hkurban

This. I heard someone talking about developing a hack for DayZ SA. Was unable to determine who it was but I tried to FRAPS the conversation. I tried going through player by player to see who it was when I muted each one, but to no avail.

So I ended up passing out/dying of hunger with about 8 or more cans of food in my inventory. I frustratingly tried to open the cans but apparently had no means to do so, despite having several sharp instruments in my inventory to include a fire axe, a screw driver, and a pair of cable cutters. The bayonet seems to be the only applicable tool for getting cans open, at least from what I have been able to determine, which seems silly. It doesn't take MacGuyver to figure out a way to use one of the three aformentioned tools to make some sort of hole in the cans from which to draw beany goodness. Instead however, my character seemed content to starve to death rather than risk cleaving the can of food in half with his hatchet, causing it to spill its contents all over the place. Now I get what the devs were trying to accomplish by limiting the ability to open canned food. I mean after all, you're not going to pry the can open with your bare hands, but my ratio of bayonets to canned food found was rougly 1:25 in my few hours of gameplay across a few servers. Perhaps have some way to try different tools out on the can to varying levels of success. More knife-like tools are more likely to open the can normally, while blunt or larger tools are more likely to smash your can of food (which would either destroy the item outright, or leave you to salvage whatever's left at the bottom of the can). Heck, if I had nothing else, in a real survival situation I'd even try smashing the can against a rock like an otter until it eventually splits open, but for gameplay purposes, that at least might be pushing it.

During that particular life the only other food I could scrounge up was a single can of tuna and some rotten fruit. The tuna did nothing to help my hunger for some reason (maybe you need to eat it all at once instead of rationing it) and I risked the rotten fruit from time to time, but in the end hunger won out.

Did not run across either of those, which may have been a byproduct of the shores being picked clean, but I had made my way fairly inland checking residential and industrial alike.

my "thrust" works just fine...

Based partially on an idea rocket mentioned in an interview. As it stands right now, all Zombies move fast (unless they are "hoppers" or "crawlers"). This occurs no matter where you go, all zombies move at the same speed. My suggestion is, what if this was not the case, and zombie speed scaled based on how malnourished the zombies are. For instance, highly traveled areas with lots of players yields "healthier" zombies that can run full speed. But say you go into a small town up north that has little loot and thus very rarely traveled by players. As a result, the zombies in this area are underfed, and have little energy to chase after you. Zombies in these areas might be reduced to a mere shamble. These lightly traveled remote areas would, as a result, be a little safer to approach. While the loot might not be as valuable in these small towns, you have a greater chance of making your escape. Unless of course, more players decide to loot the smaller towns. Then more players die there, and the zombies get "healthier" and as a result faster. When the zombies get faster, fewer players will want to "risk it" and some will head for safer looting points, driving the zombie speed back down. It's a vicious cycle. This might be accused of being an attempt to "nerf" zombies, and in a way, it might, but remember that the areas where players frequent the most such as Cherno or NW Airfield will have zombies just as fast as now, if not faster. This is more of an idea to encourage exploration of the entire map by means of creating a "path of least resistance" to the smaller less dangerous towns. Now as far as how the mechanics of this could go, I could see this tracked in a couple of ways. Best case scenario, this could be done on a server-by-server basis, but if pinging the frequency of travel in a certain area puts to much strain on the server, then it could be done globally as sort of a DayZ-wide aggregate. Zombie health could be determined a number of ways. First, you could have it track the number of deaths in the last X amount of hours X distance from the zombie spawn location. This is probably the most memory intensive version. A second way would be to track how often players pass through a certain area, or how frequently a particular zombie spawn area is triggered. Lastly, the zombie health could just be determined via a player "heat map" of activity that updates every X hours. It's less dynamic, but would as a result require fewer resources on the server's end. As an afterthought, ambient temperature could affect zombies in a similar way to players. Zombies exposed to a cold environment would be less energetic and not follow the players with the same vigor (this of course being during extreme temperatures that drop the player to around 32 degree temp, not brisk temperature that only brings you down to 40.

One possibility, if there are a ton of bodies in one place, a hacker TP'd everyone into the air and killed them all in the same spot.

run, forrest, run (east)

My first life was back when we all spawned with Makarovs. Found an enfield in a barn then followed a trail of zombie bodies into Elektro. First dude I met was friendly and we teamed up. I aggro'd some zombies, and mistakenly decided to head for the hills so we wouldn't aggro more with our shots. Ended up almost dying, but dude saved my life. We headed back into town, met a 3rd person who was friendly. Tried crawling our way through the center of Elektro. One of us aggrod, and we got into a mad dash/firefight toward the hospital and took cover on the roof. After we barely survived the horde of 30+ zombies we decided to log out for the day. Logged back in the next day to find a stranger up on the roof, he was friendly and so was I. He wanted to trade but neither of us had anything spectacular. I decided to loot around in cherno. Ran into some dude. Not friendly. He put 2 Makarov rounds into my shoulder. I took cover behind a wall, bandaged, and took a few pop-shots at him with my winchester, but decided to leave well enough alone and get out of the murder-fest that Elektro had become overnight. On my way out of town I stopped at the Train Station midway through Elektro. I saw a player body and foolishly tried to loot it. Big mistake. As soon as I stand still and start looting the body a sniper from far away (so far I didn't hear his shot until after the hit) tears into me. I take hits and my leg breaks. I manage to limp for cover behind the platform before passing out, while his long distance shots ping around me all the while. Wake up and bandage just over 1000 blood left. I morphine up, eat some food bringing me up to about 1500, and get away from the kill zone. I escape to a factory, but aggro some zombies in my haste. I try to lose them in the factory but I keep passing out and they catch up to me, eating me. Posting up video footage of some of these encounters on my youtube:

A little similar but still markedly different than an idea I had to make zombie speed/stamina linked to volume of deaths in an area. http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/53091-scaling-zombie-difficulty-based-on-food-availability/`

Head to Berezino. Walk along the coast outside of town. You're welcome.

Something I've been considering for a mod I'm working on is give the player a persistent variable (like your blood, humanity, etc.) for each round type in the game IE .45 ACP, 5.56x45mm etc. This value stays with your character as long as they are alive, and they can strip magazines of their ammo to add to this count. You can't use the bullets in their loose form, but you can subtract rounds from this count to refill empty magazines or convert between magazines between incompatible weapons of the same caliber (IE STANAG to G36 mag or AKM to SKS mag)

I agree with this post, and was about to post something similar when I saw this. Rocket has stated he doesn't want to add "classes" but wants real world skills to translate to the game. The medical system should reflect this rather than just having magical healing items, as in real life, everyone knows how to use a bandaid but not everyone knows how to apply a tournaqette, or the proper dosage of morphine, etc. There should, in my opinion, be a greater variety of medical tools, and when using different medical items, allow a variety of improper "uses" for the items, etc. so that you have to know how to use the item (Tournaqette to the neck, anyone?). Heck, I'd even like it if you had different blood type blood bags, with a random character blood type for each char, so you have to make sure you have the right blood bags for yourself, and medics would need to carry around different types of blood bags (unless they happened upon a lucky stockpile of O+. Of course, this wouldn't force the players to take a lifesaving 101 course at the local college. Average players can still perform basic self care, even basic buddy care, but self-healing would require a lot of tedium, so finding someone with medical knowledge (or learning it yourself) would help get you on your feet faster. Medical expertise in the game wouldn't even have to be that extreme. It could be fairly simple to learn/basic first aid practices. The difference between knowing first aid in the game and not knowing it wouldn't be "can I learn it?" but "would I take the time to learn it?" I'm glad someone brought up America's Army as an example. That game had a great, yet simple first aid system. Bandaging was an almost automatic process, but if you came across an incapacitated player, the game gave you a diagnosis and you had to choose which first aid action to perform in response to that diagnosis. The first aid in the training was a simple classroom style training, with more of a focus on real world than the game mechanics. There was a news story a while back, even, where someone used first aid training they received from the America's Army game to save a life at the scene of a car accident, when they had no other formal training whatsoever. And I don't remember the game's first aid training taking more than an hour.

I like this idea both for the gameplay factor and for the performance implications. This would almost certainly reduce the performance workload of having hundreds of high detail models spawned in the world. Additionally, the looting process is even more of a gamble, since you can't see what's in the box until you open it. Yes there would still be piles of loot here and there, but think about it, in an environment like this, would you find everything you need sprawled out all over the floor? It's far more likely that you'd pull open drawers, raid pantries, tear open boxes, maybe even rummage through trash cans and dumpsters etc. As an added bonus, this would hopefully free up enough processing power to allow a trash system Rocket has wanted to add, whereby eating canned food or drinking soda drops a piece of trash loot. Adds to the suspense of the game when you come across a random collection of tin cans where items don't normally spawn. Also, I'd like to mention that Rocket has at least toyed with this idea. If you look at DayZ items in the editor, you'll find a couple boxes of groceries, which look like medical loot boxes, but they contain an assortment of canned food and a few gear items like matches or knives, which I assume would have their numbers diminished based on a loot spawn system IE .05% chance a knife spawns in the box 50% chance X canned food spawns etc. etc.

This. I tried getting revenge on a pair of bandits once (back when we all spawned with Makarovs), but for all I know, I might have taken out a survivor who had finished them off for me, simply because there was no way to tell them apart. Warlord skin is definitely one of my favorites, especially for this kind of mod. There are a lot of great skins out there that would be interesting. A problem I've run into though, is that some of the skins have forced faces, such as the civilian doctor, the school teacher, the functionaries (business suit guys) and the A2 single player protagonists (Cooper, Ohara, etc.), so as soon as you'd don these skins, you'd lose your character's custom face. There are workarounds for the Force Recon characters, since many of them have "generic" versions with the same outfits, but much to my disappointment I've been unable to get a single guy in a suit without a black toupe, and I've been unable to get a doctor in game without that mass of white hair.

I prefer "His Dudeliness", you know, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

The biggest problem I see with this is, if you're doing long stretches of gameplay at a time, you risk losing it all unless your character takes power naps every 30 minutes, which would totally kill the game for me. I do like the idea of making saving your character a manual event, and here's my suggestion: Make the save progress an action that takes time, like you suggest, but make it something that can be done more frequently, and makes sense to do at any time of day. My example would be having the character "write" in a journal. You don't have to actually "write" anything, unless players want to get creative, but you physically have to stop somewhere safe, take a knee, pull out a note pad, and spend a few seconds with your guard down in order for your character to save. Plus a notepad wouldn't be as big of an inventory hog as a sleeping bag. It could easily fill a single equipment slot or be a non-inventory persistent attribute to the player.

Since I had a hand in this, this gets my vote. And my beans.

Maybe not put the hatchet as a secondary, but how about this: 2 handed melee weapons (hatchet, crowbar, etc.) remain in primary slot. 1 handed melee weapons (hunting knife) would go in the secondary slot. In addition to the hunting knife, you could find a small 1 handed axe like the one seen here: http://woodsroamer.blogspot.com/2011/06/mini-axes-and-survival.html which would have a shorter range and less power than the primary slot hatchet.

Would be interesting if you could use this method to "unlock" other maps for exploration IE Takistan or Lingor Island. Some servers would host these different maps instead of Chernarus, and hive won't allow you to connect unless your character has met the "get C130 and escape" prerequisite. Maybe a different map, even, depending on what direction you fled Chernarus from? Of course these locales would be exponentially more dangerous as EVERYONE there will be decked out in all kinds of high level gear.

This couldn't have just gone in the original thread?

Church appears to be on fire...

regardless of what happens, this is rocket right now:

maybe server crash from everyone trying to join at once? Either that or some really epic trolling by OP.

This. I roll with a group of real-life friends as well, and their policy is shoot on sight of anyone not in our group. To me, that's boring as hell, since you can do that in pretty much any other game. I have more fun following standoff procedures, only taking down people who pose a threat to myself or my group. (I let hatchets go as long as they stay away.) Still, I'd be lying if I said I didn't participate in their antics from time to time, although i never got a murder out of in.