ChainReactor

Confirmed bug.

No. It's the game, not your pc !

Very nice !

I never ate coal. It tastes meh.

You're not trying hard enough because you still have your jacket and your bandana on.

If he has, he might not show it here.

Pond water is tasty, healthy, and helps you being awesome !

Hey yeinzy ! Status report.

Well, it depends on the size of the screwdriver, but i bent and simply broke many screwdrivers until today by using them in abnormal ways. I hope you dont think about what ways that could have been. ;)

Yeah locked doors are a bit to weak, i agree ( though your topic title is misleading then, it should be "doors need a buff" :) ) Also, i would like to see increased degradation of melee weapons that aren't meant to be used to smash doors. Screwdrivers, knives etc should reduce their condition rapidly when you try to open a locked door with them. Fireaxes, crowbars or sledgehammers however should work quite well without any notably increased degradation.

^ this.

There's a player status called "kuru" in the gamefiles since Experimental 0.50/3 which isn't used ingame so far, so it seems cannibalism is in the pipeline.

Guys, if you keep on deerailing the thread with your jokes, it will deerectly go to the graveyard eventually !

Windows 95 went down twice in a couple of minutes. Back in the days, that was not unusual.

First, you have a team of 10 people and a budget of XX.XXX $ So you design and plan for all the features you want to implement. Then you look at the techonolgy you have at hand. You realize you have to cut down your vision of the game to the limitations given by the tech you have available. So you start development and release the first publicly available build. Within weeks, you have a budget of X.XXX.XXX $ and realise you can improve both your team and your technology to get rid of limitations and do something much closer to the vision you had from the very beginning. What would you do ? Keep in mind, by that time, the game was already available, heavily hyped and sold like hotcakes. Just a sidenote: No. You can disinfect bandages, which is actually the actual intention of the item. The further development of diseases will make it even more important. You are free to feel unsettled. I know the patience i bring up is above average and my excitement to see this game develop along with my interest in game development in general are nothing you can ask from everyone. But i read news from the devs everywhere and everytime i can, so i think i have a basic understanding why we are here right now instead of there. I mean, the last big thing they added about zombies was the navmesh. This however works server side, and server perfomance is an ongoing issue currently planned to be improved during the remainder of this year. But server performance not only affects the navmesh, it affects actually everything ingame. So they can't polish AI navigation without disturbing other systems. Same for animations, that also are not AI exclusive. Or physics. Same for persistence, which influences item storage, decay, loot economy and eventually server performance again. So its all about really big systems that all interact with each others. Its not "solve problem x, move on to problem y". It's developing and fixing here, then there, look what it did here, fix stuff there and so on. Its a time intensive task. That is also why everytime i read someone demands the devs to fix the zombies, I want to shoot my head. Speaking about zombies as the mentioned core feature? They consist of AI behaviour, AI sensors, netcode, animations, navigation, hit detection. Most of this is again low level engine work, takes months and is being redeveloped since they got the opportunity to do so. You might check Eugen's post on reddit explaining this. Also, either Hicks or Eugen once mentioned they started to effectively work on the new plans with the new team in august. ( meaining they work on the game 100% without wasting time and manpower for training periods and such ) Growing and synchronising a team that just increased in employees by the number of 5 also takes some time. Lastly, beans to you, i totally forgot about the autosave feature of the forum :) thanks a lot.

No worries, me stupid german used "argue" because i didnt know how to express it better. :)

Yeah i get your point, and i have to admit the entire early-access thing ( not exclusively DayZ ) is kinda breaking with the standart definitions about software development and life cycle ( as most literature says that its inacceptable to release feature incomplete builds to the public and that internal testers have to be picked very carefully to bring the general development forward ). To be honest, you can even tell from DayZ's example why this has been a rule set in stone, as it reveals all the flaws of public development build testing ( casual players simply are no good testers, and DayZ has over 2 millions to much of it ). However, i think we agree that early access isnt really a development- but rather a crowd funding concept. DayZ is one of the first titles to prove if this will work out or not. In the end we should not argue about how accurate the words and stages of development are used. The devs have been quite open about the stage of development. So everyone shall name it as he pleases, we are still where we are at now, nevermind the naming.

Actually, that is the exact definition of a Beta. At least the one i know.

And until 0.50, duct tape was one of these items, and now look at it. They keep those items ingame though, so i'm sure they have a future use in the pipeline. Also i think they keep useless items ingame to keep it in the loot economy as well. Also, charcoal tablets dont fit here, as they have an actual ingame use already. That's your first major flaw imo. It would be more enjoyable, sure, but i wouldn't have expected them to be fully working from day one. Of course, the game is advertised as zombie survival sim, but the alpha disclaimer tells you more than often that this is not the game right now. The main issues with players having wrong expectations about zombies are two things in my eyes: 1st: They dont get the size of this project in the game. They don't get that working zombies are like one of the biggest task the programmers have to do and thus, take really much time. 2nd: They dont get that the devs changed the plans they had with the SA after the initial release. Redeveloping many parts of the engine ( much of that does influence the zombie development ) was one of the major changes to the roadmap after initial release. Add that to the fact that the majority of players only count it as progress if they see it ingame, and a good portion of the alpha population doesnt even take the effort to keep up with the development and you get the mood that is quite common in this community as of today. Yeah, and that is one reason why a complete re-write of the animation system within the engine is one of those re-developments i just spoke about. They want to get rid of the limitation to full body animations the RV engine offers to them, so they develop their own animation system. Again, this is low level work, takes much time and testing, and isn't visible ingame until they implement the first animation which uses the new animation system. I once compared it like this: The devs wanna break down a wall but they only have a small hammer. So they take their time and develop a sledgehammer. Once this is finished and they can use it, the progress and the effect will be much bigger. They simply redevelop their tools to achieve what they have in mind for the game. Do you get my point? Maybe items aside, but you didnt mention any small thing. You actually mentioned very big things. They only might look small when you look from a player only perspective. Good, your example is very close to perfect. What they started with was actually the bunch of bits of code hanging barely together, the RV engine from ArmA2. I exaggereted this to match your example of course, but the engine has it's limitations in terms of what they wanted to achieve. Then the Early access had such a huge success and suddendly, they had the resources to get rid of this limitations by redeveloping the engine. So they threw much of the code out and began major parts from scratch, planning every function of the engine to fit in the correct class and be as flexible as possible.

Not that likely on stable. I don't think they would do such stuff intentionally outside of the experimental branch.

So, there's a AMA with Chris on Reddit which didn't make it into the DevTracker here, so i thought it might be worth sharing on the forums. Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/2l93uf/dayz_developer_ama_chris_torchia_art_lead/ I find it kinda funny that he says they try to encourage interaction by not giving players many kickass longrange sniper weapons but when asked about an item he really wants to see ingame, he posts a ( really beautiful ) model of a kickass longrange sniper rifle :P Anyway, your thoughts on this ?

Yeah because it's random, just as the OP suggested. Random systems however hold the chance that you simply have bad luck sometimes. And i too would not have wasted 1,5 hours gaming time for 20 suicides.

I acquired the habit to use useless items when i find them ever since persistance made it's early steps on experimental. Shed full of chemlights? Break them all. Food house full of books? Tear out pages from everyone ( also mildly resembles my mood when i've encoutered this :P ) Another useless wrench, hammer, plier ? Take it into your hands and throw the F it away ! ( Because you are really really angry now ). Just use those items in any way and their decay / respawn timer should start.

An alpha is naturally simply not optimized. You can have a 5000$ rig, the game just wont use it. Right now, the single core performance of your CPU is rather important. Many I7's fall behind i5's and even XEON's in that sector, and Intel outruns AMD by quite a bit. Also, since so much of the stuff in DayZ is happening server side, your network connection is a really important part of your overall gaming performance, and i don't mean raw numbers like up/download speed exclusively, but much more the quality of the connection ( steady ping, no packetloss etc ). For your third point - thats an issue currently being discussed somewhere here in this subforum. Check the threads about it out and see if someone has a solution ( as i have no idea, just the knowledge that it's brought up here before ).

That problem would not be a persistant one ( lol, get it ? :) ) since its only an issue of persistance still being under massive development. Once it's working as planned and the servers dont drop in performance over time, there will be no persistance-disabled servers anymore.