philbur

Agreed....and I remember a couple interviews with Hicks where he gave his reasoning behind keeping 3PP and I was struck by the feeling of disappointment that by doing that he basically draws a line in the sand where the Hard, Cruel, and immersive DayZ stops.

Huh? Not trying to troll you, bud...but the word LETHAL is usually synonymous with death. Knocking someone out just makes it easier to walk up and tea-bag him to death. ;-)

Good job doing the leg-work on these clowns, and thanks for making the effort. I am under the impression that this kind of behavior is a lot more common than you would think, as it is the best way to circumvent the entire "gearing up" process in the Public Server ecosystem. It's hard to justify the effort people like you make in exposing and reporting servers that act like this but I personally wanted to chime in and offer my sincere appreciation. However...I am of the mind that this is going to remain a constant issue in the Public Server community and as long as the Server Providers are making money off us then there can not be any changes to their habits without divine intervention from BI. Also...since the costs associated with running a Private Shard are higher, it makes good business sense to drive customers towards that option by creating this kind of environment among the Public Server community. A data center absolutely LOVES charging higher rates for fewer instances as it is basically lowering operating costs and raising net income. Good luck getting results on this issue, and thanks again for your effort.

Yup...But that's EXACTLY why I DON'T play at night anymore...I had the odd time where Elektro was alive with flashlights, flares, and fires and it was freaking awesome to behold, and to be part of...and then "along came a spider...who fucked with his Gamma slider!"

Had to do this once...almost created a case for amputation and almost severed my femoral artery....Darwin was in full effect that day! This mechanic of fashioning splints with all the various in-game objects will definitely happen...if the devs are true to their mantra about DayZ being a survival simulator...

I am equally passionate about this kind of thing and can relate somewhat through my personal experience in the combat arms. What originally drew me to ARMA was the emphasis placed on accuracy in-game of environmental metrics and how they affect the tactical situation you are placed in. While DayZ has appealed to me from an immersive and suspense-filled point of view the fact that terrain and general environmental considerations can be manipulated as drastically as it stands now leaves me with a huge disappointing experience "so far". If there is a way the draw distance, LOD, and light levels could be forced "server-side" then I surly will invest in my own private shard. I don't think this is possible, of course, for many reasons...the biggest being the brunt of the work is being done by the client machine...but it's too bad. I remember having some seriously great LAN bashes with QUAKE, MOH, HL, and UT at my place (weekends with five-six fellow drunk gamers) and one of the BEST ideas we had was to force everyone to run the identical settings on our PCs. It was a bit of trial and error, as we all had varying specs on our rigs...but it really changed the experience by "levelling the playing field" for all of us...removing the inevitable dominance of either the guy who had the best rig or the guy who played a looney tunes cartoon. I have been playing DayZ, ARMA3, Skyrim, DeusEx, Half Life, Etc. on Ultra settings with a triple monitor setup for a while now and can honestly say that my "experience" is so vastly more immersive and entertaining than when I used to sacrifice quality for frames. The point where I KNEW I would lose a fight due to the other guy having a massive frame rate advantage is the point where I stopped "enjoying" the multiplayer aspects of that game. I know it's MY problem and not yours...so I'm under no illusions that my preference towards in-game quality is one that is shared by the masses....but if you dial back my point a bit to a middle ground where graphic fidelity is high enough that LOD and draw distance are at least high enough to allow the intended "experience" to be something that is closer to what the title deserves then I think, in general, players would be better served. The multiplayer aspect is both a huge positive aspect and also a major detriment to what you take away from a session of DayZ and I can only hope that the quality of frames are treated with just as much passion as the quantity of frames.

The OP mentioned something else I would consider even more interesting... Remove VIOP! If only there was a way to prevent teams of players from communicating independent of the in-game chat feature...wow...dare to dream, I guess. There will always be third-party options to communicate with your teammates so this is moot....but being in-game and having to obey the reality of voice chat while others choose to scheme and plot your demise on TS really puts a dent in my sense of fair play. I know...BooHooHoo...poor little me!

But....the running parts of Enfusion were still being overshadowed by the legacy modules I think....so what Iriahjake is trying to say (methinks) is that 0.60 signifies a giant leap forward because it brings into play a more "functional" game engine to handle the implementation of new features and mechanics. I happen to agree with this...and I might use the analogy of Enfusion being the "workshop" for development of a game and now that the tools are being set in place it will be immensely easier to create things. I can build a frame for a race car using bolts, torches, and a hacksaw...but if I had a welder and steel chop saw I could do it in a 10th of the time and 10 times better. I have rebuilt engines using some pretty rudimentary and old-school tools but when I finally accumulated enough specialized equipment I became so much quicker (and a whole lot better) at it. Feel free to substitute your own comparisons...but the point is that the dev team must be hugely relieved that they can finally see their work being processed into a project in a more efficient and "useful" manner. The biggest thing for us will be the exponential rate at which builds and content will be released. Using the ridiculous timeline projections seen on the forums is just nonsense.

I also felt a twinge of panic when I read that....sort of came across as a hedge towards the inevitable Console version. It made me secretly happy though....the lazy and instantly gratified version of me thinks it's awesome that I will know all the possibilities right away without having to do any homework or experimenting...hehehe.

I am immensely pleased to hear a short reference to the Audio Module! The way I looked at it was that Audio, while super critical to the immersion of a game like DayZ, was being set aside while the guts of the game were still being sorted out. The fact that they are already including this in their scope of development brings joy to my 7.1 surround sound ears! Yeah Baby!

I would not call DayZ SA "built on the same stuff" anymore. I would hazard a guess that all this kind of content is pretty much on hold until the "engine" (renderer, player controller) gets better implemented? I share your view of jamming being a key mechanic (requiring cleaning kits and occasional part replacement) but a lot of upcoming features have suffered the same fate by being put on hold or just not part of the upcoming plans. This probably is a result of the team not wasting dev cycles working on features that will have to be completely re-iterated in the new engine anyway. Just spit balling, here...but the period leading up to this year I am writing off as a return to the basics for the devs. Maybe the scripts or calls to the game engine are similar as those in ARMA, but I am guessing that the Enfusion engine is going to make a lot of these types of in-game features easier to work with. (fingers crossed ;-p)

A fully auto FN...without the heavy barrel... Intentional "A" marking on the casing as well.... There you have it, folks...but I would love to see a real one. I have seen what happens to a normal barrel in full auto (we used to cook them for fun when the weapons needed re-barreling). We even set the wooden fore stocks on fire occasionally....from the barrel heat and gas tube melting. Then there were the odd broken case extractor, broken return spring, and the carbon build up in the gas tubes. I know it was easy to convert them over to full auto (lots of fun with a Blank Fire Adapter stuck on the end) but I have had a really long time with this rifle and became very "proficient" with it and all that time there was nothing that could convince me that the FN could ever be used in full auto effectively. We used to play "pray and spray" with AKs and G3s as well and the G3 was the only one of the three that had any valid argument for full auto as it would at least keep a decent grouping out to a few hundred meters. The G3s also had the three-round burst mode which was perfect. The full auto rifle would not be something a survivor in Chenarus would be able to live with. I imagine the case for full auto "heavy caliber" rifles will be settled when the rarity of the ammo comes into play. PVP load outs will probably become whatever happens to have the most prolific supply of ammunition. Thanks for the info!

My man....Honestly... This was not a rage topic so don't paint it like one. I for one, was not crapping on the devs for not delivering orgasmic eye candy in 0.60 and I don't think that was the point of the OP. This was about what was more important to the player...pure FPS or Graphic Fidelity...and I personally think it is a valid conversation that the Developers can benefit from paying attention to.

Yeah...I picked up on that too... He really set off alarm bells in my mind with his apparent lack of interest. It came at a time where we really needed to be reassured about the release of 0.60 and it came across (to me at least) as if he could care less. Oh well.... I am developing an excellent short term memory for stuff like this and my attitude is changing for the better because of it.

Let the love back in, everyone! April might be the revelation we are all hoping for indeed! Already we have a reply from SMOSS in this thread and Brian actually spoke up in another thread last week...seems like it's up to us to put all that unhealthy negativity behind us for a while and just go for it as well. I resolve to do my part and help breath some much-needed enthusiasm back into this Forum. And Happy Easter to all!

A consideration for me is the fact that since FPS will be a major factor for determining where people will set their graphics settings....the lower the FPS the lower they will keep their rendering...which leads to unbalanced gameplay. I am one of those people that really enjoy playing on maximum settings with as much LOD as possible, so I am already setting myself up to get shot or at least out-flanked by others who use these settings to gain what can be called an "unfair" advantage. I run an i7 with two AMD 290X's in CFX and those alone should be lots, right? But I play on triple screen Eyefinity so right now FPS is a major problem...especially when I come up against PVP players who have streamlined their settings to give them as much of an advantage as possible. If the devs were to focus more on LOD at distance and other immersive features of the graphics API then FPS will tumble further and provide even a greater separation between the two player types. I would submit that the development focus should be solely on optimizing the renderer and polishing the world object calculations until the game can be run at very high levels of detail with fairly high-end (but not ridiculous) hardware and THEN they could just set higher limits on the MINIMAL LOD settings. Forcing the use of minimal draw distances and minimal LOD for objects would certainly piss off the laptoppers or low-spec PC users but no mainstream AAA title really cares about that kind of thing because these kinds of games are primarily designed for the enthusiast. If 30 FPS can be the minimum mark based on a mid-range PC (i5 or AMD flagship CPU with a decent AMD or Nvidia GPU) then having a draw distance of 2km at full LOD would probably be easily achievable once the renderer becomes more fully integrated. Having a max FPS becomes an interesting way of going about it as well, except for the endless array of 60-120hz monitors...CFX and SLI rigs...and multi-monitor gamers....so where do they try to create that much needed level playing field? So getting back to your concern about the focus on FPS... I think it is the "benchmark" we use as our reasoning behind where we set the graphics levels. I personally choose to avoid other players because my in-game experience would be diminished by having to crank my graphics down enough to at least give myself a chance against PVP kiddies and Bandits. I also seriously suck at ARMA 3 because I again choose to run absolutely beautiful graphics levels in multiplayer at the expense of smooth FPS and "cheater" levels of LOD. DayZ will probably ALWAYS suffer from FPS issues simply due to the high detail and number of objects and the environmental effects, so I hope they get it as optimized as possible before they move on to something else. My fear is that they will get to a point where the FPS becomes decent enough to keep us quiet and then they add other enhancements/effects that end up penalizing the high-detail loving players later when correcting these issues becomes too time-consuming and resource-intensive. My question will eventually be...."how can we PREVENT players from running minimalist graphic detail levels?"

What you are asking might come to pass...but you need to remember that there are a lot of variables when it comes to deciding which weapon gets which mode. I have never seen a fully auto FN except for the support variant with heavy barrel and bipod and 30-round mag. Firing this baby in full auto is pointless and would cook the barrel after a few mags. The AK is a candidate for it but instead of cluttering up yet more HUD space maybe it could be an animation. This would mean separate actions for each but it would be the best way to keep immersion and still give the player that info. The M4 has a lot of selector options depending on your model choice and customizations so maybe this one can be the standard NATO config of just the single and three-round modes without full auto. Heavy battle rifles are generally never full auto as their recoil is simply too violent to make sense and when they were popular it was more of a matter of the soldier being proficient than might be the case now. The trend towards lighter caliber assault and close quarters weapons means the full auto option is usually available and here is where your suggestion might make sense....but again...I hope this is not yet another addition to the already cluttered screen. Since most selector switches are located on the sides/rear of weapon chassis (or so it seems in my experience...except for the stupid breech cover system on the AK) why not just have the actual mode displayed when the reload animation is called? I would be very happy with that. Even the zeroing should go, TBH....as I cant remember the last time my scope settings appeared glued to my retinas, in real life. The iron sights can be clearly shown though so zeroing for range for them can easily be shown when you look down the sights or when carried at the shoulder. Once again...I am only responding to you post because the suggestion to add more info to the screen sets off alarm bells for me. I agree with you that there should be mode selection (for realism) but in my opinion it cant be at the expense of keeping the experience clean and free of HUD assisted magic info.

Just when I thought I could count on you for reasonable input....you blew it all up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell! But seriously, you gotta admit that wishing for a respawn location close to your base is pretty narrow sighted considering the intended consequences of a perma-death game in the first place? If anything...upon death you should be kept from rejoining that server until enough time has elapsed that it discourages some of the spawn-roulette players from suiciding on spawn. I know why you are making this argument but this particular game is not going to make it easy to re-start a character. The intention is to reward survival and punish death. Happy Easter to all of you folks out there...religious or not...go have some food with friends and family and forget about Beans and Builds for a day!

Thanks, and respect for chiming in, my man. You should rest assured that most of the dedicated players here sympathize with you and the real pain is felt only when "someone" makes that one little error of announcing new features/content/enhancements to the world and attaches even a vague timeline to when we will get to mess with it. S3V3N has point on this one, and I think you can agree that most of the times "we" get really annoying are the periods after a suggested release gets delayed extra long...without follow up information. Take as long as you guys need to....but throw us a bone or two when the builds don't test out.... I am personally just as interested in your delays as I am in your new content because that's one of the main reasons I chose to jump into the Alpha! Learning about just how complex and interconnected all the different processes are and how your team functions in relation to moving from one aspect of the dev cycle to another... You might just as well add "Game Engine Developer Spectator Simulator" to the project for now as my admission price seems like a bargain when I look at it that way and I appreciate it every time I learn something new from this.

Is this true? I honestly had no clue that the new engine being created for Day SA was already expected to be something Bohemia was going to use in-house for future projects. Seriously guys...not being sarcastic (for a change)...I guess I never considered the DayZ SA team as being part of the larger picture yet and I "thought" the IP from DayZ SA was going to be more or less "up for consideration" once the project was ready to be officially labelled a BI game. I thought that BI was keeping an arms length from SA until there was definitive progress towards 1.0 and I used the fact that BI's website has no mention of it in their game listings as justification for this. Weird... I would post a reply to this post of mine with a big-ass dunce cap on my avatar if I knew BoneBoys wouldn't whack me for self-Beaning! ;-P That does indeed give me reason to feel a better about all this hubbub and twaddle!

At this point I would imagine this is one of the last things the team are concerned about. If there are any devs still working on the game I am sure they have bigger fish to fry. You should try Hick's twitter account, as he doesn't follow the forums anymore.

You guys ever see those cheesy "undercover expose" videos? Someone should strap a GoPro onto their heads and just go on a DayZ Studio crash. Surely there is someone living nearby who could do a bit of investigating for us...right? Let's call it "PrayZ...The search for truth in the quest to build a classic" LOL !

That's all I want. A simple shift in the way they communicate.... That would pretty much solve the abstract negativity. The game is progressing and if big brother comes along to pat us on the head occasionally we pretty much run out of reasons to bitch. The bugs and lack of functionality and features are perfectly ok, seeing as it is a work in progress. Like it or not the game is still in development so no one can complain too harshly about that. I have found myself shifting my impatience over to the management side of things because it is the easiest fault to pick out. Not once have I bitched about bugs and not once have I complained that they should roll back a build because I had more fun playing on a previous one. Two steps forward and one step back is, regrettably, still progress. Once we have better oversight it pretty much returns to just a game in early access...without all the frustrating missed goals and contradicting timelines/roadmaps.

"In my experience gunshots don't get louder or quieter with distance." .......huh? My man.... I hope this was a typo. Ask me how I know. A battle tank firing it's main gun 10 feet away from you could collapse your eardrums and suck out the air from your lungs. That same gun sounds like distant thunder from a few kilometers away. Any gunshot, whether subsonic pistol ammo or high powered rifle ammo will have varying degrees of reverberation, echo, and acoustic pressure which changes with direction and distance. This is severely under developed in DayZ SA so far but as far as I know the Audio Module is still very far from being a finished product.

Hi Buakaw. I don't think the team are nearly as fragile and sensitive as some think...or at least I hope not. These people are working in an industry and are getting paid as skilled employees. The crap that is out there on forums and reddits is going to happen regardless of how the game is progressing and it should not be used as an excuse for not meeting deliverables or as a reason why personal performance is sub par. When I make pointed comments about the game's development it is from the perspective of someone who just thinks there should always be an expectation to do things always a bit better. Without having high expectations it's easy to get used to the idea of delivering mediocrity. Developers have many reasons to feel stressed, but it is misguided to think that the BS posted online is responsible for an increased level of it. In ANY industry there is a requirement to hold employees accountable for their output. There is also a requirement to hold those companies accountable for the quality of their product, right? My own posts are an example of someone who just wants them to do better....I don't try to be malicious or hurtful...But if what I say has a negative impact on the DayZ Developers then I would say that they are in need of some serious self esteem counselling. Who am I to these guys? I really hope my opinions don't break any hearts or draw any tears from them, but let's be honest...unless you are 12 years old and a sheltered mommies' boy you should be tough enough not to care about idiots who post hate comments. Besides that, it's people like Brian Hicks that I am actually "talking about" as he seems to have the role of PR and marketing. He comes across as a person who is comfortable as the face of the project but that also means he is the guy who should be getting the brunt of the criticism when it is deserved. So when you choose to defend the dev team in regards to "haters" please consider that there are a great many other people who don't mean to be a**holes to the devs, they just expect better from them. When you always expect better you will BE better. My focus is on how bad the DayZ team has managed expectations, primarily. I still play the builds and I am looking forward to times where progress will exponentially increase but as long as I have something to say I won't hesitate to say it. When criticism stops being constructive and leans more to a dull roar of frustration I would suggest that this should serve as a warning sign to the company that their product is in danger. Ok...back to Rify, to mess with tourists.