalone, simply because its actively developed and its far less painful to set up and use, giving you time to focus on getting used to the control interface. sure theres less to do in the grand scheme but that is all set to change.

No. Canisters are disposable.

I can state with absolute certainty that my back is indeed magnetic! It seems to repel help and attract gunfire. The strange part is there doesn't seem to be a set radius, i assume that instead of a normal electromagnetic field, its more of a photonic emission kind of thing, because it seems to tie in closely with lines of sight.

http://feedback.dayzgame.com/view.php?id=153

ITS ALPHA! This one phrase gets bandied about with disturbing regularity on these forums, and oftentimes its towards a user who perhaps doesn't know what this really means. I mean its fairly obviously an Alpha, it says so when you start the game, users on forums keep screaming it at you whenever you bring something up. But what exactly is an Alpha release? Software development goes in cycles. Conceptual design Alpha candidate Beta candidate Release candidateYou start by drafting up a conceptual design. In this case, i want to build a platform game, where you can destroy blocks, gain powerups, kill enemies and your objective is to make it to one side of the map to the other. In college or university they then tell you to move on to drafting up a solid design document, make some nice little flow charts, knock up some psudocode and the like. This of course rarely occurs past the initial design document (if even that gets done) outside of industry studios people more often than not just move on to knocking out code and assets. Mostly enough to get you to your first working Alpha candidate. So you move on from having your idea to fleshing it out into something looking like this: THIS IS AAAALLLLLLLPHAAAAAAAA!!!!! Where light blue is your non-interactive background, medium blue is your player, dark blue a platform, black is the ground and pink is simply another platform. (colors don't really matter, they're merely placeholders) You move from there to working on your physics, how the player moves around, jump heights, fall rates and basic collision detection. Once that's all mostly ironed out you can move on to adding more features, like destructible platforms, boxes for power-ups and triggers etc. Winding up with something like this: Where dark blue is now destructible, light green is a trigger box and dark green is a box that's been triggered. Graphics still suck because, who cares? It's alpha! Simply to test your design and allow for rapid changes, sure the jump mechanic is a little off, but that's just some bug from loop timing, the controller occasionally seizing up is another, as is the wrong beep playing when you hit a box that shouldn't trigger any audio, along with the juddery frame rate. You can fix those later in your Beta candidate, cause in alpha phase all you're focusing on is BULKING FEATURES, the only bugs you need be concerned with are game breakers that prevent you from testing more features, like not being able to jump at all, or collision glitches that cause you to fall through platforms and the like. Pick a feature, focus on it, get it added to a rudimentary level and rapidly move on to the next, raw ninja coding filled with dirty painful to read through hacks, but it kinda gets the job done! Fine tuning comes AFTER ALPHA, so you can focus entirely on things like adding power-ups till you get to this stage: Where you've added your power-ups, got some rudimentary animation like the yellow power-up box being able to move and be collected, all the features you wanted are now added, so your officially into BETA where now you just need to fine tune things, work on the sketchy jump mechanic bug, fix that weird glitch that seems to effect every 17th press of the jump button, and figure out whats causing the controller to occasionally lock up and essentially do nothing. This is the stage that's most boring, all you'll be doing is testing and bug fixing, reading through code, finding more eloquent and efficient ways of getting thigs to work not just properly but efficiently! Simples! once all that's worked out, its time to really go about polishing things, cause it looks boring, time to start skinning textures to your collision boxes and make it look pretty, remove the ear destroying beeps that trigger when you collide with certain boxes to nice audio samples and then you'll have your Release candidate. So that's pretty much it, Design is never really finalized Even at RC stage, you can still punt some DLC ;) you start off with a rough idea and refine and add/remove/alter things as you develop, this should all be done in the broke-assed alpha stage, but often isn't (so be prepared for more game breakers in your Beta phase ;) its real common) And the Mario example posted is very oversimplified, add in threedee geometry and netcode and things are an order of magnitude more complicated. The premise remains the same however. So now you should have some idea of what will and wont be fixed during an Alpha cycle, unless its a major bug, it'll be ignored till the Beta stage. And that's why when you post about something seemingly arbitrary, people will cry alpha at you. Don't take it personally, because regardless of in game kos, banditry antics, the people on the forums are far more civilized and nice. (Everyone's allowed to be unrealistically optimistic occasionally, right?)

I wholeheartedly agree about the lack of design document, if a full fledged design was in place then there would have been a far less painful transition with the influx of bodies, because everyone would in effect know their role and what was needed and required. This is why large studios insist on it, because you can replace staff rapidly or outsource parts if needed in order to meet target deadlines. As a coder in a large studio you're nothing more than a mindless drone, banging out functions to meet defined specifications. The tradeoff is a lack of real creativity or ability to really deviate from the spec. DayZ is very fluid in its design process, this can be both a blessing and a curse. Open alphas typically require that degree of flexibility to facilitate change and growth in keeping with communal demands, but without a concrete plan it slows down the development, simply because people need to be constantly updated on their function within an organisation as decisions shift to match the current landscape. There's more room for interpretation and confusion. I'm not faulting the dev team in any way here, or attempting to detract from what they're doing, nor even suggesting a better way of operating, im aware its unusual (and more indie) and I'm entirely fine with that. They have my beans :) I was simply trying to help others interpret why their thread got jumped on by "ITS AAAAALLLLPHAAAAA!!!" because the forum is littered with those kind of posts and as a new player who perhaps doesn't understand, it can be fairly intimidating. I have friends for instance who flat out refuse to post here, simply because of the alpha bandwagon. They do however lurk. I just feel that's a shame because for every silly idea there could be a gem that never had the confidence to write a post, The community loses out in such cases. To the detriment of everyone.

Trust no one. Trust no one. The beans belong to those most armed. If you need it, you wont find it till after you die. Entropy will always win.

THIS! Very much this! If someone is begging to be opped hes up to no good ;) For moderators and basic admin jobs, hire in-house. As for devs (a far more scarce resource) id make a sub-forum on your servers forum (if you dont have one, get one stat), looking for technical suggestions, advertise what you're looking for and allow a place to put forth ideas and suggestions, play with people in game, build up a rapport and then move to hire/promote/demote (depending on how you look at it) from there. The sheer volume of coders and admins I've worked with over the years on servers has been a very mixed bag, even people who seem trustworthy oftentimes have their own very different agendas, good help is extremely hard to find! So getting to know someone before either of you gets into that position is wise ;)

Why they don't set player locations to separate server specific tables in the hive i'll never know. For instance your coordinates on DayZ_servername_1 are X:236 Y:48 Z:7 And when you log out from servername_1 to another server say servername_2 it spawns you in a random spawn (much like a bambi spawn) and updates your position to the DayZ_servername_2 table. This assumes its a server youve never played on before. When you log back into the first server your position will be the same as where you initially logged out on that particular server and ghosting wont be an issue at all. The only conceivable downsides are players spawning randomly if the server changes its name but that's an end user admin issue, and to prevent the databases getting too unwieldy have the server just issue drop tables when there's been no activity for like a month. I assume at present when a server connects to the hive tables are created anyway right? things like loot tables and so on? Why not just split some tables in the schema and totally work around this issue?

I climb (currently E6/7 Trad or averaging a 5.13b for the US folks). Its dangerous, difficult, scary, exhausting, painful and a whole lot of fun. The barrier to entry is high and its not for everyone, and more importantly "shouldn't be." My regular buddies generally aren't interested, some of them expressed an interest and i took them to a few easier local pitches (a few VS crack climbs or 5.6ish in YDS) They hated it, couldn't understand putting yourself through the pain, trusting your life to "little bits of aluminium" and overcoming the fear of your ass hanging in the breeze, and the physical exertion involved in simply clinging on for dear life :) In essence they don't have the prerequisite discipline to gain any real enjoyment from it. Some things are NOT for everyone, and that's not being elitist, its simply stating a fact. I suck entirely at playing the Guitar, its hard, i get fed up with lack of progress and just don't "get it." I don't however complain that it should be made easier on my or others behalf. That's just life. I get to see views few other people ever see, simply because the barrier to the reward is HIGH, and i imagine that people who can wail on a guitar experience similar rewards that i will likely never achieve. Difficulty to me is a positive, the rewards for enduring are greater. In terms of climbing, i could crank up a pitch, place gear and attach ladders to allow my regular buddies to experience the same mind-blowing visages, but i know that they wouldn't appreciate them as much as i would, having not put the work in and not faced the same terrifying risk of failure (you don't EVER trust your gear placements, you trust yourself, if you let go there's no guarantee that the rock will hold or that that cam or nut will not fail) the risks make the reward. The same is true of DayZ, sure the cost of entry is initially high, but the rewards for success are amplified by those risks, when it goes right, it feels feels amazing, when it goes wrong you suffer. And that, as in many walks of life is exactly as it should be ;) Don't misunderstand, this is not a "Haha yuo are teh sux" post, im simply suggesting that things should be difficult in order to grant a sense of achievement, as with many things in life. If you cannot overcome those difficulties, either change up and improve or find something else suited more to your tastes. But asking for things to be made easier, i take a dim view on it...

I've been giving this a LOT of thought. Full disclosure: the following will refer to Bukkit server administration quite a lot (its where the bulk of my experience lies with regards to buildable structures and persistence) Its been stated that they're looking into bolting onto existing structures to begin with, simple barricades initially. I see a multitude of problems with that that need to be considered and thought through, if its to persist on a server after restart. The only way i can see that working is for the hive to update that servers database table (and therefore persist in the world upon restart on that server alone) this is fine against zombies (when the collision and pathfinding get rectified) but not so much against players who can presumably ghost across servers to bypass any locks. A way around it would be cuboids like Bukkits "Precious Stones" mod, whereby you can set up a perimeter where players can and cannot build (default is iron blocks, but its configurable) by allowing players to place something like "fenceposts" they could easily make perimeters around structures that would follow its geometry (thusly working around basic cuboid and radius based placements a la Minecraft) and those players would be able to define "SPAWN ACCESS" whereby if you spawn on a server, it performs a simple check to see if you can spawn in the region, if not you get kicked from the server with a ghosting warning. Something to let you know you're trying to access a field you don't have permissions to access. By enabling access tied to some kind of UID (presumably tied to steam account or battleeye ID to avoid nick changing glitches) you could allow groups to spawn inside your "base" or "fort" or whatever you wind up calling your locked down region. This could be as complicated as users throwing commands (in mc it was /ps allow [all/username] by clicking a field marker) or as simple as just having players you wish to allow access to stand inside the field and the builder throwing an allow command and granting everyoe inside the existing field permissions. The feature with the latter is that you really need to trust a person because once you've invited them, they're in, no take backs unless you had some way of denying access to specific UID's. Id be all for it as it adds another dimension of risk/reward. The trouble with a perimeter based setup is its very open to grief on a public hive (on a private hive you'll have access to all the tables, and be able to identify who placed what, where, and when. Much like LogBlock on Bukkit) initially i don't see much of a problem, because you don't spawn INSIDE buildings as you begin a new char. However as things progress to user buildable structures, its only a matter of time before assholes build upon all the spawn points and cause mayhem on a public hive, that presumably Admins will have no real moderation over, because giving out access to the public hive tables opens up a whole other kettle of fish in terms of abuse. A work around would be to set up areas like Bukkits "WorldGuard" does, in that you can set up spawn regions where things wont be buildable, this is good in that it allows a developer to specify regions on a master map and then deploy it across all public servers rapidly, changes to the master as things develop would be able to be deployed across all instantly, if and when the need arises, (so end users are largely unaffected by and unaware of changes because they don't need to download any update) But yeah, the real trouble will be how to handle policies regarding grief and abuse, as on a public hive there, it'll be unlikely that any given server admin will have much in the way of tools to deal with it, it also opens things up to injection hacks where an astute user will be able to circumvent protection, but the barrier to entry is higher there than simply downloading a script. I can see the room for potential here, but also see the pitfalls if things are not implemented precisely and with a degree of finesse. Its bound to be interesting anyway :) Again apologies for anyone not buffed up on bukkit plugins, or database design/management, i tried to keep it as user friendly as possible though.