micalo

I am sure it has been suggested somewhere else and explained in more detail: the possibility to recognize players (yes, in a way it could not be abused to spot enemies easily) the game tries to achieve some realism in a lot of aspects; you can customize your character - but in the end with no effect. I think this would help much more with the problem of kill on sight than any other difficulties of survival. edit: ok, it seems a bit off topic - but in the end it could also help to spread the ppl on the map and stop killing of bambies, if they have the possiblity to recognize you. in the way that your decision on how to approach other survivors has more weight. There are too many incentives to kill the other (gear, food,...) but nothing that rewards you for being friendly, and therefore you have to find better weapons quickly...

every other month I have a discussion about this with my brother: what is really happening in DayZ, is there actually some real progress, and are there chances it will be finished at all? In this discussion I like to point out how well an other early-access backer-founded game is doing - it's a pleasure to read star citizen status updates, and exciting to follow the little pieces of released content... one difficulty of DayZ is surely, that "the game was already there, so give us some bug fixes and we are happy!" of course it cannot work like that, and I do not want to complain here about the numerous bugs still present in the game... but (yes, it is one of those but's...) it is the way the game is presented that makes me doubting that the persons in charge have a clue what they are doing. how many official pages are there about DayZ? there is a developer blog at http://dayzdev.tumblr.com/last entry April 18., it does not point to another blog/forum whatever - did the development just stop? I can imagine the developers have more important things to do than to blog, but dont just leave it like that there is dayz.com/dev-hub which is apparently the same as www.dayzgame.com/dev-hub, and who would expect https://store.bistudio.com/products/dayz to point to at least to one of them? It states: "We estimate that reaching Beta version with all key features present will take more than one year from current stage. " but wise enough they did not give a date for this statement. www.dayzgame.com shows a "Development Timeline" - no, it is a calendar, where someone sloppily added one re-occuring entry for "scheduled maintainance" until May 2016 - probably they don't know what a timeline is? But no, there is this other timeline (.../dev-hub), which has a marker for the Beta version sadly in distant future, but fair enough, delays in sw-development happen. But uuuups- it reveals how DayZ is moving into 2015 (sic!), with Q4 we are already in the beta, riding our air vehicles... and that the new renderer was planned to be finished half a year ago... wait, according to the status report from October 15.: "As of this report the Engine team is focused on post processes and making sure that we have visual parity (making sure the visual quality is at least the same as the original renderer). Once that is done they'll be focusing on optimizations and multi threading. This will require a good amount of QA time before it hits experimental, but as we've said before - we need to have a visible improvement on performance when it hits experimental." I understand it is more exciting to build a new renderer on your own than to do other coding tasks, but was it really necessary for this game, why o why just don't use/license an existing one and use this effort for other issues? ( or is this just bi-studio politics? ) players were looking forward to store things in tents, and have better means to cross the islands than running - but no, we find new ways how you can force feed each other with rotten food or bqq from your friends corpse, and start presenting new ideas like that probably in the future you could get a disease from that, or you would need to build your own tooth brush to prevent your teeth from rotting in your mouth. no, at this point all these new ideas how to have an even more complicated life, and half-yearly updates on the status of the renderer do not make me excited at all. ... These discussions usually end with him noting that beside all of these problems he already had more fun with DayZ SA than with SC or other finished games, and it is true. it is just the way the game and its progress is presented is disastrous does not help to encourage confidence in the project. (edit: disastrous is certainly too harsh)

first, the fact you disagree with something does not make it gibberish, trying to win an argument doing so does not help the discussion. second, analogies can be helpful, but it is easy to get carried away just for the sake of applying an analogy. But let's hope you are right and this work was finished a couple of months ago, and even more: that we see soon something of it!

actually you are the first refering to this :) I would say: creating some renderer is not particularly difficult or time consuming - but creating an efficient one, more performant than the existing, is another thing. moreover: it is software development, the newly written and never tested component will have new problems. To refer to your analogy: If you want to build a car, and you start to manufacture complex components like the motor yourself, you will never finish. There is a reason why designing new motors is not done in every garage around the corner, but by companies with a lot of experience. And you have to be aware of what is your core compentence, and what you want to achieve (at least the customers supporting your project assume this is a running car, and not new motor) so maybe you should analyse what your requirements for the car are, and then select the best matching motor. yes, you will have to do adjustments, maybe it will not be easy - you struggle with that tube located at this f.. place where it does not fit in your system. But probably there was a reason to put it there, and designing your own motor to fit your car leads to the same problems the old car had to struggle with. I don't say swapping the renderer is a simple task and quickly acomplished - but I just don't see how building a new renderer helps in this regard

my point was not to start a war SC vs DayZ, but the comparison is an interesting one because both are funded by a fanbase, but progress in a diametrical way. neither I tried to say that star citizen will succeed, and dayz fail, but I do like the way they manage and communicate things better... regarding lags: they released the dog fighting module where they had to struggle with "rubber banding" effects, actually I do not know if they are completely resolved yet, because my PC is to slow for it anyway... nevertheless, they have a plan how they release their modules and test functionality I guess at the moment there is nothing interesting to get there for hackers, and they will have to deal with this later -we will see how they are up to this

professional complainer, hmm, sounds interesting :D and apart all complaints, proposed alternatives like ARK etc are lacking one important thing: zombies dayz was always more zombie apocalypse than survival game for me...

I agree with you that letting players see the game so early was quite daring, and that a lot of players have difficulties to understand that. this thread was not intended to be a complaint about being abused as alpha testers(because yes, we are) or robbed of money. Dean Hall had some great ideas and his dedication for his mod created something unique and great fun, I guess he would have made a fabulous creative director, but in my opinion it was a big error to make him the team leader. constantly new ideas to improve the survival aspect and more sophisticated simulations, it is nice for brainstorming and innovation, but at some point you should agree what you want to achieve when... the second mistake was trying to create an own graphics engine - maybe this makes sense for bi-studios, to use part of the money from dayz to create a newer engine - for the game itself it does not, and draws effort from other tasks. finally, all the things i pointed out earlier might seem pedantic... who cares about an abandoned blog? - no one, as long everything runs well. but it also leaves the impression of a lack of organisation. we dont know anything about the team, I guess it`s rather small and they do their best - but they should try to focus their resources - a facebook profile, really? in this sense I welcome the statement in the last status report that they want to do it more informal, - less can be more - but i hope they don`t skip the bigger picture completely

I agree that presentation does not equal realisation, but if realisation lacks, it is important that you show that you a) have a plan, b ) know how you can achieve it... if you have a blog, you should update or quit it, if you present a timeline, it should be a timeline, and you should update, or remove it mumbles why bother answering to a thread if you dont take the time to read it

already while you were writing this I realized that disastrous is too harsh, and leaves a not-at-all constructive note... but I think the game could do much better if they put more effort in presenting it, and to clearly define the focus and step-by-step goals of the game would have helped a lot to shape expectations and most of the issues I have pointed out could be solved quickly...

I don't know about arma 3 mods, I have only played the dayz mod, because it was a nice zombie apocalypse, that's why I supported the SA game (it was a mod, so expectations lower, and there are already enough threads discussing how good/bad it actually was )

according to the "project timeline" today is scheduled maintainance, whatever that means - maybe it is related to that

I would prefer to be able to take notes, if someone is close enough and in my line of sight... "guy gave me a bandage", maybe to see existing notes on players I can see i have to open a notebook?