OrganGrinder

(from Stable 0.58 thread: https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/228363-stable-branch-058-discussion/page-59#entry2305718) BEHOLD! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to3x7B14D1U Damn they're fast!

Numbers always spike with releases. I think the more relevant numbers are the ones just before a release - it shows how many dedicated players there are... which has dropped dramatically since 0.57. I'm glad to see people coming back though - its a good sign what with all the toxicity in the player-base lately. Hope they/we (myself included) stick around.

Agreed Jonathan - these environmental pressures -- IF they are put in -- are what will make this game legendary in the end.

Got it. I don't see much in the video that is wildly beyond the capacities of the game. Zeds hear noises and look in the direction of them before deciding what to do. Animal AI already has alert-levels built in (relaxed, cautious, alert, fleeing) and animals already are in herds and move as herds, so pack movements shoudln't be a stretch. Sure, it was a carefully composed set of interactions in the vid but it is a far cry from something that "will never play that way" IMO. It will prolly take a while to get there though, I'll give you that.

So you think this video is more like those production-quality, fan-driven Minecraft vids? Seems to me it would more of a PITA to make one of those than to just wait until you had enough in development to show a sandboxed WIP (as stated). All the other WIP vids (i.e. new guns, vehicles, buildings, zombie AI) proved to be almost exactly what was eventually released. These are not PR videos.

My wife is a vet and had to cut one open yesterday because it chewed up a tuna can and swallowed the jagged pieces. Enough said.

Oh please, I hope so!! Zeds too. me too. I'm at work and it could have been very embarrassing had anyone witnessed it. ;)

I remember a vehicle I was in being chased by a pack of about 10 feral dogs on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. Chased us for more than half a mile. They had a sinister look in their eyes too. We had been walking around in the area for hours before too... one of those "I just escaped death" moments.

Whyherro -- all valid points regarding behavior. I'd be shocked if they fine tuned it enough for all the scenarios you mention as animal AI is not the focus of the game, but I bet they will make a yeoman's effort to put some of that in. The devs did state that they wanted to invest in animal AI... hopefully this was not them blowing the whole wad at once. I think wolves would be a prominent predator in this environment, and I think feral dogs would be present but in time would be taken out by wolves. Interbred possibly, but I don't know the rate of instance of this occurring. It does happen with Coyotes frequently (coy-dogs) but not sure Coyotes exist in this type of region (i.e. Ukraine). Look at Chernobyl as a case study - the wolves became the top predator there, and I'm sure there were all kinds of dogs left to fend for themselves during the evacuation. Can't recall if dogs are prominent a feature in current-day Chernobyl's biota... does anyone know the answer to that? And yes, DeathLove - I too suspect they will start out annoyingly simple-minded and too much in attack mode. Too bad we can't climb trees in game :P. Anyhow, looking forward to checking out the new release. I took a long, needed break from the game and wanted an excuse to get back.

To stable... Pretty much, yes. Some significant changes are currently in experimental and should be here some time in the near future. BI has changed their release strategy to have changes spend more time in experimental in order to make stable... well, more stable. This is presumably behind the long pause on stable branch that nobody seems to be very content with. It gives the appearance that development has stopped and has driven away many previously dedicated players. Risky strategy IMO at this still-early point in development. Makes me wonder if people would just prefer the frequent changes & updates even if it comes with flagrant bugs. *sigh*

Ask Steam really nicely. Saying "Pretty Please?" might not hurt.

in 25 years I'm expecting a holodeck version of this "legacy" game... where my legs break on the fire station stairs or I'm trapped under the floor of a house. :P

That. And my son started playing just before the zombies were removed and zeds were integral to why was hooked (he is intimidated by PvP and is too young to appreciate PvE). He and I both won't play until they are back. Honestly I'm a bit peeved they took away our co-gaming experience - one of the few games our tastes overlapped. But that's my issue, not BI's. Well, that almost sounds like wisdom :thumbsup: , meaning I found myself immediately agreeing but had to think about it a few moments to really understand.

My sentiments exactly. Gotta say as I've broken off from DayZ to play other stuff it was impossible to keep my excitement level up -- one could say my "Zopamine" levels have dropped off ;) and things are back to status quo. Through Steam I can see dozens of ardent DayZ players now playing other games as a rule. These people (including myself) add up to at least 10,000 hours play time cumulatively and that can't be a good thing for the health of this game. I sincerely hope I will be pleasantly surprised.

Creating "a whole new engine" can mean a lot of things so I'm not going to pretend to understand its scope or impact. If it means totally replacing the Arma2 code good for them.

For reference, I think this is the one you refer to: http://www.dayztv.com/video/dayz-devgamm-2015-dayz-with-chris-torchia-surviving-success/ Thanks, I will check it out. That does interest me.

Good software design applies at every level of development - what I refer to is not specific to being in alpha. You could be right regarding the "engine" (that term is a bit amorphous for me) if it is a true replacement and the current devs did not fall into programming anti-patterns. If they chose to modify something existing to get it to work with other, newer modules then they would still be inheriting any root mess in the engine code, right? I don't want anyone to think I am dissing the developers - again, I suspect they doing their best to work with inherited problems.

No, that is not the nature of any given (code base) beast... though it may be for this beast. If code is organized well, separation of concerns is applied and unnecessary dependencies are kept to a minimum then the expectation should be that any given change will have a minimal impact on other, seemingly unrelated areas. This has been a sneaking suspicion of mine from the start with this game - that there is enough inherited mess of entangled code that the gradual replacement of modules, functionality etc. has been more onerous than originally expected. I have nothing but empathy for these devs if true.

I keep trying to zoom in when I look at things IRL. I'm so disappointed every time it fails. Man, that would be cool - Steve Austin, Bionic Man cool. :D

Don't go pissing off two countries now! ;)

How ironic that your profile title is "Helicopter Hunter" then :P

Good question - that's a lot more than the "40" number thrown around here. Complete speculation, but I always assumed the dayzdb map was generated by scraping the pbo file(s) for coordinates (and of course parsing item classes, etc, for metadata). My hat's off to whoever took on that daunting task :thumbsup: Based on that I would guess there are actually "about 100" possible truck spawn points and none are legacy/hard-coded locations.

+1 Adding fog like what is in Arma 3 would be a great addition. I imagine the cold, late fall Charnarus mornings would sock in the fog within the valleys and lowlands and force the snipers to play a bit differently for a few hours. Personally I'd love to walk through a forest with about 20m visibility and get myself hopelessly lost trying to find the next town over :D

That sound more like an effect rather than an explanation of why. And by static you mean one of the 40 possibly spawn points, right? I say this because in the last patch version the trucks were always in the same place every time they spawned. I can't recall, does wrecking the truck beyond repair cause it to despawn and reappear at one of the possible spawn points on the next server restart?

That doesn't sound crazy. Its been in the game for a few patches that if you drive in a vehicle your character's position will not be updated on the hive until you exit the vehicle. This was a pain back when the servers were restarting very frequently - needed to get out of the truck every few towns or so or else you go back to the last place you were not in a truck. You just got a case of bad fortune in timing I think.