ChainReactor

You will see it when your steam downloads the update.

Lol yeah there isnt an idea thread. Just an entire suggestions subforum. A mod will move your thread soon. For your suggestion: Dragging bodies is already in the pipeline.

Again, artists, designers and animators do not do the coding job. Also, the "core" elements take the most time, obviously. When you look what all is needed to make a zombie appear and move ingame, you will understand that tasks like AI, networking code, loot persistance and so on take over a year of development. The most work being done so far was work on the engine to prepare the actual feature development. The pace will pick up more and more the further they proceed with this engine work.

Vehicles everywhere !!! Well, he is teasing us so much that i am confident Exp. 0.51 could be the patch so many have been waiting for.

Okay, will try to adress some of your points. Thats a coincidence. Zombies are controlled by the server, so server performance has a huge impact on how the zombies behave. This is an ongoing work in progress, and it's no small task. To be clear, it's actually one of the biggest ones. If you are interested what stuff is needed to make a Zombie ingame, continue reading this. They are replacing engine modules bit by bit, so yeah, parts of the new engine are already in. Many things that has been scripted ( the melee system i.e. ) went to hardcoded engine modules. Current WIP's that I am aware of are the new renderer and the player controller. Also the sound system is about to be rewritten from scratch. The team grew from 10 to 50 since last December. Still, money doesn't develop a game, and stacking up a team this much needs time because every new guy needs time to get involved with the project before he starts to be productive. So hiring another 50 employees would most likely slow the entire process down. That's what they are going for just right now: 3 Experimental updates ( one each week ) that lead to one stable update by the end of the month. Unfortunately, thats what an alpha is for. You throw in all the features and fix it once it's complete. Might sound silly to someone who has no idea about software development, but it's actually the quickest way to do this. There are no excuses, there are reasons. We are still less than one year into a projected 3 year development process. And now that a good chunk of foundation work is being done, you will see that the development will seem to pick up pace, because you will see more actual changes ingame. Stable 0.50 will bring basic barricading, first implemention of horticulture, refined weather effects, map updates and many new items.

I see a fairly decent progress so far. Are you aware that most of the work being done so far was on engine level which is barely visible ingame ?

And they put it back in again.

Don't get so defensive, man. You just need to keep in mind who was being interviewed. Chris is the Lead Artist and it's simply not his thing to talk about overall game progress and control. That's stuff Hicks or Eugen could answer a lot better, and i hope we will see something similar from both of them ( at least Eugen announced he wants to do an AMA sometime )

Most of client-side optimization will haben in beta, and there will be definitely none before the new renderer is in. As for server-side-performance: It's an ongoing process they work on it, but there wont be any milestones before the game is feature complete, what means beta. So yeah, if you cant play it right now, it seems you will have to wait a bit longer, sorry.

Have to disagree. Sure it's a sandbox, but the devs still can have a vision of the game and try to encourage this vision with their descisions on gameplay. Chris even explained why they dont throw many sniper rifles in the game - to enforce player interaction ( which still can be hostile! ). Sniping/getting sniped from 1km away is hardly any interaction, and i understand that point.

A crowbar is to small and light to deal the damage equivalent of a firefighter axe. And before you go ahead - a fire extinguisher is to bulky to be a decent melee weapon, since it's totally not meant to be one. And a sickle is meant to cut grass, not zombies. Really, melee might have its flaws, but the weapons are not that unbalanced. They're the first weapons a player will pick up, so they should not enable easy mode where you can one-hit zombies with a plier.

How exactly is it unbalanced that a hit with a long piece of wood is less fatal than a strike with a heavy, sharpened piece of metal ?

Nah, you only seem to think to easy on this subject. From the very same status report i've just linked you to: The devs constantly fix hacks. Unfortunately, the idiots trying to ruin the game come up with something new quite often. There will be holes that can be exploitet as long as major changes to the code of the game are made. Anti cheat measurements are an ongoing development process and the devs already fixed much. Keep in mind that they dont fight symptoms but the actual cause. That being said, if you see someone teleporting that doesnt mean the devs didnt do anything against it, its just that someone found a new way to do it.

How would it affect a hacker anyway when you simply let him spawn fresh, what the wipe did to every player? Also, status report: It was the one and only reason for the wipe. http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/211071-status-report-week-of-15-sept-14/

Because this was the wipes sole purpose? They fixed the 4 major duping techniques that have been known with the introducion of 0.49 stable, so they wiped the database to get rid of all duped items present at this point. Noone ever mentioned the wipe would fix hacking.

Keep in mind that Chris Torchia is the Art Lead, so diseases and loot table questions are not really stuff that he could answer.

"The small experimental population" will be run over by OMG VEHICLES hypers though once they are in. :P

Your fault is that you see bad performance and think about how things look. The graphics aren't the bottleneck in DayZ, its CPU ( single core ), network- and client/server performance. Much stuff in DayZ happens server side, and if your connection fails to tell your rig everything in time, your game will lag. Same when your CPU can't keep up with all the calculations.

There's no real plan. This game is in alpha, which means they constantly add new stuff to the code, which naturally creates new loopholes. The DayZ hacking community unfortunately is very active ( google for them, i did once or twice and it made me really sad to see this much effort in fucking up a game ). All the devs can do is to fix loopholes faster than they can be exploitet, and they have an entire team only assigned for that very task. Rocket once said anti cheating measurements already took away one month of actual development time. So it's an armes race, really. The break even point will be in beta, when there are no major additions to the code anymore and the devs can focus on fixing the remaining problems, until none is left. So there is no such thing as "fix hacking". Its "fix hack X, then hack Y, then hack Z" and while you do that you should find out about hack A again. According to Eugen, X/Y teleporting should be fixed, same for explosion spamming. But despite them doing an awesome job at fighting this shit, there will be a new one right around the corner just by tomorrow. So the casual player that doesn't keep up with the development of the game only goes like "hacking still a problem, fack this shit!"

They aim for wednesday, as wednesday is the stable branch maintenance day. And they gave us endless sprinting, you actually are the bicylcle you are asking for.

They don't restart on schedule, they crash or get a forced restart. It's a known issue with the current build and it's being worked on.

This, imo. I don't wanna be "warned" globally about snipers / bandits / kos'ers. I wanna spot a player, feel a rush and the need to decide how to move now. I wanna feel like a lone survivor without a 24/7 newsfeed on my screen. Also, whenever side chat gets introduced, it WILL be abused. I don't wanna see idle players having a chat, pickup requests and killed players going like "omg effing batch fook you, you kid omg!!!!" No global side channel pls.

Come back in beta, sorry.

Chemlights ! Chemlights everywhere !

You have four character slots in total. Stable branch: One for first person, one for third person servers. Experimental branch: One for first person, one for third person servers. Those four characters will be persistant. You can play on a stable third person server, go to another and you will still have the same character. Same for every other character i've mentioned above. Still, there are some things you need to know: If you log out, your character will remain visible and vulnerable to anything on the server for 30 seconds. That's the logout timer. When you log in and you get a spawn timer, you also will be visible to other players, zombies and so on. So its possible you get killed during login or logout. It's to prevent ghosting. If none of this is the case and you spawn in as a fresh character, the server you joined might just have restarted and failed to get your character data from the central hive. Quickly log out, wait a few minutes and log back in, your character should be back now.