EpicTickles

Hi DayZ community! Even tough I am a very old dayz fan, I just decided now to make an account on the forums, because I feel like the future is very uncertain for my favorite game. I would like to start by saying that I've played dayz mod for over 2000hours and when DayzSA came out, I was more than excited to buy it. I currently have about 1000hours of DayZ and I've seen this game in better or worse times. In real life, I work in software development for one of the biggest companies in the world and even tough I worked on many projects so far, I don't understand where DayZ is going project wise. Why are you guys concentrating on adding new content in game, while the public is screaming for performance issues? The game as it is right now, has more than enough content to play around with, as a player, for hours and hours. Is there any plan in the future for addressing: 1. desync issues 2. fps issues? I am more than 100% sure that if you guys would address these 2 major issues currently in the game, content would not even be in the minds of many players. One other thing that I've been having lots of problems with, gameplay wise, is body collision. Since fighting a zombie with a melee weapon is not really a viable option anymore, body collision can be a very annoying factor that will have the final word in your survival, or just getting trapped in a place. Don't you think disabling this until finding a solution or forever would be a better decision? The last thing I would want to put on the table is the zeds animations. In the past, I really loved the fact that zed hits were well synced with the animations. Right now, I see an animation and get hit 3 times. Will this be fixed? No matter what, I still love this game, but guys, whoever the project manager is for this, I think he/she should rethink a bit his/her priorities, as dayz is loosing public hard lately and this also means less $$ for you guys. I want to enjoy the game again and I have faith that you will make the right decisions in the future!

The truth is that the feeling that dayz mod gave me the first time i've played it was incomparable with anything else, even in early stages of development. Dayz SA has many strong points, but in my opinion, it just doesn't deliver what I would expect after 2 years(ha I said it again)

People still fail at understanding that the computer games industry is a business... At least I can still see that there are some who don't!

Well of course you haven't... I don't understand what you mean about the grammar? Lesson in humility? What for? Sorry for the fact that I'm trying not to be like a common sheep, but as I stated before: smart people take what they consider to be good from this thread and discard the rest. And then there are those who will still wonder even in a few months about the comma placed wrong...

The community is the reason dayz exists! DayZ mod was created by the community! Dean Hall started as a common member of this community.

I totally agree. If you go back to post 1 you will see that I am pretty much asking some questions and then express my doubt about the managers of this project. That's all I needed, but it would have been rude not to reply to some of the people that asked me different questions afterwards. After all, what I say is my opinion and intelligent people take what they need from that and discard the rest...

If you are curious about finding out something new, it's called basic business applied psychology. Let me give you an example how this is done: you have a discussion with a potential buyer for a product but you feel that the customer might try to find excuses for not paying you for what you are about to deliver. While you present all the powerful sides of your product, you slip between the lines minor downsides of it. If you see that the customer is more interested in "shinning" the small bad parts of your product, rather than actually paying attention and asking more questions about the powerful parts that would normally impact his business, you are most of the times dealing with a person that is looking for excuses not to pay you the full worth of your product or at all! On the internet, the most obvious people that I can bring you out are the so called "grammar nazies". They are the ones that would rather post 10 pages of you placing a comma wrong, rather than a single post on the topic. Now go back on this page and look how many fell for it... Draw your own conclusions...

Sacha, this is a general discussion part of the forum, where everybody is free to express their opinions, being them good or bad. I got some of the information I needed and will use that in the benefit of both the project and the survival games communities. If every developer would treat every bug as people's whining, where would we end up into? I always say something to the people on the game communities I am into: "if you have fun and it makes you happy, do whatever it takes!". So in your case, if you enjoy the game, keep playing it!

I just hope that after an alpha of more than two years, there won't be a beta of 2 more... I'm pretty sure you KNOW better what is the REAL stage of this project and I hope you CARE about reaching a point of delivering the most awesome survival game ever made. Because in the end, no matter the money earned, if this game comes out as a joke(which I hope it will not happen), you will always be labeled by the community as a part of the joke! Of course, that, if you care... All the best to you!

I really hope with all my heart that you are right, pretty as much as I am hoping for the new renderer to have a huge positive effect on the game, for both the project's sake and the gamers that still hope. All the best, Epic

When I currently play the game, it crashes if I try to play for more than an hour and then disconnect or if I try to change any video setting from a higher option to a lower one. I disagree with a game needing to run at 60fps or above, but stating that on a medium-top end computer it is normal for the product to run at 10-15 fps in certain conditions(e.g. cities) for a long period of time and not only spikes is a bit fictional... Also, another really bothering issue is the desync. Every player wants to enjoy the game they are playing in a fair environment(no cheaters, no glitches that might give advantage to others). DayZ currently performs very poorly in this chapter, as on any server you would connect, unless it is running in "your backyard", you will always encounter periods of desync that give moving entities a clear advantage over stationary ones. Please don't tell me the solution is to move all the time... :) In one of my streaming sessions, I will collect as many blockers and critical bugs as I can and will send them to feedback.dayzgame.com just to have a good contribution to this project, but I will also post their responses and steps taken into solving those in the forum and on the dayz social sites I am a member of, so that I have a positive contribution to the gaming community too. Seems fair?

In beta, if you have a game which is "feature complete", but performs poorly in means of crashes, memory leaks, low fps, or any type of blockers, that game should not be yet in beta. In a traditional beta, the game only needs polishing and minor bug fixing. In DayZ's case, I think we can all agree that we are not talking about a traditional development project as public would normally NOT have access to the game in this phase, but in beta. Unfortunately the truth is that without the "early access alpha" marketing term, we would have never had dayz, as I'm sure no company would pump money into an "unsure" product for 2 years. There is also a big difference between fans and fan-kids/fan-boys as the second category is an internet slang used for those that ignore true facts no matter what in the benefit of their belief... Which truly are you?

Hi Beav, I used to work in development and now I do work as a PM in software industry. I am far from an expert as I like to think there is always something to learn. Developers do not take decisions in a development process, even tough they help a lot into making these...

In traditional development cycles it works fine. The problem with the dayz project is that if they don't keep a balance between the performance and content, it will be almost impossible to get performance in the end without sacrificing content. I hope it will not be the case, but bear this in mind and contradict me afterwards if it will not be like this: the new engine is the hope that still keeps many people thinking this still has a chance. If it will not make a miracle, this game will never reach release stage!

Many opinions and I appreciate all of them, but I will tell you my personal one: if the new engine doesn't do some kind of miracle, this game has no chance to go in a traditional beta until the end of the year(if at all). I love the game don't get me wrong, but the reference to the poor project management that I've made was there for a reason! On a game that can "barely breathe" because of poor optimization(the engine), you don't start loading the map even more with apartment blocks and huge cities! Most survival fans would prefer a rugged countryside with small but many villages rather than apartment blocks. It is not that they are not nice, but the engine is just too overloaded for such things. Most of the gamers appreciate much more a stable game with decent fps over an unstable one with better graphics and much more content. Just because WITHOUT PERFORMANCE YOU CANNOT ENJOY THE CONTENT!

I just hope, in the beta release, the game will be playable. Until then, there are worst alternatives which perform better so for now I will go with performance > content. DayZ is a game too great not to be optimized correctly in the future.

Elevators and printers, don't use windows 10, so I disagree...

You are partially right. In beta, the game is almost complete, the development team only dealing with the minor bugs remaining. The performance issues present currently in dayz are critical and are definitely not to be left for beta in a traditional project. What most of you don't see is that the "alpha" term is used in this situation as a cover-up for the extremely poor decision of relying on arma 2 engine for such a complex game. Why do you think Dean left? :))) But I think I am explaining things to fan-kids, so I will stop here... You'll learn when you grow, what I mean

...not to mention that hackers are back :(

I don't deny it's an alpha, but it's more of a "marketing alpha" in the case of DayZ. Optimizing EVERYTHING in one go will never ever happen in the software industry as it's impossible. Thanks for your opinion tough!

First of all I would really like to thank you for taking that time to explain a few things to me. Don't worry, in my job, criticism is something to be taken constructive and not personal. About paying attention to the blogs, I haven't payed nearly enough attention to know a few things that you brought up and I thank you for that. I consider DayZ as being a very unusual project in the gaming world due to the fact that development is already stretched over a few years and the content/performance factor must be kept balanced, which they did... for a while. The problem is that with the last patches, it really felt like the game got trashed even if I'm sure it's not the case. I am really hoping for a bit more in the following patches. Are there any plans for the desync? I fail at finding anything concrete about this. The desync is by far the most annoying factor for me even tough I have an extremely powerful internet connection.