Troll_Hunter

I was thinking of the White Cliffs of Dover ;) - but I don't mind other colours, as long as it's high and vertical, with plenty of seagulls riding the wind:)

I like the idea of cliffs. I imagine people being thrown of them... On the other hand, the 'natural' migration that happens now from the coast to the NW airfield may be affected because the starting at the NW coast would allow easy access to the airfield and military base NW. I think BI should at least try to motivate the west and north border of the map more.

At this moment I would just adjust my settings, and wait until at least new year for the after Christmas sales. Like Eno said, the game is still heavily in production, and not even close to the optimising / polishing phase. However I expect BI will adjust the game and settings to run well on a current pc at the moment of completion. I expect that early 2017 a 970 GTX will be the average videocard, and the 1060/1070 the higher midrange. I don't know much about how the CPU's is going to develop, but I think the game remains heavy on CPU's as well. So in your situation I would start/keep saving, sell your entire pc after Christmas, and build a new one with the heavily discounted parts early next year. If you have some cash to burn right now, install afterburner to watch the fps, and choose the low graphics settings and resolution and see how much fps you get, this is the max fps for your cpu/mem/mb. Adding a good graphics card will allow you to use full resolution and run most graphical features. But maybe your gaming will benefit more from a better/bigger monitor? or something else that needs upgrading more?

For me it's too early to tell if we need a big central city. Transportation, natural threads, player count, economy, soft skills, sound, migrating infected? etc. have all to be developed before balancing. For now I actually like the rural centre of the map, but that may be because I prefer the outdoors over any city myself.

Great post FlimFlam. I add to this that for base building, placing and nailing planks and boards on walls with precision would also add a lot to the game's immersion. I think this more realistic and detailed building mechanic will help to make DayZ stand out from other survival games. Detailed item placement is also great when attaching bushes to your tent or car to camouflage it. Apparently there is already a throwing action, why not have a dropping action? It could be as simple as pushing and holding the backspace key, to have your character hold the item in front of you, and upon release of the backspace key the item drops down from the hands. Hold your rifle out over the table, and let it drop on the table. Hold a twig over a fire, and let it drop to fall on to fire. In a hold up situation the 'drop your weapon' command is actually animated and visualised! - no need to bring up the (immersion breaking) inventory screen too!

Finding an in game hiking watch with altitude and thermometer would be cool. These days HR monitors have all sorts of functionalities that could be fun to use in game. Seeing what a climb with a full backpack does compared to walking without, seeing the HR and Joules used. A GPS tracker could have the same functionality. And some whistles have a compass and thermometer in them. Farms should always have a thermometer outside on a wall. It would be cool to see the in game temperature vary more. For the day and night, for the different weather conditions. Actually, maybe for the expansion, I like to see seasons like fall and winter too.

Dayz should be a more dangerous environment, 75% it's PvE, 25% it's PvP. I like the idea of more infected in towns and villages, near all buildings, so most loot is challenging to get. In bigger towns getting loot should be increasingly rewarding and dangerous, with many gangs of infected roaming around. The biggest towns should be too dangerous for all but the most well equipped and skilled lone wolf players, encouraging teamplay to get to the high level loot in a town's center. Because of the infected weakened state, infected should not be able to run for long, just a short 100m sprint, just like very heavy (weight matters!) players. Wave like infected migration: Actually I think it may be fun to see a wave like migration of infected towards the west. Picture this: at the start of the server/evening the (additional) infected start spawning in sea towns and villages. Their numbers gradually build up. Once they reach a certain number threshold in a village, gangs of them start walking to the next town inland. Each time the village area reaches a maximum capacity a gang of infected goes to the next village west. This migration looks like moving refugees, and the wave like nature of their movement offers a timing mechanic. The travelling groups of infected offer a moving random danger along the roads. Off the road, wolves, wild pigs, bears, other players are the main danger. They too may have a spawning and travel cycle. I like to see hungry wolves, that eventually even attack groups of infected. When the infected reach the most western villages at map's border, they'll die off when these towns reach their maximum infected threshold.

If it's warm here, wearing a wet shirt works great. Drinking cool drinks too. Simplest would be to take the clothes off and put them in/ on the backpack.

Good point! - I also love to see Russian crash sites. Or find an overrun convoy.

DEAR BI, please take note of this excellent work! I think the JPG screenshots don't do the effect justice. The saturation of the rod cells effect looks great!

An infected spotting you from 800m? Yes, spotting a fire or a flashlight in the dark. But during the day most normal people will not notice people walking 200-100m away, unless they really contrast with the back ground and they happen to look up and not be distracted by something close by. What I think you want is a dangerous environment where being careful about stealth is necessary. I think this can be attained in a more realistic way by improved hearing, or better, more realistic sound travel distances. So if a Z hears you stepping on a branch in a quiet (no wind - wind mechanics please! ) forest, he'll turn around and focus narrowly scanning the direction of where the sound came from, while walking quietly toward the sound. With this alerted state Z can see for say 400m(depending on light and weather), scanning with a narrow beam 45 degrees toward the sound, while keenly listening for more sounds. As the Z initially gets alerted he makes a sound, alerting all other nearby Z's to focus on him, and flock to him. So one sound can trigger a chain-reaction of Z's to turn, flock and walk towards you investigating. A second sound would make them jog towards the sound, and a third, sprint. This obviously needs a cool down period, so after x seconds the Z's alert status goes back to default, upon which they would turn around and go back to the village, to continue doing their normal behaviour. I think they are in need of having a sensible for infected behaviour pattern, just standing is so boring. With sound causing a chain reaction mechanic things can really escalate. A player may alert a bird, the bird will cry loudly, the Z hears it and alerts nearby z' s, and walk towards the woods where you're in. Another scenario would be a pack of wolves that have followed a players' smell and catches up with him just as he's about to enter a Z populated town. A bow would be able to shoot an arrow against a ringing metal surface, or break a window, attracting the z' s. away from the player, and (very fun) towards other players. Sound is really important in Dayz. I wish the wind to play a much more important role. More wind would mean more leave sounds, more wind in the streets sounds, crashing waves. These sounds would mask the subtle sounds Z's and players and animals would otherwise easily hear on quiet days. Wind should also affect tree sway, grass sway, bullet travel, dust, rain, ocean, smoke, sounds travel distance, energy consumption, flight.

Duck Hunt 2.0 :D Making shotguns valuable again, I like it!

I could reply "they are not zombies, they are 'infected'." But this would be a bit lame. To many non discerning players, probably most people, they are zombies. Personally I like to infected to be more like ill, weak, disorientated, starving, dying people who have fallen to a level of extreme apathy and extreme aggression. Gangs, cannibalism etc. all caused by a plague. This would also explain the absence of the young and old. I think the infected need more work to make them interesting, unique, unpredictable and fitting the level of realism the game aims for in many other parts of the game.

I don't like the artificial presentation of 'hints'. All hints should be natural. Audio hints: People stepping on fallen branches. Birds alerting. Birds flying away. Scavenger birds (crows, seagulls) circling the dead, or near dead players, feasting on bodies. Animals fleeing. Wolves hunting. People who chop wood, hammer, saw. make a very distinct sound. irritated restless infected roaming the woods looking for food, hunting and attacking ones make lots of noise, growls and screams. Cold fires, made with wed wood, should produce a lot of smoke, and the crackle sound carries about 40 m. The increased awareness soft skill idea I like. I would make it so that those environment sounds carry over significant longer distances with ageing older characters. Making life and old characters more valuable. Text hints: Since our pc's have no smell, I would like the game to tell us about distinct odours and the direction they come from. Piles of bodies, unwashed infected, smoke, petrol, sea-air. Ageing also improves this ability.

Stalkarn, I believe many of the controlling issues are to be resolved by the new 'controller' and animation system, that allows for mixing many animations. This means that the game/player has no longer to wait for starting a new action while others are being executed. I've given you a like because I too see a schism between realism, and the unrealistic. Personally I think the contrast in this is often too much. Allowing players to construct big and complex structures in a mere few seconds is part of this, let alone carry all that building material! I suggest that crafting should be shown and animated and it should be limited to simple things that can be done in less then say 5 minutes in real life. Adding a battery, opening a can, eating, adding a wheel, spraying a gun, sewing a pair of pants, cleaning a gun, assembling a gun, taking off and searching(opening) your backpack, operating a hand water pump, setting up a tent, making a torch, piling up sticks and lighting a fire, gathering skicks, picking apples, butchering, setting up a trap, pushing/pulling doors, pushing furniture. What tasks should not be in the game? Using saline* (would take too long and players could not run a fight with an IV), building entire walls and houses, chopping trees. Ok, maybe one could chop a tree, but the diameter of the trunk would make chopping down a big pine tree take at least 5 minutes work. (In real life it would be at least 45 min+ with skill and a good axe). I envision players chopping trees and sawing lamp posts to make improvised road barriers to block and slow down cars, not for fire or building a house. To board up an existing house one would use a crowbar to take individual planks of nearby fences, and use nails and a hammer to nail them individually to doors and windows. Enemy players could disassemble and break them to gain entry. I think the durability of the items needs to be tuned, and I expect them to be tuned. For now the devs will play with variables, to test their systems and us. I think it must be great fun to experiment with an audience, especially if they give interesting and unexpected feedback. Though extensive house crafting in minecraft and other games is fun, it does not fit the gritty atmospheric realism focused dayz world. Dayz is play mobil, not lego.

Lovely ideas, I fully concur and value the realism aspect very much. I would like to see people being able to take apart fences, and build new wooden hammer and nail fences. Mechanically I like to see houses, fences being made out of parts and removable attachments. So one can take out each plank and post individually from a fence section. The houses can be cleaned up by using bleach to remove the blood decals. The furniture is based on physics and can be moved around. People can move a cupboard in front of the window or door, or pick up a chair and put it under a door, or use it in the fire. With fences consisting of detachable individual pieces they would also be cool to drive through. BTW I hope we can use petrol to burn houses down. I don't like the unrealistic minecraft like huge buildings, but on the other hand I still need to understand what role(s) 'base building' should / could have in the DayZ universe. I think for me a base would be a (secret) place of storage, so I can collect parts for cars, helicopters, bmp's. A shoot out may occur if I / we are around, but I think the idea of a fort is only for big clans/ groups. But then what is the point of having such a big base? What functions do bases serve?

Maybe for Dayz 2, but not for this one, I much rather have them work on all the other necessary and vital functionalities. I think for Dayz 'weapon cleaning' should be enough to keep you guns from further degrading. A degraded gun should have slightly less accuracy, jams, and cannot be brought to a higher quality state then 'worn' using the cleaning weapon kit. Cleaning a weapon should involve taking off all the attachments, and then a weapon cleaning animation should be shown - so players cannot instantly clean their guns during a fight.

About the cassette, I just thought of recording a voice message to a tape. I imagine finding a voice tape recorder at a hospital, listening to a doctor dictating his findings on the deadly disease. Or a recording of the former owner of the piano house, who choose to stay at home, play some piano and await the inevitable fate. Other key spots could have tapes too, building the atmospheric DayZ setting. I also hope to find a tape recorder on a player, who spoke his thoughts on his tape. Maybe he recorded a message for his friend, or a will of some sort.

I love to find an old Sony walk man, with a cassette, with some cool music fitting the period. Putting the cassette into the car stereo and driving and singing along with my friends in a car would be very memorable. A Getto blaster with a cassette would be great too, along the camp-fire, or putting it on a chopper, blasting it from a few wired speakers could be great. I agree the game needs much more, varied, better environment sounds, impact and contact sounds, and sound carry distance and fall off, reverb, echo etc. The thing is that being alone one starts to really focus on the environment sounds. You could hear animals flee from you and if you pay attention from other players.

I love it. It looks smooth, but still a bit digital (maybe due to the short gif repeating ?), like a CMOS chip, but the noise has the right amount of variation and smoothness. Suggestion: make a 3 layered shader, with the first shader blurring the dark area's according to their darkness: light level 0 (Black) = radius 15(?), 100% blurred, light level 5, 75% blurred, light level 10 blurred 50%, LL 15, 25% blurred, LL 20 (and up) 0% blurred. The second layer is the noise layer, applied in a similar way, with no noise from light levels 25 and up. Light levels are from 0-255 btw. The third layer is another gradual blur, making the dark noise like smooth fading round blobs, but not affect anything lighter then light level 25 and up. The scene you choose is nice, maybe you can have a white flare lit up a wall to a light level of 125? To see if this has noise and blur or not? Are the links to the latest version the same as the ones listed above? Effectively Tommekk has done the experimental phase for Dayz, I really hope they pick this up, and build upon it. ps. I just imported the screen shots, and raised the levels and noticed two players in the shadows. :) The shader does obscure the player a bit = good.

Mooi ideeën, en mooie foto! (Nice ideas, nice photo) What guns are on that table? I think I can recognise 80% of them.

I think KOS is the lowest level of play. It is an easy way to have lot's of (bad) influence on other players, and therefore the player feels influential and powerful. It can remain a problem if the game makes other playstyles / goals too difficult. The IQ and gameplay expectation of the audience also translates to how people play the game. Dumb people have no ability to play in another way. People without a microphone or without a reasonable language skills cannot find much success in the higher playing styles. I believe BI should make the higher playing styles very accessible, so the lesser players will start cooperating, role playing and assume higher goals. Love to see Dayz actively encourage players picking up a higher goals. (repairing cars, aircraft, building and maintaining a base, assembling a group, trade, liberating (cleaning) towns from infected, restoring lights and electricity, an active global ranking, etc) I think KOS can be reduced by: - attractive higher goals. - a tougher environment (a bit less supplies, more infected and predators). - challenging gun handling (manual reloads, jams). - making players worth more alive. (soft skills, weight carry sharing, holding key information, such as base location, enemy group size) - facilitating other playstyles (in game specialisations / soft skills) - Using the weight variable, affecting player speed in a linear way, making teams faster because they can share items and their weight. - directional far travelling Sound. The sound fall off is too short. In real life 'Silenced' weapons are far from silent, unlike the movies or games. This game has a realistic large terrain, have a realistic far sound travelling, and echoes. - eye simulating darkness noise. This will help to equal to night visibility for all players, no matter how bright their monitor and gamma settings. Furthermore I think the game's gameplay time scale can be encouraging KOS gameplay. I think many jump in Dayz to have a couple of hours of fun, get gear and waste a few players, like a short term death-match. It's nice to feel a bit of power after being bossed around at work.

Hehe Tommekk, Thanks for the clarification. You need to charge BI when you have made the smooth organic darkness shader :D - Good job man! Take note there is also another 'Gamma' topic, perhaps offer you next (smooth fading organic noise) shader design there too. Maybe you can record an animated gif of a screenshot + your organic smooth noise shader at work? - From film I know it's rather challenging to make grain / noise look smooth and organic, like we experience in a very dark situation. DSLR's noise usually shows the chip's read-out patters, and when seen at pixel level the contrast between pixels is not looking smooth and organic. My eyes see more like small smooth rounded blobs, nearly devoid of colour. I'm looking forward to it.

I agree with the general sentiment, I too want more to do besides pvp. I think the game needs more interesting goals to persue. A simple one would be a high score list an interesting long term goal, A ranking of the number of days survived. The developers should also think about how the player can have noticeable and memorable influence in the Dayz world. For instance building a big fort on a server would be cool. Leading a 'Mad Max' style army / clan would be cool. Restoring a village, town, city to have electricity and to be cleansed of infected could be a big goal too. Off cause gathering a team and rebuilding a helicopter would be nice medium stretch goal to have. I'm not worried about today's loot balance, though I'm sure they'll test a lot more extreme loot distributions on us, to explore how we respond before they come to a satisfying mix. I like the idea of 'player skills', allowing players to gain/find expertise in various practical fields, because it makes living players who are experts (much) more valuable. For example: when you need a health expert, to regain full health, KOS will not help. An car mechanic can (re)tune your carburettor on your car. Without a tuned carburettor it runs slow - is unresponsive with lots of smoke and bad milage. An aeroplane mechanic can rebalance the rotary blades of your helicopter, without it your heli violently vibrates and wobbles and spins, and if exceeding a high rpm it will break and you'll crash. In short the experts will have the fully fix the problems, players can only partially fix problems, gaining only say 75-90% of the functionality. One possible problem I see with Dayz is the quest for too much detail. Detail that leads to meaningless grinding. Now I believe that with Brian Higgs at the helm they went away form Dean's very detailed approach, but still the danger is there in the form of making crafted leather jackets. In real life I would rather disinfect a bunch of infected clothes, then find a cow, kill it, cut and work the hide, find needle and cord and make a crude and badly insulating leather caveman jacket. The difficulty with Dayz is to define the genre. In the game's current state it's about 90% deathmatch. The game designers need to make the game about reaching higher goals, to rise above deathmatch. With tempting and interesting and interconnecting higher goals, with their short to long play time requirements, players will be motivated and lured into attempting increasing more difficult and risky endeavours. With a personal and challenging goal in my mind, encounters with other players become more interesting and meaningful. Do I need help, what is her goal, can we work together, will they steal my stuff, will they force me to complete their goal, what are they up to, shall I join them? As the goals become more difficult, the time needed, risk and tension rises, and high stakes encounters can become very dramatic and memorable.

First, thanks to Tommekk and his topic on how to solve the gamma in the game - in other words: the practical view distance. Tommekk's blur shader idea, gave me the idea of an organic looking noise shader, to actually simulate the noise our human eye sees in the dark. This organic (smooth) looking noise is heavily applied to the darkest parts of the screen gradually becoming less and is nearly zero in the lighter dark parts. The medium and light parts have zero noise. So a car under a lit lamp post, or a clear night sky look noise free, while underneath the dark tree and bush the organic mushy noise absorbs all detail. This organic noise will obscure/dissolve small to big details in the shadows and dark, effectively equalising the practical view distance for all the players. However bigger objects can be observed if they move, just like in real life. Example, a player sitting still is near invisible, but you'll notice a 'shape' standing up making big/ fast movements. Look at what happens when a camera is photographing/filming a very dark scene with applied high gain (ISO). With the increased gain the noise in the dark parts dissolves all details, not in the medium and light parts of the photo. I like to see BI develop such a shader, making a truly smooth organic looking grain, that is applied according to the in game light level, not people's brightness / gamma settings. Applying more brightness or gamma will only make the blurry noise lighter, but will not allow players to see (more) detail in the dark. With this eye simulating organic smooth noise in the dark parts, all players will be on a level playing field AND have a more realistic night-time / bunker / cave experience! - Win win. I think the shader can be a global image shader, and it probably will not cost fps on a modern card.