emuthreat

^^^Props to you for using the word "azimuths" twice in a single sentence.

Yeah; haven't seen you around in a while, in fact I've never seen you at all. I hope that you don't mean to say that since I never played the mod, my input is invalid... Persistence is a major part of the game and I don't think that is going to change. If you want fear, or a sense of loss, try dumping dozens of hours into setting up a series of camps on a server and keeping a large motor pool operational. You will notice the loss. You will fear for your camps. You will mourn the missing vehicle. .60 experimental, for me, means trying to break persistence before it goes stable, so that I can fear losing my progress to other players, not camp-eating bugs.

Oh come on now, @pilgrim* you've been ranting all over these forums for the past week about how death means nothing anymore, and that you don't like it. I must ask you: Did you play the mod? I never did, but I think that finding tents was something that people looked back upon with fondness. I was aware of the game for some time, but I was waiting for persistence to be included. Persistence; you know, that game-changing design decision that allowed players to build a life on a server by accumulating and storing the things that complement their playstyle? Remember now, that nothing is "safe" as long as it is stored on the server. So that fear is still there; that fear of loss, that makes the value of one life seem insignificant. What do you care if I found dozens of FALs while looking for a pristine green cowboy hat, and didn't have the heart to let them despawn? What do you care if I have a tent full of charcoal, antibiotics, morphine and epipens; another full of cooking pots and tripods; and another tent where I keep my dozens of pelts--so I can look at them at the end of the day, and tell myself that my time was not wasted, that I am an important man, I can feed the poor, and I'm gonna make Chernarus great again? That fear that you speak of? Well, if you have been playing the game, you would know that players of the habits that you so frequently denigrate are now beyond fear, beyond the sorrows of loss; for the Great Hicks has shown us the way to salvation!! He heralded the arrival of 8-day, interaction-dependent, persistent storage CLEanup. It is currently broken as shit. Tents set down two days ago, and dutifully stuffed full of gear, have been despawning. Persistence is in chaos, so I guess you got your wish. Are you sure DayZ is the right game for you? Persistence is a design decision. You seem to be whole-heartedly against it. I look forward to the empires that can be built, and the feeling of loss when it all burns down. What U want out of this game? I can assure you, persistence-based play facilitates many player interactions that would not otherwise be possible. SEE? Just wait until we figure out how to use radio stations.... Edit: When a player gets killed and "nothing happens," that is because the killer who killed them has no patience, or foresight. If instead of just killing the player, they had tracked the person back to their camp, and then kill them, something more impactful might have happened. So let the coastal PVP, KOS scrubletts keep giving each other's worthless cadavers ever-more-meaningless bullet massages. We skilled players will bide our time, try to make contact, maybe sacrificing one of our many meaningless lives in the process of determining the temperament of the stranger; and then go rob the sonsofbitches for all they're worth if they turn out to be shitheads. Even if you are playing on a hi-pop, PVP server where everybody is a dimensional traveler from their own personal armory server, you can still do a bit of research (reads: cyberstalking) and take a stab at paying them a visit on their home turf. The true King of DayZ will be a master of all these parallel dimensions.

Who besides a few people hanging around here, actually try to 'break' experimental builds? On .59 exp, I saw more KOS than ever. I suppose it is possible that someone was genuinely curious at to what would happen if they shot a player at the exact moment that he (I) leaned down to skin a chicken, but I suspect that they were just following their orders to be a complete douche-nozzle in every village on the map. I feel like that long downtime between patches brings too many "undesirables" to experimental builds lately; just looking for a place free of hackers, so they can kill everything they see in peace.

I have the same luck here, Bio. Been sitting on my hands for weeks during the seasonal slump in my industry, and now that my schedule started to fill, here comes .60. Praise be Murphy.

I play for that feeling I get when I look inside my car tent filed completely with pelts. I play for that feeling of bringing another player back to my camp, stuffed to the gills with FALs, VSSs, SVDs, and AUGs, and showing them my tent full of pelts; maybe ask them to help me cook an entire barrel of meat in just a few minutes, and in exchange, they may take whatever they like. My adventures are going helicopter hunting, but having an automobile mishap that then sends us all over the map looking for replacement wheels, going to get another vehicle to push the wreck free and finding that the bus I left parked in the woods had slid into a tree, and we now need even more wheels to complete the day's mission. I play for that feeling I get when I stumble upon an unknown base, and proceed to spend the next two days fishing at the pond just next to NWAF, and replacing everything inside said tents with fish.

It wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit, if all we had to do was comment on the experimental topic, for now...

@pilgrim* I think we are pretty-much in agreement on how it could be fixed. You just like making the explanation unnecessarily fancy. :P Camera should move dynamically with player, and behave in a certain way when player is close to cover, which would help to take some of the imbalance out of PVP situations. It should make combat more fair, work well, and not defeat the purpose by becoming so close that you may as well have just hit enter instead. Yup. Did I miss anything? Also, look on first page for the ARMA 3 video. It's near the top, and shows enemies phasing in and out of existence.

I've been tracking a Russian on my home server for a few weeks now, and it just-so-happened yesterday, that a friend was looting Myshkino and heard a hatchback drive through. The driver got out, looted two tents, and got back in the car. My friend couldn't contain himself, and emptied an SKS into that general direction, as the guy in the car fled south out of the tent city. I, and one other player, were going to recover a vehicle, but upon hearing of this new contact, we split up to try and triangulate the escaping hatchback. After ruling-out the possibility that he had fled south to ZG, or east of green mountain, we managed to get a break when the guy who originally spotted/shotted the car, found him in Vybor. I ran up to help, as fast as I could, and found our new 'friend' with broken legs and bound hands. He was resistant to communication, and seemed generally hostile--probably from all the shooting, tracking, leg-breaking, and interrogation--and I was reluctant to splint him. After about ten minutes of chasing the crawling man around at gunpoint, and haphazardly using google translate to try and communicate (both by text, and by my verbal butchering of an unfamiliar language) he finally responded with a bit of coherent english. He told us that he had abandoned the car a ways south of Myshkino; which we knew to be a lie, because I was coming over Green mountain when he was fleeing the first contact. We awkwardly ordered the prisoner to lead us to the car, but he would only crawl, never holding still long enough to be splinted, watered or fed. After making it up to the distillery, he attempted to log out. I did the only reasonable thing, and tied his hands before the animation finished. If only he had cooperated. hell, we may have even let him keep the car if he was honest. We knew he lied about the car, so logic dictated that we search back towards Mysh. We found his hatchback about five minutes later, crashed on a fence in Pushtoshka, in need of one wheel. And so ended the saga of GeHka, The Cagey Russian. We didn't want to kill him, but he just wouldn't cooperate...

What did you mean by farms with balloons? The big, white, water towers?

I try to get as close as I can, and then shout "Greetings, Survivor. I mean you no ill-will." It usually works out alright, as long as I'm not looking for friends in a place where everyone goes to look for trouble. A few days ago, we were role-playing police in Berezino. We would restrain people, put them in the jail, and explain that we are posted here to defend high-value public assets and keep order. It was mostly a protective custody type thing, where we would feed and water the prisoners while trying to capture or kill anyone shooting at civilians. Some people refused to follow lawful orders, and force had to be used.

Do you have a compass @eXXonWaldez?

That's gonna be one hell of a topic. The .59 experimental discussion made it to 102 pages in a little over two months, six pages in the first day. I think we can do better than that.

How far do you plan to go, with regards to vehicle parts and fluids? Will we eventually have to collect 4 spark plugs, a full set of distributor wires, a radiator, and so forth? Is there going to be any reliable way of recovering/towing vehicles? Are there any plans to better support kidnapping, such as putting people inside the trunk/boot of the sedan? Perhaps we could tie a rope onto a prisoner's bound wrists, and drag them through the woods with a bag over their head?

Because THAT is the first, best, and only place to find all of the freshest official DayZ news; not these-here official forums, no sir. I'm still compulsively checking the bugtracker in anticipation. It's still down for maintenance. They wouldn't release .60 to experimental without a working bugtracker, would they?

I thought I already mentioned the easy proof that adaptive camera movements were in the game. Driving through bushes is the best example I've found, where the camera draws-in much closer to the player. And we all know how useless 3pp is when tree-sitting. The camera just needs to perch up on one shoulder or the other when the player is very close to cover.

You might even say that it is super, duper, rare...

I would definitely have a use for tow chains.

I won't pretend to know how it can be most efficiently made that the camera follow distance is to be made directly proportional to the player's distance from an object, but I do think this is the better (only) option to improve 3pp function. The occlusion thing, to me, is a non-start. Picture a situation in which one is crouching behind a dumpster in an open lot. Directly centered in the occluded LOS shadow created by the dumpster is a player, laying down in the open. The observing player stands up, and has a very wide view of the area in question, yet the dumpster still casts a LOS shadow onto the area containing the player. The player goes from prone to crouch; does only the upper half of him render, leaving a man with no waist visible to the player, partially occluded by the LOS shadow? The observing player returns to a crouch, while the observed player pops out of existence because the dumpster is now casting a 'taller' shadow over the area. The observed player stands up. The observing player slowly moves back from the dumpster, until the head of the observed player is no longer within the shrinking LOS shadow cast out by the dumpster. Shall the observer see only the head of the player, or will the whole body be rendered? Did we just defeat the purpose of LOS occlusion? The very nature of having the camera separate from the player creates these gray zones that can be seen by the camera, but are not within the direct LOS of the player. So there will inevitably be many cases where the player is using the camera to observe an area outside the direct LOS, but the game will not render anyone until camera and LOS are redundant on that zone. There will be a certain point where something within the observed field of the camera, will no longer be "in the shadows" and the game will have to render it as if it appeared out of nothing. I don't see any way to avoid this problem, and this is why this kind of solution hasn't already been used. I like the idea of having contextual camera setbacks, but I don't know how this would best be achieved. My immensely labor intensive ides, would be to paint concentric rings around every structure in the game, determining three different distances for camera setback, dependent on which band of proximity to objects the player is standing within. Aside from the labor involved in hand-designating these zones around every object on the map, I imagine another layer of the map would have some effect on the resources used. If everything on the map already has a hitbox that can be used to designate areas where camera needs to draw-in tighter to the player, then it may just be a matter of giving the camera a simple means of deciding how far the player is from an object. I know that the same thing already happens whenever I drive a car through a bush; the chase-cam jumps right into the back seat. This might actually be a very easy to implement improvement if the camera already has this capability. But then we start getting to that claustrophobia that people were trying to avoid by using 3pp in the first place.

If I somehow missed a large chunk of understanding how such a dynamic player/AI occluder would work, please explain it to me. As it stands, there will have to be a point at which a player becomes invisible; once the conditions for occlusion are met. There is no way to combat wall/roof peeking by occlusion, without having a visible player abruptly become invisible, or otherwise. It is intrinsic to the 3pp camera mode, that the camera will "see" more than the player's LOS will allow; this will invariably create zones that the camera looks at, which the player cannot see. These areas will have boundaries, and it is on those boundaries that players will have to come into visual existence to the camera. How can this "event horizon" be made less abrupt? By quickly scaling the opacity of the player as they move into view? By abruptly popping into view from thin air? Will a bright flash of light herald their coming into view? You can say that it is a bad argument, and that a professional team should be able to make a smooth transition into view, but without any assertion as to how it can be done, the idea is still just as bad. Pilgrim's idea based on scaling the camera distance dynamically, based on terrain, would work, but it would require tagging every walkable surface in a somewhat complex manner. Think of a rock or a parked car; the ground around it would have to be tagged to draw-in the camera closer to the player, but only if one is looking in the direction of the obstruction; roofs would be easier. This method might work, without having an "event horizon," but I don't know how expensive it would be to implement.

The only way I have imagined, that would make the 3pp fair, would be to render the floating camera behind and above players. I understand that occluding players and AI based on LOS is an option, but I think it is a pretty poor option. We would have people complaining in droves about players disappearing in front of their eyes; players' legs getting occluded when they ran past short cover, strobing in-and-out of existence as they flee through the woods; and I can't even imagine the graphical mess that it would cause when vehicles are involved. Sorry @Kohlbar, but I think that tightening the camera to the player is the only realistic solution for wall/roof peeking, and that has already happened to some degree. It's a classic dilemma, hence the divestment into two different games; one, a claustrophobic survival simulator, and the other, a post apocalyptic RTS shooter. Thanks for trying.

Bow drill? I'll see it when I believe it.

We could use this thread as an opportunity to try and fill up a 1pp public server on this next patch. I know I'm in the market for a more populated home server next time around, and 1pp would be great if we could get some bodies on the map. I would play on DUG much more if they had another server or two, so I didn't have to wait half an hour to get a slot on the server. I like 1pp play, but I have already spent far too much time playing on empty servers. If there was a 1pp official server, with apromise from the devs that it will stay up for an entire patch, then I would gladly make it my home. As things stand now, I'm probably leaning towards playing as a hoarder/mechanic on a full public server like pimpsy's loot mania. If we can get some people interested in 1pp this go around, I'll stake a claim on a server and hope it has decent traffic for a few months

Since my last post about public servers disappearing, I have moved all of my play to official servers--thinking for some reason that they'd be more stable. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that the official servers should be adequately available over time and running properly. In the last two weeks, I have had two official servers on which I was playing, go dark. I was under the impression that the officail servers such as"DayZ US Central 1-55" and "DayZ US East 1-58" were supposed to be the ones that GSP's had to keep up and running as part of their contractual obligation for the right to rent out other servers for this game. Needless to say, I am more than disappointed. How can I be expected to give reliable feedback about the game, when I can't even reliably use the same server for more than a couple weeks? Unless I can host my own server on my own hardware, and be solely responsible for my satisfaction with the server uptime and availability, it is imperative that the "official servers" be offered and maintained consistently. As stated in my previous post about servers going dark, the continued functionality and availability of officail public servers is an absolutely necessary part of making the game playable. This issue is separate from the core development process, in that we don't have to wait for a new engine module. I believe that there is already an existing agreement between BI and their selected server hosting companies, all that is missing is enforcement of the contractual obligations upon those companies. Can't somneone at BI just write a few emails to these companies and see why they can't keep a server running. I will add that after a week or two on these servers, two things seem to happen. Lootbombs start showing up and bogging down sections of the map. And in the case of my most recent lost server, 1-55, the population would start to increase. In fact, once 1-55 became full of players, it would shut down more than once an hour. I'm REALLY interested to learn what the problem is here. Is it something about the game that is too hard on the servers, are the server hosting companies simply skimping on resources? I spent a considerable amount of time this weekend setting up high value supply drops, and recording the coordinates, only to find that the server that I'd used to prepare these "treasure maps" is no longer accessible. And yes, I know it might be mere days before the wipe, that's the problem. All the time I had spent collecting this stuff and scattering it around the map is now void, I don't even get to use anything myself, other than what's on my back. TLDR: Even "officail" servers cannot be trusted to stay up, this is unacceptable. Without proper oversight of officail servers, DayZ becomes more like an ironic, long-form exercise in masochism. People are being paid to make sure these servers are available, and they are failing.

It seems like a marginal difference between BI asking for an official server to be taken down for inspection, versus the SP simply renting it out at random. As always, thanks for doing the digging.