Beizs

I'm hopeful that they'll go more in depth with it, but I'm sure that they'll go to the level I described at least. We'll just have to wait and see. :)

The zombies aren't the dead risen in this game. It's more a rabies like virus which simply does not kill its host. So, the bodies don't rot, which explains why they can run. They're just feral humans. It's more like 28 Days Later than Night of the Living Dead. The reason it's called DayZ is up for debate. Many will tell you it stands for Zero, as in it's the final days. Others will tell you it means zombie. It doesn't matter, though. Most people consider the 28 Weeks Later style zombies to still be zombies. The point of zombies is that they're an unstoppable force that will come at you until you put them down. They were once humans, just like you, and are now something truly horrifying. The fear is meant to be in the fact that the large numbers that eventually will overpower you. I personally prefer fast zombies as they add a much better sense of fear and urgency. They're also far more realistic (it's possible for a virus to mutate - rabies only needs to incubate faster and not kill or at least kill slower to give us 28 Weeks Later style zombies, whereas the dead coming back to life, realistically speaking, is just... No).

Would benefit server hoppers too much. A better solution would be to detect server restarts and not penalize players for joining their next server.

I don't think you should choose your starting stats or anything like that. Too RPG-ish and kinda defeats the idea of the anti-game (though I'm skeptical about that whole notion). However, this idea, at least on a basic form, is definitely something that would add to this game. Currently, there is an unrealistically low incentive to keep your character alive. Having things like this would increase your character's value, promoting more realistic play. They've talked about a stamina system quite a few times, to my knowledge, and I do not believe that a basic system to increase general fitness would be too difficult. They could either go as in depth with it as you have, which I would love to see, though I'd worry that it might draw focus away from some more important things or simply add a single fitness stat that starts at a reasonable level and depreciates over time if you're not active, especially if you are constantly stuffed or constantly hungry. This discourages setting up on a hill somewhere and staying there, sniping for hours on end. It rewards running over using a vehicle, which is good incentive, adds value to your character and balances the game a lot. The higher your fitness stat, the longer you can run. Weight should be factored in to your stamina, but, if they just want to implement it on a basic level, it'd be fairly simple. So, stat goes up by being out of breath regularly & degrades constantly over time. This means it could be coded with minimal performance impact. There is already the implementation of being out of breath, so you could simply add a statement that says fitness += 0.5; within the code for being out of breath and fitness =+ -0.01; in the timer they use for hunger. Obviously they'd have to adjust the values to balance it, but it'd really be very little work. Then simply make the fitness value a multiple of both sprint speed and stamina (and jogging too). Bear in mind that I have no clue off of how they actually have implemented everything, but something along those lines should work. So, quick example of even a basic fitness stat. Player 1 - Fitness level 10/100 Sprint time with empty inventory - 20s Sprint time with 50lb carry weight - 10s Sprint speed with empty inventory - 8m/s Sprint speed with 50lb carry weight - 7m/s Player 1 - Firness level 90/100 Sprint time with empty inventory - 60s Sprint time with 50lb carry weight - 30s Sprint speed with empty inventory - 11m/s Sprint speed with 50lb carry weight - 9m/s So, speed would be less affected by fitness level, but stamina would be heavily affected. I just threw those numbers out arbitrarily, but whatever. However, I do not believe that it's too much of an overhaul to implement the entire system. They're going to be overhauling it any way and this wouldn't be a lot more work than simply adding a static stamina system.

This, so much. Certain items might degrade over time etc to balance it out, but burying items would just be so good. I'd also like to see some Ghillie wraps for backpacks. Wouldn't be massively effective while wearing them, but would make hiding them a lot easier.

People will be able to get around it by just disabling their mic in game (which can't be removed as a possibility, sorry). That'll mean that they're even less likely to try to talk to you and be friendly and it'll take a turn for the worse. If you expect to hear players talking no matter what, and they've all disabled their mics and are communicating on team speak, you're going to be caught off guard a lot easier. It's a nice idea, but I really don't think that anything can be done about it, short of stopping players from joining the game if TeamSpeak or other, similar programs are on (which could be done), but I think that's a bit too invasive for a game, honestly.

Chernarus, to my knowledge, isn't part of Russia. But even if civilians have that few guns, the fact is that there was clearly a very heavy military presence in Chernarus. There'd be a lot of guns left over and a small number of people left to take them.

Can't link any sources as I'm just going off of what I've seen and heard in various places, but I think that the game should be going in to beta next year..? If anybody could back me up on that (or contradict me, actually - just point us to the time frame), I'd love that. That'll mean it's basically feature complete and just down to bug fixing, optimization and tweaking.

Personally I'm not 100% convinced either way yet, though. I think that they need to find a good balance between gameplay and realism, especially with this touchy subject. Though I do think that, assuming they can get hordes in who can chase you down if you fire a gun within a reasonable distance and don't GTFO, plentiful guns & ammo is the way to go. Imagine turning a corner in Cherno to face a horde of zombies, only to not even have a rifle to defend yourself. :P

Not that they've already confirmed that they're aiming to add hordes. Or improve AI. Or that it's pretty much the primary focus for the roadmap this year. Please do read the roadmap before you suggest things. Not that many do, but it's really worth it so that you don't waste your time suggesting something that they're already doing. I'll not even bore you with the usual 'it's a damn alpha' stuff. Because I'm sure that you're aware that judging something like that is ridiculous at this point. But yeah, no need to worry. The zombies are coming. Food, realistically, is fairly easy to obtain. I could go to an apple tree in real life and pick as many as fifty apples from that one tree. I could go up to a berry bush and pick literally hundreds of berries from it. I could kill a pig and eat for a week. If anything, speaking realistically, food is actually too hard to come by. Clothing is something I agree with you on. While I don't think that military clothing should be rarer (Chernarus is clearly very heavily militarized), I think that they should balance civilian gear a bit better to make it worth it. Military gear should offer more protection while top grade civilian gear should offer more storage space or something to make it worthwhile. As for the brightness/gamma thing, they NEED to have those options. There are people who have impaired eyesight and have to set it up that high. Even if they did remove it, most computers have monitor controls and graphics card controls, making their removing it virtually pointless. It's an ease of access thing. The most we can do is discourage, which, in my opinion, is best achieved by simply making it so whenever you change your brightness/gamma (among other things, such as FOV), you have to restart the game before it'll take effect outside of the menu.

I'm not shitting on the game at all. I'm incredibly optimistic about it and, frankly, am happy enough with the game how it is already (though, obviously, I want it to be finished). Guns shouldn't be rare though. It makes 0 logical sense in any location, let alone a post-soviet, heavily militarized area. Guns and ammo should be incredibly common. There should just be consequences for using them (as in, you draw in zombie hordes). Other than that, I agree with you, though I wouldn't expect it to be sold out on release as its going to have been out for probably 3+ years by then.

If you're dealing with only a couple of zombies, sure, you'd be an absolute idiot to not employ stealth. If you can avoid a horde, again, you'd be an idiot not to. But if there's never a time where you have to dig your heels in and fight off a large group of zombies, the game isn't doing it right - and if you do come in to that situation, you're going to need your guns. But that still cuts down on the amount of PvP. As you said, firing your gun could draw a huge number of zombies to you. You're not going to risk that just so you can have some lulz, or even to take that guys M4. It's no use to you dead.

Melee combat needs to be improved. A lot. But ranged combat should be the main focus. Why, you ask? When the game is complete, the aim is to have zombies be the main threat. There's going to be hordes, etc. This makes close quarters combat obsolete. Run into a horde of zombies and, no matter how good you are at using your weapon of choice, you're going to die. Guns will be the only usable weapon - and that's what guns are going to be used for primarily. That's how they're going to increase players working together and decrease PvP. By making it so that you either co operate at least some of the time, or you die. Don't get me wrong. Player interaction and fighting is and always will be a massive part of DayZ. But Zombies are supposed to be, too. As for people claiming that guns or even ammunition should be rare, how does that reflect reality? At all? Guns aren't rare. Even military grade ones are common. The fact that Chernarus had a heavy military presence only amplifies this, but even here in the UK, where guns are virtually taboo, I know a fair few places I could get a gun in an apocalypse, entirely hypothetically, of course - I'm not much of a prepper (granted, many of these involve stealing them from people I know and dislike, but yeah - even here, they're not all that rare). It makes 0 sense for guns or ammunition to be rare. I also take issue with the rarity of clothing, backpacks, working vehicles and a lot more, but maybe that's just me. In the aftermath of civilization, with a massively reduced population, there's plenty of everything to go around. I don't believe that DayZ can focus on hardcore survivalism and be realistic as well as difficult. Its focus has to be player interaction and zombies if it wants to actually be realistic (though they've gone for 'authenticity', which I'm fine with).

That's not the reason they're in the films or shows. The point is that it's supposed to be hard to kill a child. It's just so morally wrong that despite the fact that they're a zombie you still think twice. It's meant to be a horrible thing, but not from a 'dey scerri' perspective. I'd like to see some work on the ambiance of the game though, with better sound design, more gore and similar things. I'd not be opposed to this being implemented, but it's not really that necessary and it'd only stir up controversy. But, then again, even cannibalism did. Which is hilarious. Personally, I'm more big on sound design to add fear and general ambiance to the game. The simplest, most effective method available.

You have to consider performance here. As it is, DayZ's performance is tenuous at best. After a fair amount of tweaking, on a reasonably good PC, I run at ~40fps in cities and 60fps (well, higher, but VSYNC) in the wild. While this isn't bad at all, adding a huge amount of random items for no reason wouldn't make sense with the performance hit it would create both client side and server side. It's just not practical in any way. Maybe once the new rendering and physics engines are in and they've done some more network optimization it'll be a more viable idea, but for now, I really don't think that it's worth the potential sacrifice. Imagine if they put it in before a completed loot cleanup system. Servers would literally become full of only junk items. I'd also argue that your examples weren't exactly mundane items in a survival situation. :P Every single one except for the first and last would be incredibly useful items in an apocalypse. Blankets would be a nightmare to transport, though. Fill up an entire mountain backpack with a reasonably thick one.

With the CLE, they could always add some very nonsensical weapons to the game and just really limit the numbers. Makes it very hard to find them, but the possibility hanging over your head would be amazing - and just imagine if you did and then you died. That'd be true loss. I'd actually really like to see a whole range of guns added that would be in incredibly short supply in Chernarus (as well as other items that'd be cool), but I don't know if the amount of work it'd take to put that stuff in would be worth the payoff, considering how few people it would really affect. I just think that, if people have things that took them ages to find and they know that there's only (I don't know) 100 in the entire game, they're going to play a lot more realistically with their lives. It really adds value to you characters life and that's a very, very good thing in my eyes.

So, I'm not entirely sure how wound infection works as of the latest update, but I'll write this on the premise that this video is accurate (0.50). So, as it stands, if I'm correct, wound infection can only be caused by stitching yourself up. Regardless of the durability of your sewing kit, it has a ~15% chance of giving you an infection. This is supposed to balance sewing kits against bandages, of course. My issue with this is that it's not very realistic. At all. You should be able to get infected wounds from bandaging yourself with dirty rags/bandages and should be able to stitch yourself up without the risk of getting an infected wound. So, how do you balance all of this? (- = Key point, ? = Possibility) 1 - Rags start off with the durability of the item that they were crafted from. 2 - Damaged rags, bandages, sewing kits or leather sewing kits have a chance (30%?) of giving you an infection. 3 - Badly damaged items have a 60% chance of infecting you. 4 - Ruined rags and bandages are still usable (sewing kits are not), but they have a 90% chance of giving you an infection. 5 - Sewing kits give you a shock penalty... You're stitching yourself, after all. 6 - Rags and bandages can be cleaned with disinfectant or alcohol. 7 - Sewing Kits can be combined to increase their durability from badly damaged to damaged. 1 ? Add a 'dirty' status for all of these items. That way, sewing kits can be handled differently to account for the issue of dirtiness and running out of thread. Rags and bandages damage status would be ignored other than ruined (which would be unusable & unrepairable) & the dirty status would take the role of the above functions (ranging between clean, dirty & filthy). Dirty status is applied to these items on a per second(?) basis. It's simply a float that ticks up over time. Sewing kits get dirty fastest (if the needle has any dirt on it, you're asking for an infection), then rags and, finally, bandages. If these items are in containers like the small protector case or the first aid kit, the rate of dirt collection is halved. If the items are damp, the rate of dirt collection is doubled. To minimize strain on servers (though I doubt there'd be much), the timers could only tick when in a players inventory or they are rendered by a player. It's handled client side and sanity checked by the server on an occasional basis (for example, every ten minutes, it checks whether the item's dirty status has changed a possible amount over that time, resetting when it's dropped or picked up). 2 ? Apply dirt status to clothing, too. Dirty clothes add a chance of getting ill (very low if it checks regularly). If not, the first key point translates damaged clothes to 'dirty' rags & 'badly damaged' or 'ruined' clothes to filthy rags. Damaged/badly damaged clothes give you worn rags, while ruined clothes give you damaged rags. 3 ? If 1 & 2 possibilities are met, then sewing kits can be replenished by adding them together (replenishing the amount of thread in them) & cleaned separately. The way this could work is; Pristine = 100% Durability Worn = 60% Durability Damaged = 40% Durability Badly Damaged = 20% Durability Ruined = 0% Durability When you combine two kits, they add their durability together. So, a worn and damaged kit would make a pristine one. Badly damaged + Damaged = Worn. Worn + Badly Damaged = 80% (can add another to make it pristine). Etc, etc. They can then be cleaned with alcohol or disinfectant. One use, like with rags or bandages, cleans it completely. Why this works Okay, so, with this, there are three different items (four if you count the sewing kits separately, though they should work exactly the same) that you can use to stop yourself from bleeding. 1 - Rags. Easy to obtain, stack to six uses per inventory slot. These items might be useful depending on how clean the clothing you got them from was. Good for entry level, not very space efficient but very accessible. Can be used in any situation. 2 - Sewing Kits. Fairly common, these are very, very space effective. However, they require more maintenance, balancing the fact that they could, potentially, be used 20 times for each slot taken up. If the dirt feature is implemented, they should get dirty faster than rags or bandages. If it's not, then the fact that they deteriorate and become more likely to make you ill with each use is balance enough. In situations where you have low blood, the shock penalty means that there's a chance that you may pass out, leaving you vulnerable (I believe that it should complete the stitching even if you pass out, however). 3 - Bandages. Rarest of the three. Medium space efficiency, but they're the safest to use and require the least maintenance. Can be used in any situation. Overall, this creates a good balance between the three items while making the issue of wound infection a bigger deal... Which it should be. It's not too difficult to get around, so it shouldn't harm gameplay and it adds to the realism.

A lot of the things that get brought up aren't necessarily realistic, though. They might be realistic for some, or even the majority of people, but they're not realistic all around. You might walk into a horde of zombies just because you're drunk, but most people wouldn't. You might get depressed from eating the same food all of the time, but I know people IRL who do eat the same thing all the time. They're completely fine. You might be able to run a mile before you need to take a rest (I'm a smoker and I can run a mile in eight minutes without the adrenaline I'd be getting from being shot at or chased by zombies), but others might be able to run twenty. You might be clumsy and cut yourself on a window, others might make sure the glass is all knocked out and be very careful. Zombies can already see you through windows. If you think that houses in Chernarus should have security alarms, you're sorely mistaken. Oh, and you think that half of the map would be able to track you down and reach you before you move because you shot a gun even a single mile away? No. Just no. I could go on. There are some things I agree with you on, such as getting infected wounds (which you can, if you stitch yourself up. They just need to balance it properly so that it's a case of 'not sterilizing it = getting an infection', not 'stitching = getting an infection' but 'using rags from clothing = completely fine'). But the majority of the ideas that people put forward in the name of realism are either ridiculous, completely unnecessary or just not realistic. Damn, if you want to talk about realism, vehicles should be incredibly common and most should be in working order. It's not like a zombie apocalypse breaks all of the cars suddenly. Guns should be incredibly common. There are multiple military bases on the map, crashed military helicopters all over the place and the game is set in a place where people have guns. Ammo shouldn't be hard to find at all. I should be able to pick 50 apples from a single apple tree and hundreds of berries from one bush and fit that all in a single mountain backpack. Then I should be able to carry another mountain backpack on each arm. Food should fill me up for a lot longer than it currently does. A single boar could feed me for a week. A single chicken could feed me for a couple of days. I should be able to get a tonne of eggs from a chicken too, as well as milk from a cow. Infinite food, here I come. I should be able to get branches from trees without an axe simply by pulling on it hard enough. I should be able to light a fire with some dry leaves and some flint from the ground, but then I'd burn down the entire forest. I should never fail to find a twig on the forest floor. My axe should be able to last a hell of a lot longer than it currently does. Especially a fireaxe. My clothes shouldn't get ruined by being punched and grabbed by zombies. I might get a sleeve torn, but some needlework can patch that right up perfectly. None of the items inside should be ruined by that, either. Oh, in fact, items should only really be ruined when they're directly hit with a bullet or melee weapon - if my backpack gets shot once, the majority of stuff in it is going to be fine. Jeans should protect me from a lot of damage and be very, very durable - in real life, they've saved my legs from being shredded while coming off of mopeds. Oh, talking of needlework, sewing kits should last a hell of a lot longer - and one sewing kit should work for everything. I should be able to bury a waterproof backpack and all of the stuff inside of it should be completely safe from both the elements and any player for a fairly long time. There should be a lot more of every item of clothing. I could carry multiple rifles on my back and ten more in a duffel bag. It should take me a good minute to find a small item such as a battery in a full mountain backpack. I could have holsters on each arm, each thigh, each ankle, each shin, either side of my chest and all over my belt. All of the weapons should be a LOT more effective (take a baseball bat to the face and you're going to be fucked up - even a stomach shot can kill). The devs should set a certain amount of loot to spawn in each server once, then after that the only new items come from renewable sources (farming, trees, fishing, hunting etc). But don't kill those animals too fast or you'll depopulate the area and never see another piggy. If you die once, you're out of the game. Zombies shouldn't exist. Again, I could go on.

Exactly. I'm not somebody who'll advocate permanent effects or serious, complicated procedures to repair issues as that negatively effects gameplay imo, but it'd be great to get something more substantial that there currently is.

I don't know if I agree with the categorization of loot, honestly. Weighting it is fine, but the game is pretty clearly set at least a couple of months after the apocalypse. Consdering society has been gone for this long and people have been looting the entire time, everything is going to be scattered everywhere. Honestly, I feel like military bases & clothing stores etc would be the least likely place you'd find something good, realistically. I definitely see where you're coming from, though. Just not 100% convinced on it (but this is my 100th post).

Personally, while I love the idea of beards, I worry that they might make my true dream harder to include (though not too difficult). I want to be able to customize the face of my survivor. I don't care about the rest. Body is fine. But being able to customize the face to even a small extent (think Sims, but scaled down. A lot. Just like, enlarging or making the nose smaller, changing eye size, mouth size etc, but have it fairly restrained to keep it from being too much work and also to prevent people from creating the terrifying things we see coming out of the Sims regularly) would be awesome. It'd be cool ingame as it'd be possible to narrow down searches for known bandits, etc. Hair color, at the very least, shouldn't be much of an issue. Even a more adjustable skin color (sliders would be nice). That's just color overlays over the textures, which really shouldn't be an issue. Imagine if you could customize yourself enough to make you distinguishable from others and they added a basic camera in game (think a polaroid camera - makes sense in the world and removes the issue of not having computers & printers etc). Could set up noticeboards in your groups base of known bandits or heroes who frequent the server to pick targets, etc. Facial hair would make this even cooler as you could use it to distinguish people further or even disguise yourself (shaving or refraining from shaving changes your appearance a fair bit). Granted, that'd work the best on private servers (as it has a captive player base, meaning that if you run into a hero or bandit there, it's fairly likely that you'll see them again in time). Would add to the immersion for me at least too, but I think I'm having a bad case of wishful thinking with all of this. I'd just really love to be able to go on to a private server and maintain a notice board in the middle of Cherno or something with pictures of all of the known bandits. I'm a roleplayer at heart. Wouldn't make a suggestion thread about it because I'm sure that the devs have been pestered with it before and, frankly, it's a very small, unimportant feature compared to everything they've said they've got planned. Would just be nice to see as a late addition. I'm rambling now.

With launch parameters, what should I put for a FX6350? I see that you put an 8350 as 6 cores, so should I go 4 or 6 with a 6350? Bear in mind that I'll probably be recording with Mirillis Action a lot of the time I play (using AMD APP, so minimal performance hit). Other than that, good guide. Already knew some of this, but the XP param is new to me. Might have to try that when I get home. EDIT: Went ahead and followed this guide. Launch options = -nopause -nosplash -high -cpuCount=6 -exThreads=5 The config files are as you suggest. I'll not go to the trouble of listing my graphical settings in game as they make very, very little performance difference for me (though when I record I generally go to Very high on both texture options, low in the 'Objects, Terrain, Clouds etc' tab and disable almost everything in the post processing etc tab because I just dislike how they all look. I generally lose maybe 10fps running everything on the highest settings - but it's not really worth it imo. Anyway, here are the results. Bear in mind that while taking all of these screen shots, I was recording in windowed mode with browsers, steam, iTunes, HWMonitor and a couple other programs running in the background. I have two screens on currently (my third just died :( ), one at 1366*768 and the other at 1600*1200 (this one's weird. It's not actually a 4:3 screen, but its resolutions are all 4:3. I'm not complaining, though. I play all my games in windowed and it leaves some real nice realestate). I was using Mirillis Action to record with AMD APP (MP4), max bitrate, 60fps etc. The recording turned out absolutely perfectly, so no issues there. I'm running my OS on my Corsair Force SSD (along with Mirillis), recording to a 2TB 7200RPM hard drive (some programs, my music and my documents are all on this drive. Music was loaded in iTunes) and playing DayZ from a dedicated 1TB 7200RPM hard drive that only has my Steam Games on it. GPU - AMD Radeon HD 7870 CPU - AMD FX 6350 (OC'd to 4.6ghz 24/7) Memory - 16GB of 1600mhz (OC'd from 1333) DDR3 Ram. Cooling - Corsair H80I, 6 casefans (including the two on the Corsair Radiator) all Arctic F12's. The game, in the wilderness and forests, was stable at 60fps (capped through VSync, assume it was a fair bit higher as it never dropped below). In that small town below Novo with the firestation, it was fairly stable at 55+. In Cherno, it never dropped below 30FPS, even when sprinting with Zombies chasing me and topped out, even in the center, at aroud 45-50FPS (whenever I took a screenshot it'd dip for half a second, making it a pain in the ass to capture.) You can see in one of the screenies that I'm sprinting at the time. Anyway, enough rambling. Here's my proof. All of this while recording, as you can see in the top right of each screen shot. Not tested not recording because that doesn't matter to me. While it'll be higher, I don't really mind lower framerates (above 20 I'm happy). It's for the video. So, I have a reasonably good computer, but it's by no means a beast. From this tutorial, I managed to get everything running real smooth. Wasn't able to try -WinXP as it'd crash before loading (after initial startup screen with DayZ logo and a loading bar). Would be really, really interesting to see what my frame rate would be like with that working though. I'm willing to bet that, if I wasn't recording, that even in the center of Cherno my framerate would at least peak at 60fps, which is awesome. Computer never broke 40 degrees celcius (anywhere - case, GPU or CPU) and, rather annoyingly, never passed 55% CPU usage. I think I'ma play with scene complexity and see how it effects it. Would really like to cut down on the pop-ins that you get at 100k. I have plenty of room to work with, after all.

I think now is the time for you to figure out who you want to be in game. Try killing some people. See how you feel. If you feel exhillerated and excited, maybe you're a bandit. Play from there. Get a sniper, find a nice, covered spot and start sniping and killing people. Not the most honorable role, but you'll be enhancing (and destroying) others' experiences with the constant fear that somebody might just pop them in the head at any moment. Try helping some freshies. Maybe you could be a hero. If you enjoy killing people, but also enjoy helping, you could target bandits and make it your goal to protect all fresh spawns (and gear them up when possible). Offer people food, meds, clothes and protection. Keep on your toes. Don't let people catch you off guard. When it comes down to it, even a hero who helped you ten minutes ago can be the perfect prey to push yourself up that ladder. Maybe you're a mountain man. Go up north, preferably west. Look around, learn the map, pick a town and find a place nearby to stash loot. Collect loot in said stash (keep it in backpacks) and start farming, hunting and exploring. There's a lot of cool, secret stuff up north (try and find the dungeon full of bodies. That's all I'll tell you). If you enjoy this playstyle, you'll probably want to be as stealthy as possible. Keep to the smaller towns whenever possible - there's less people there. But always be alert. Always be ready. Today might be the day that somebody else is passing through Sinistok. Finally, of the mainstream playstyles, there's the medic. Maybe you like helping people and just don't enjoy killing. Get yourself nicely geared, preferably in the best civilian loot and fill your backpack with medical supplies. You can have a gun, but it's advisable to keep to things you can hide in your inventory (sawn-off shotgun, sawn-off mosin, pistols, SMG's). Run around and help people you find. Look on Reddit and find people in need of help. Always be wary though. This is, potentially, the most dangerous playstyle (while Heroes might be targeted by the groups of bandits they killed, they are generally very good at PvP and can handle most stuff). Or figure out your own, unique playstyle. Maybe you want to roleplay. You could be a preacher priest. You might be a mountain man who, every now and then, runs in to the towns to massacre people (whether for the good of humanity, killing bandits, or for the detriment - killing anybody you see). You might be a zombie hunter who only kills zombies. You might be a creepy stalker, following people on nighttime servers in nothing but a coat, cargo pants and a payday mask. Maybe you're an ex-convict who has religious convictions that prevent you from killing, so you hold people up, handcuff them and take their loot... But only what you need. Maybe you're a deranged maniac who chases people around with an axe, screaming down direct, only to knock them out, force feed them disinfectant and flee into the night. This game, as it currently is, doesn't have much of an endgame. So, either kill your character and start again, or go and create an endgame for yourself. Over the coming months, Zombies and Animals are getting smarter and new additions should create more of an end game. Until then, you're alone. Or not. Maybe find a group who play in whatever playstyle you like the most. Personally, I'm an opportunist. I like to play nice as much as I can and do, occasionally, go into cities with the specific task of purging them of bandits, but generally, I'll be more of a mountain man. If I'm out in the wilderness alone and see somebody, I'll probably kill them and take their stuff (or, if I really catch them off guard, just knock them out, handcuff them and steal some of their stuff. I don't really like killing people for no reason). I like to test things out (hunting, farming, cooking, crafting, etc), which provides me with a lot of content. A week ago, I dropped all of my guns at my stash and made myself a bow and a tonne of arrows. I spent four days using only these to see how well they worked and improve my skills in game. That kind of thing.

Why on server restart? Why not just have a range of colours for each current house model (with variations such as pristine looking, ivy covered, cracked bricks and peeling paint). These all add variety to the game and shouldn't have much of a hit on performance (depending on how texture loading in graphical memory is handled). Once these are ready, replace a percentage of the current models with each variation and voila, everything looks different.The issue with changing it for each server restart is it's not practical and it serves no purpose. It confuses people who learn the areas they like to travel, too. I think that this kind of thing, however, is something for much later in development (end of alpha or maybe even early beta).

As much realism as possible without making the game shit. That simple. Gotta play it by ear.