ColdAtrophy

You've won me over. Anything that makes using the awesome light sources in the game a bit more viable is a win in my books. You are also talking more about he experience of looting and the authenticity that you want it to carry I think, and again I would have to agree that in that sense, the vicinity window does take something away from the experience. Not everyone is going to feel that way about it though and that may include the designers. Just keep that in mind.

I guess I just don't see what the vicinity window takes away from the experience. Do you think people would be less likely to take everything that isn't nailed to the floor? I don't. People would adapt and still take anything of value.

I don't.....I can't......This much stupid in one post hurts too much. EDIT: Here. http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/224905-hordes-of-infectedfinally/ Read my last two posts to PlasticAssasin8 at the bottom of the page. Maybe some of that will make sense to you. It's tiring to feel compelled to say the same things over and over.

You do realize that we have only gotten maybe 25% at best of the work the devs have done so far into Stable right? I didn't spell it out above but the idea is this: you can't put in half of a new module, like the renderer for example, and expect it to work either by itself or with the old graphics tech that is already in the engine. The major tech changes that they have had to make can only be implemented as an entire completed chunk. They can't put them in piecemeal. Scripting is easy. I'm a designer with little interest in programming and I will have to learn scripting. As a matter of fact, most designers end up spending the last couple of months before a game ships helping the team with the remaining scripting that needs to be done. Programming is not easy by comparison. It is the bedrock upon which all else rests and good programmers are not only hard to find but they are not cheap. I hate to break it to you, but $90 million is not that much. Not for game development that requires this level of polish and especially not for any MMO. Microsoft spent $90 million dollars on a Halo MMO and then they cancelled it. Skyrim cost $85 million and it didn't have a single scrap of multiplayer. It still took them 4 years to do it and they had tons of people working for them that had worked on previous entries in the series. They also didn't have an engine on their hands that had to be completely reworked from the ground up. EDIT: Oh yeah. Bethesda didn't also have to provide a playable game to the masses while they worked and got bitched at constantly. I'm sorry you didn't do more research before you bought the game. I wish more people hadn't bought this game on impulse without understanding what it was that they were actually getting in to. It would've made this whole process a bit easier on everyone who doesn't enjoy reading constant negativity directed at people who don't deserve it, not to mention the devs themselves. Come to think of it....didn't Rocket even tell people not to buy the SA? Based on my understanding of all this and what makes inherent sense when looking at the big picture, I would expect the following to be be true if I am correct about what is taking place in DayZ development: 1) Large chunk of time goes by with small changes that will easily be portable into new modules. This would mostly be art assets and other items that don't need major tech changes like buildings and weapons. While I've only been a DayZ player for a couple of months, I'm pretty sure this is the time period that the SA is right on the cusp of leaving. The major tech work is being done here but we won't see it until it is ready. 2) Major tech changes start getting implemented as those modules become completed and ready for stable. Each one will mark a massive jump forward for the game and open up tons of work for the designers. Each one may or may not appear to be a major change from the point of the player. In some cases, like the inventory matrix, it doesn't really look different 3) The race to beta begins. We will begin to see a faster tempo of visible changes that greatly impact the user experience. During this time period, most of the PVP focused players will leave, screaming as they go and harassing devs, I guarantee it. The forum mods will be quite busy and the graveyard will become so full that the servers crash. That last part was a joke.

I see stuff like this all the time and I have to point out the flaw in this thinking. My intention is not to be arrogant, but to help you understand why it seems simple but really isn't. First of all, scripting is a dirty add on kind of thing. The zombies of the mod were scripts. Everything that was not an existing part of the Arma 2 engine was run using scripts. The new zombies and their AI is being programmed as a part of the engine. The zombies and their behavior that we see now is not a simple, thrown together, tacked on thing but a hard programmed, integral part of the game. The real issue here is that the mod was exactly that: a mod. The engine could only handle so much. You run too many scripts and performance goes in the shitter. The limitations imposed because of the fact that it was a mod existing in an old engine not designed for this type of game and using an API that was current when Windows XP was released put the dev team in a position where they couldn't do all that the concept begged for. The only reasonable thing to do at that point was to either give up on the whole thing or redo the entire game from the ground up. BI chose the latter and decided to make an effort to keep the entire Franksteined together mess working and playable while they extracted pieces of the engine for replacement. So the short answer to your question is no. It's much, much more than that.

I bet you do just about whatever you want too. I live in a small city and I can't light a fire in the backyard without a permit from the fire department, shoot a rifle or even air rifle, light fireworks, play music loudly, etc. without it either being illegal or running the risk of someone calling in a complaint. My girlfriends parents live in a rural place up on a mountain like what you describe where they can only get satellite or cell internet and we stayed out there for about a month last year. It damn sure was fun having bonfires every night, growing all kinds of fresh veggies, shooting whatever whenever we felt like it, letting the dogs run till they passed out in the shade, and never having to worry about someone else raising a stink about play music out in the garage while I worked on the car. I also killed the first and only wild rattlesnake I had ever seen (sorry about that fella) and found a shit ton of scorpions which was actually pretty cool, imo. My dogs absolutely loved it and their personalities became more pronounced and they seemed to be more sure and protective after awhile which didn't go away when we moved back to civilization. If I could get cable internet out in a place like that, I'd never live within a mile of another human being again.

Lowering the scene complexity value in your config file alleviates the low FPS in cities issue. However, once you get to the point where your FPS is more acceptable to you, you will likely notice an enormous amount of pop in and texture flickering. This engine does not do occlusion culling in the way that modern games do. That's at least one reason why the new renderer is being implemented. It will render everything within a radius around you to the level of detail that you have specified in your graphics settings regardless of whether you can see those objects at all or not. I have an Intel i5-4690k @ 4.5ghz and a Gigabyte GTX 970. I have every setting maxed right now except for shadows, post processing, and objects (which is the in game setting that represents scene complexity in the cfg file). Since raising or lowering any one particular setting does not necessarily effect your overall usage in a linear fashion the way that you might expect from other games, I can turn resolution scale with these settings up to 125% and not lose frames, but going any higher with resolution set to 100% on any one of these settings will lower frames. I did a ton of testing and real time monitoring with the Rivatuner OSD lately to nail down the best settings for my rig. If any part of this doesn't make sense to you or you want to learn a little more, please ask me. I'm thinking about doing a little more testing and typing out an updated guide for everyone. I would have to install DayZ on my girlfriend's AMD laptop and repeat all of the testing to make sure that my findings thus far are reinforced by results even with totally different hardware.

I kinda think that this issue is one of alpha in that it will become less necessary as things like loot spawning on top each other and too close together get sorted out. Either way, even if I do pick up an item without the inventory open, I often immediately open the inventory just to be sure that I am satisfied with its placement.

I'm not sure I follow what it is exactly that you are trying to say. You are jumping around a lot and I'm not sure that I'm understanding the progression in your thoughts. Probably just me, and I'm not trying to insult you. I agree that the devs need feedback, but that doesn't mean that all feedback had merit. For example, I quite commonly see feedback like this: Zombies and the environment are too hard, not enough food, I'm having a hard time locating X item and this sucks so I quit, I can't PVP all day or as quickly anymore, please fix or I'm leaving. Do you understand why I find no merit whatsoever in statements like this? And please keep in mind that these are just a few examples and I am not attacking anyone specifically. We bought into an Early Access game with a very clearly defined road map. Things will change when they change and in accordance with the overall plan of the devs. Not sooner and not to our exact liking. We also bought into a pretty clearly defined kind of game. The official trailer for the game, something that even a casually interested individual with no knowledge of these forums is likely to see, describes the game as a survival horror MMO. Dig a little more and you find that the game is supposed to be hard, bordering on punishing, and not a giant map for shooter deathmatch. When the majority, and I don't use that word lightly, of negative feedback is irrelevant because they are complaints about the fundamental nature of what the game is supposed to be, it is almost impossible for me to take most of the people who complain seriously. If I go to McDonald's and order a Whopper, do I have a right to bitch at the guy behind the cash register that he is trying to give me a Big Mac?

There are quite a few around Myshenko and the military tent compound, particularly if you are driving the dirt roads coming from the North.

And monitor temps. He might be getting too close to TJmax and throttling is kicking in.

I have a 970 and I'm now running almost every setting at max, but I had to bump my i5-4690k to 4.5ghz to make it work. I guess my FPS avergae would be around 40, 60 out in the wilderness areas, and 25-40 in cities. Believe it or not, adding an FPS limiter through Rivatuner with Vsync turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle for mouse response, "smoothness" even at lower FPS, and overall playability.

You are going to have to provide a lot more information than that. Desktop or laptop?Monitor resolution:CPU:Graphics card:RAM:*SSD? (Yes/No) You absolutely cannot compare any released game to DayZ and say "I can run X game at Y settings, so I should be able to play DayZ". There is no comparison to be made. That fully released game has not only been optimized by the dev, but your GPU manufacturer has optimized your driver for the game as well.

I would have to agree. Even a desktop Intel dual core struggles. A laptop AMD dual core under 2.0ghz base might catch fire trying to run this.

What will happen to an AKM or an AK101 that has a PSO-1 scope attached when .56 hits Stable? How about a Mosin that has an LRS on it? I heard that the Mosin used to accept a bipod, so I'm guessing some of you out there have some experience with changes of this type.

SMoss already specifically and directly confirmed this. No need to wonder or get your hopes up that you might get to keep your stuff. Absolutely no player data of any kind will survive this wipe. http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/224793-looks-like-56-will-be-a-character-wipesaw-msg-in-server-earlier/page-2#entry2260679

I still disagree with a lot of what you said, but I feel like I made my point, you made yours, and no one had to resort to ad hominems or have posts hidden by mods. For the internet, that's something special. I disagree with you on such a fundamental level that I don't see any way of continuing the conversation. We basically disagree on everything that has happened since day one. You see this as some massive blunder that you paid for and I see this as the culmination of all that games are capable of but have not yet reached. Perhaps I do sometimes get emotional about video games. This is my passion. I eat, shit, and breathe video games every single day of my life and I am not in the slightest bit ashamed of it. If I'm not playing, I'm working on my degree in Game Design. I'm no expert but I've demonstrated to myself and to others that I do have the fundamental creative capacity and background in the medium to not only be able to create games that are fun and worthwhile but to analyze games in a way that gets to the very core of what makes them tick (not talking about programming at all here). Based on everything I have seen, this game is on track to become legendary. The biggest hits are never wholly unique. They are never formed of completely new mechanics the world has never seen before. They tend to be an excellent combination of things we've probably seen many times over in other games but not in this particular execution, with this particular design style, with this theme, with this set of mechanics, etc. Maybe DayZ doesn't do tons of things that no game has ever done before in a technical sense, but what it does do is combine many things that we have never seen together in quite this way. Not even on PC. Can you imagine what a console gamer is going to do when he finds this game in his PSN store and plays it for the first time? It's gonna spread like wildfire. The console market is going to eat this game up like nothing we've seen in a long time and that's because the consoles have never been able to experience anything even remotely close to this. The console market is so stale and stagnant that a game of this size, scope, and complexity with this level of replay value will have people throwing bills at their TV screens and screaming for more. You can suggest I'm tricking myself if you like "to avoid uncomfortable questions", but I can say, with utmost certainty, that I do not arrive at conclusions without careful considerations of all sides of a situation. There are no "uncomfortable questions" for me to ask because, despite my interest in this game and the fact that I want it to succeed, my happiness does not hinge on the success or failure of DayZ. I was just too drunk to play (for the first time in years) when I posted the OP and wanted to talk to other people on the DayZ forums who might feel just as excited as I am about the future. Silly me. I can't find any reason to support the negativity I see around the internet towards these devs and this game. People miss the fact that there is an opposite to the hype train and it can be just as alluring and intoxicating AND without any real merit whatsoever.

I'm beginning to see a pattern here. It's okay. It's not necessarily your fault. It's just that you, and many others like you, have no idea what the devs have actually been doing while it looks like not much has changed on our end. The part that is the fault of average annoyed DayZ customer is that they choose not to read what the devs write. All of what I'm going to touch on here is based on information that the devs have posted right in front of our faces. Building an engine from the ground up is tough, extremely complex, and requires programmers who really are masters of their craft. You know what's even harder than that though? Having to start with an old engine and replace pieces of it one chunk at a time so that you can maintain a playable build for the consumer base of Early Access. Essentially, they took the ancient tech from the mod as a base so people could keep playing it as they made the necessary changes. They already had a difficult task (building a new engine) and in an effort to keep our interest and the project funded as they set about doing this the best way they could, they were forced to start building the new engine around an outdated core. They can't implement a new renderer piecemeal. It's all or nothing. The same can be said of the other major tech changes coming down the pipeline. Once those major hurdles are cleared, the rest of this will snap together by comparison. So maybe you haven't seen a ton of progress since the mod, but what sense does it make to work on, say, improving the graphics when the current renderer is getting ripped out anyway since it can't do all that they hope to accomplish? And what else could they do in the meantime while the code monkeys bang away at their keyboards with caffeine IV drips hooked up? All they could do is exactly what they have done. Add weapons, add some buildings, work on spawns, and so on. These are all things that can transfer with relative ease regardless of major changes in the engine. I'm sure my optimism will have me labeled as a fanboy either now or in the future, but I really don't feel like that is the case. Am I a little biased in their favor? Absolutely. But it isn't blind bias. I'm looking at the same exact stuff that you have access to and drawing from my own education and knowledge to come to a very different conclusion. Everything I see from BI simply makes sense. I just can't help but try to show people that things are not anywhere near as bad as some of you seem to think. I know that you know that DayZ is in alpha, but do you really know what that actually means? Do you actually understand how monumental of a task it is that BI has undertaken here? In what way do you think they could have done better? You want them to get it done faster? What about when faster means more likely broken? After all, if they rush the extraction and upgrades of the various components of the engine, what else could we really expect?

Exactly. You get precisely where I'm coming from. A lot of games have told us that they we were being given tons of choices and could make our own story, but DayZ actually fully gives us that. I have several very distinct memories of crazy stuff happening that was completely unexpected and jarring. There was one time where Biohaze and I tried to meet up in Elektro when we spawned in on experimental. I had a glow stick going so he could see me more easily. No one else was on the server and I don't like messing with the gamma so, whenever possible, I use the lighting options available to us. Anyway, I see something chasing him and I assumed it was a zombie and told him so. Then, as I got closer, I realized that it was a person and I told Biohaze to run. The unknown guy definitely had something in his hands but I really couldn't see what it was. I began to run the opposite direction as I turned off my glow stick and then I ran into the police station, closing the door behind me. The only "weapon" I had was a gardening hoe. I put it in my hands and hoped like hell that the dude didn't follow me. Then I heard the door open. I panicked pretty hard at this point. I hadn't even gotten healthy yet. The asshole ran into the very room I had chosen to hide in with an ax raised and I swung like crazy, treating him like a 0.54 zombie (since those were the only things I had ever fought before with melee weapons) and swung, sidestepped, swung, juked some more and before I knew it I was beating the shit out of a dead body. I wasn't sure when to stop swinging. I was actually shaky for a few minutes after from the adrenaline kick. A game made my brain engage a genuine fight or flight response. These devs know exactly what they are doing.

I get that I'm being completely subjective. After all, there are tons of people out there who love basketball games, for example, and I can't stand sports video games even though I like to play sports IRL. That said, for the past few years I have been thinking heavily on the topics of immersion in gameplay and how every minor detail in the game itself either lends to or takes away from the state of immersion. In this time, I began to wish for a game that really focuses on drawing you into the game world rather than the usual AAA checklist of features. Even in games that I have absolutely loved, I never get the feeling that immersion is pursued in the way that BI is doing with DayZ. For the first time in a video game, I am made to have genuine feelings like anger, fear, anxiety, joy, and regret and there is not one single spoken word of dialogue, hardly a scrap of lore or story, and absolutely no hand holding whatsoever. The game gets the hell out of your way and lets you not just play, but experience in a way that nothing else ever has even come close to for me. I have never once really cared about my avatar's death in a game, not really. You load your last checkpoint or save and try again in modern gaming. I have never felt genuine anger and regret at another player after being forced to kill them. I would have never expected to be quite so happy to find what would ultimately be graphical assets and not usuable items in other games like a battery, a cooking pot, or a raincoat. I've never felt like someone was looking over my shoulder and felt the slow creep of anxiety from looting a location knowing a clock was ticking before another survivor shows ready to fight to the death over a box of 20 rounds or a can of peaches in any other game. I've never felt this level of concern for an injured friend and brought them back from the brink of death in any other game. I've never felt the panic stricken desperation and certainty that this is the end in any other game like I did when I was in Cernaya Polana and forgot to restock my rags, began bleeding from zombie attacks, got separated from my partner, and at least 20 zombies attacked over the course of about 1 minute. These kinds of experiences are just the beginning and I am already hopelessly hooked on this game. The devs are nailing every note in my opinion and the roadmap looks like everything I would do if I was in their place. I've only been playing this game for 3 months and I can tell you right now that there is a good chance I will still be playing it in 3 years. After all, I still fire up Diablo 1 for the procedurally generated dungeon every so many years. I still play old Gameboy games on an emulator like Golden Sun, Pokemon, Castlevania, and Metroid. I still play Borderlands 1 and am still working on a Psycho character in Borderlands 2 only now on PC rather than Xbox 360. I recently snagged Morrowind for PC even though I have played it many, many times on the original Xbox so I can get involved with Skywind. I'm on my ?th playthrough of the ME trilogy. I honestly don't know how many times I have played through each game with a different character. At least 20 but I hesitate to put a number on it. Anyway, my point is that what DayZ aims to accomplish is every single bit as important to gaming as any one of those titles I just mentioned. I feel sorry for the people who lack the insight to recognize that.

You were referring to Biohaze's previous statements directly and doing it in a condescending, rude way. If everyone on this board was discussing the potential mechanics of this game in a strictly imaginative way and we were in beta or after release, then I might agree with some of your sentiments. However, this is alpha. Despite this fact being thrown around a lot, I often get the sense that many of the people on the forums have no real idea what it actually means. In relation specifically to video games, when the software is in alpha, features are being implemented. Once the game hits beta, the features and mechanics of the game are generally locked in, barring some major changes that may need to be made as a result of bugs or new information from testing, and then the devs begin squashing every bug they can find. So, not only is this the stage to discuss the implementation of features on our end, but the devs do it too and I can guarantee you that Biohaze, who has been posting in this forum for years now and hanging on every word the devs type hoping for a glimpse of the future, is not simply pulling the ideas he is talking about from his ass. Since you don't know him like I do, please allow me to do some of the legwork for you and quell your negativity. Stamina bar in new HUD: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/224386-dayz-sa-hud-concept(Directly from devs) Weight system: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/220780-status-report-17-feb-15/(Directly from devs) "Total weight that character is carrying around will be used later to modify his stamina value." That took all of 30 seconds to find references directly from the devs. If they aren't sure whether something will be in the game, they either say nothing at all about it or say that it is unlikely as we have seen from Eugen many times in response to player requests. If they are talking about it at all, that is pretty good evidence that implementation of said mechanic is being discussed internally and steps are being taken to deem whether or not the mechanic is viable, if not even possibly already in some internal build branch. If they were more loose lipped, people would be even worse to them than they already are with the "but you said X thing was going to happen [maybe] and it didn't so fuck you!" crap that has infested dev to player interactions on the internet. I made the original statement that DayZ SA is the greatest game ever made, by which, as you can see if you read my OP, I mean that this game has nearly limitless potential and, as I am now adding since I find it incredibly relevant, a dev team that is not afraid to do things that may alienate the AAA crowd. The immersion, attention to detail, confirmed changes and implementation of features, new tech, etc. all have me dreaming of a fantastic zombie apocalypse sim, something that the world has never seen before. You are entitled to your opinion, but no one is entitled to being ignorant. Now can you quit with the petty bickering so this discussion can continue until the next guy comes along trying to be disruptive?

Time to go out with a bang then.

From the wiki - "It has a variable magnification from 2.08-7.5x but starts out at 2.34x." http://dayz.gamepedia.com/Long_Range_Scope Since you guys brought it up, I decided to look into it. I thought the LRS was 8x. Can't wait to put the new hunting scope on the CR527 carbine. I love the gun already, but giving it a scope is definitely going to make it much more viable of a weapon choice, even if your character is geared. Hopefully it isn't completely overshadowed by the new Winchester rifle.

My server is down right now too. I thought Eugen said they were all done with the weekly maintenance. EDIT: Actually, he hasn't said everything is done yet. So I'm guessing they will be up again Soonish™.

I never really got to experience the first two Doom games in their original context. I find that sometimes games are harder to appreciate once they are long past the time period in which they were relevant, mostly for technical reasons and the fact that success encourages emulation. That in turn means that I've experienced a lot of what an older game has to offer and then some, generally with improvements of some kind. For example, when I used to play Halo, I played 3 for years. Once Reach came out and then I got into BF too, I found it difficult to go back and enjoy the lack of customization options that I had began to get accustomed to in the newer titles. Still fun, but not quite as robust as it seemed in the time period when it was new. And that is a more tame example. Sometimes the disparity is much greater. Most gamers would probably cry foul over my opinion here, but I'm probably not explaining it quite well enough. At any rate, Doom 3 is one of my top 10 favorite games of all time. I fully understand why Doom 1 & 2 were so popular and beloved. They were major breakthroughs in gaming, giving birth to an entire genre, and wholly unique in their time. Doom 3 scared the crap out of me and was absolutely fantastic for immersion and visuals. The BFG edition was a lot of fun to play through again too.