FrigginTommyNoble

Taking your idea even further, what I'd like to see is a hierarchical hot bar that maps items to containers they're in. The idea would be to simulate the act of going through your pockets, or opening a backpack. So, in the first tier, each slot is mapped to a container (piece of clothing or backpack). In the second tier, each slot maps to an item in that container. Or, if you have ammo in a sub-container (storage container or ammo box), you'd then have to select the hotkey that maps to that "sub-container." example: 1. Vest 1. 30RND STANAG 2. 30RND STANAG 3. Bandage 4. Morphine 2. Jacket 1. Compass 2. Knife 3. Range Finder 3. pants 1. 1911 Pistol 2. 1911 Mag 3. .45 ACP rounds (40) 4. backpack 1. Can opener 2. Matches 3. Sawed-Off shotgun 4. Ammo Box 1. 5.56 Rounds (30) 2. 5.56 Rounds (30) 3. 5.56 Rounds (30) 4. 5.56 Rounds (30) 5. 5.56 Rounds (30) 6. 45 ACP rounds 7. 45 ACP rounds 8. 45 ACP rounds If you wanted to access 5.56 rounds from your ammo box, you'd have to hit "4" to open your backpack, then "4" again to open the ammo box. then you would have access to those rounds on your hotbar. Although this will add some overhead to how you manage and access your inventory, it will help simulate reality and (imo) add great dynamics to high-stress/combat situations: You have to remember which "container" is holding the item you want, pay the time penalty to extract it from that area, and only then can you use it. If the devs wanted to, they could associate different wait timers to simulate how long it would take to access that particular container type. For instance, a backpack should take longer to access than your pants pocket. You should be able to pull a gun out of a holster MUCH faster than putting your hand in your vest pocket, pulling out a storage container, opening that, then pulling your gun out, then putting the container back in your pocket. This will reward players for organizing their gear in the most effective way, incentivize clothes types tailored to specific activity types, and shift the focus away from our current inventory slot count uber alles situation. It will also help slow down combat a bit, and make it more deliberate and less twitchy, which is something I would like to see.

Yeah same here. I've been playing solid for about a month, and haven't died once, so I have a couple of just-in-case stashes spread out across the map (so if they're found, I won't lose everything). It will help take some of the teeth out of the permadeath. I really like that suggestion, of running around in gear you're not too worried about losing, as a means to practice interacting with people. Everyone seems to say the best part of this game is interacting with others, and given how different that is from my experience, the "problem," if there is one, lies squarely with me, not the game or others, necessarily.

Right on, thanks for the insights. You know, I've been watching a lot of streams lately, and it's desensitized me enough to start taking more risks and choosing fight over flight. One thing I didn't really make clear in the OP was I feel like I need to practice using weapons in high-stress/deadly situations. I've been just running around a lot, and feel like I'm losing my gunplay chops, and that's reducing my ability to survive. As I mentioned, I hadn't even fired my AK-101 at all until I shot at that dude. I felt badly unprepared for life/death combat. I don't really like going to the airfield because I know the chances of a deadly encounter are high. But between the combination of top-tier loot and the lack of any other form of end game, I find myself there all the time. I would avoid military loot altogether if there was a more fulfilling survival system in place. But I must admit, it's endlessly fascinating to me just how strongly those encounters effect people on a fundamental, almost animal level (hence the adrenaline).

That all makes sense, and kind of confirms the huge grey area of this situation. Heh, thanks. I just enjoy writing a lot, don't get much chance to do it these days. Glad you enjoyed it :) I totally agree about PvP being the end game right now, and honestly, I think that's what drove me to pull the trigger. I'm super geared.. but if I'm not gonna engage anyone, or make use of tactical advantages, then what's the point?

To me this is the difference between simulation and game. This is a game first, and it needs to put game mechanics before realism. Survival games need constant survival pressure to drive decisions. If we only needed to eat once every 3 hours, we would have to barely find food, ever. It would be super boring to just run around with nothing to do, no pressure forcing you to take risks. That hurts the main driving mechanic of the game: Finding exciting loot. IMO they shouldn't let realism get in the way of the loot hunt.

This is something I'm really passionate about. I think game developers tend to be "code cowboys," which is a term us "Enterprise" engineers use to describe developers who are like "lol just pushed to prod bro, no unit tests. yolo." Although this surely isn't fair to BI, the reason I bolded part of your post is is because I got real hot about the most recent persistence wipe. Hicks even replied to the thread, which I was really happy about, because although I didn't love his answer, it means they're reading it, which says they care. The reason I got so fired up is that persistence wipes reveal a kind of cavalier attitude towards player data. Yeah, sure, it's alpha. Yeah, sure, there are disclaimers. But in my world, if you lose customer data that took hours to create, you've probably lost customer confidence, and you're definitely fired. Also, I know for a fact that if you make it a priority, data stored in a database does not get "wiped." You write a migration script, and you test it in pre-prod. Then you know that even in the worst case, you don't "lose" persistence data, you just roll back to the database view before your broken migration script started, fix it, and try again. The fact that BI does not take this approach shows that our time investment is not a priority to them. Maybe it shouldn't be. But enough situations like this happen, and you start hemorrhaging players and poisoning your brand. There has to be a middle ground. This is why Early Access is so controversial. NOT because it's a bad idea, but mostly because I don't think game dev culture has much respect for their customers' time. One thing's for sure: if someone pays for your product, no matter how many times you cry alpha or point to a disclaimer, they're still your customers, and nothing about that relationship is black and white.

Although I understand your personal frustration, it sounds to me like your main gripe is the current player count on specific servers. I see several servers available with high player counts at peak hours, maybe try one of those? Although I've been a software engineer for 13 years in mostly not gaming (my first job was at Sierra in the late 90's), and I'm working on my own game in unity right now (mostly as a project to learn more about game programming), as such I don't have a lot of knowledge about modern game design in a professional capacity. But I'll share my opinion on DayZ, and specifically BI's progress in an early-access capacity. Most importantly, I have a ton of respect for BI. They are clearly a solid team capable of making a game that tens-to-hundreds of thousands of people play. The big challenge they're facing right now is the engine. Writing a new engine is hard as hell. It takes a long time and highly talented engineers with tons of experience. BI is in a situation a lot of early-access studios find themselves in: They need to swap out the engine of a game that tons of people are currently playing. A lot of indie shops had (and are still having) a really tough time migrating from Unity4 to Unity5. Their new engine is tackling all the core issues I have with the game: netcode is a huge bottleneck. de-sync is rampant and still a huge issue. player controller is clunky, controls are not expressive rendering pipeline/shaders are based on dated tech and need to be swapped out (hence fps problems and general graphical issues) inventory system is very buggy I recently wrote my own inventory system from scratch. Then I re-wrote it cause it was buggy. There are a million edge-cases that happen pretty often. And this is all single-player, so I didn't have to sync those inventory events to a remote server. Here's an example of a bug that seems obvious/easy as a user, but needs some non-trivial logic to handle: open your inventory pull an item from a slot, so you're holding it (this de-references the item from the "backpack" inventory instance, copies it to your "hands" which is actually a simple 1-slot instance of Inventory) close your inventory (still holding item) item seems to disappear because I had some logic in the player controller that only shows item inventory objects when inventoryOpen is true.This made me re-think how I manage state across the many inventory instances in general. Then I re-wrote inventory again, and added a message bus to marshall item objects between inventories. That took way longer than I had expected. But this is the normal exploratory process of programming. You can try to think through everything beforehand, but once you get to coding, it all goes out the window, and you have to just rapidly iterate as you learn new things you didn't (and could never have) known in advance. This is probably the phase BI is in right now with the new engine. It's a process of discovery and solving new problems every day. Just when you think you're close you hit another design flaw and need to take some steps back. To get a game as complex as this one to a state where it's reliable enough to push out to production and have thousands of people play is a monumental effort. All that said, I can't help but think it's time for us to get our hands on the new engine. I'm a little worried about BI's migration path, namely this idea that both engines will live concurrently in the same game files. Although I think it's probably the best option to "sneak" the engine in in parallel with the old engine, that can really draw out the process sometimes, vs. just getting all hands on deck for the new engine, and doing a hard swap. If the new renderer isn't out by the end of 2015, that will be a sign that they're having some serious difficulties, because I just don't think it should take more than a year for a well-funded dev shop with top talent. But, I've never written shaders or a rendering engine myself before, so I'd be interested to hear people's opinions on that.

The tooltip on the lightweight M4 buttstock says something like "there's a slight impact to dispersion, but makes the weapon easier to handle." I assume that means it will be less accurate at long distances, but you can raise the weapon and/or aim down sights faster. Whether or not those effects are actually hooked up to the weapon system, I couldn't say. But to your point, I would definitely like to see some resource where this kind of info is spelled out in detail, preferably with data to back it up.

I'm sure I'm ignorant compared with your experience, would you mind explaining what you mean? I assume you're saying it's fruitless to "spy" on people when there are 42 of them connected and playing on your server.. which, now that I think about it, does make sense :)

This is a good insight. There may be a conflict of interest at work here: Server Admins are the source of income, so there's a financial dis-incentive to take punitive action against people who pay you money. Especially when you already have the money of the people who are complaining.

Just wanted to say beans for calling out culling as a huge culprit. For those that don't know, a big part of performance is knowing the bare minumum number of objects you need to create in the scene "right now," and for video, knowing which polygons are hidden behind other polygons, so you don't need to send them to the rendering pipeline, using precious resources. I think the main performance limitation right now is object culling. This is conjecture, but I think all objects in a city "scene" are created once you reach your maxViewDistance (or w/e the prop name is). That sends craptons of vertices to the rendering pipeline, even though most of them aren't visible. This kind of programming is very specific, it's hard, and it shouldn't be the focus until the game is feature code complete. Patience is key.

Oh wow, I didn't realize that. So maybe my server is set in late fall or winter or something. Thanks for the info!

I couldn't disagree more. Server administration needs to respect privacy, both inside this game and out. If admins could spy on connected players, it would be seriously abused. A clan admin could tell clan members where a player is, what he/she is doing, how geared they are, etc. And believe me, they would do it.

If it were my design, I would say no. Maybe you can get "sick" from the ambient contamination, and maybe water and food get contaminated, but the loot you grab should be usable without any kind of "cleansing" mechanic. This is kind of the line between realism and gaming, imo. The main drive behind this game is getting better loot. "Uncontaminating" loot is an added step that would be annoying, not challenging. If you make the looting process too tedious, I think you compromise replay value.

I think it's essential that contaminated areas are part of a dynamic weather/event system, but they should draw you to them, not away. Contaminated areas should force the player to make strong and clear choices, with trade-offs. Any notion that bad RNG "screws you over" would make the system fall down, imo. Players will just log and go to a different server if contamination is prohibitively detrimental to survival without a really strong loot incentive. We have to think about what the gaming purpose of contaminated areas would be. There are a few options: Making high-end loot more reliable to find but harder to obtain (if high-end loot is guaranteed to spawn in contaminated areas) Making travel more difficult (you have to redirect around 10-50 square kms of contamination) Restricting access to resources (contaminated water and/or food) Forcing players to move out of an area quickly (if contamination rolls in like a fairly quick-moving fog) Drawing players to an area to see what's in the contamination Stimulating the item hunt (forcing players to find contamination antidotes)Now, which of these are right for DayZ? I can only offer my opinion, but I'd say: Do like: 1, 5, 6 Don't like: 2, 3, 4 I think, in a game like this, the map and events need to be designed to create action through shared interest and choke points. that's my main gripe with the DayZ map. There are no tactical choke points, like bridges or canyon/mountain passes to encourage player interaction. There's basically just NWAF, but there's nothing interesting about how that part of the map is accessed. I think you should be able to see contaminated areas from 10-20 kms away, and you should know there's either solid loot there, or people with solid loot. But you also know two things: You need to have a reliable supply of contamination antidote, and you need to be ready for hostile enemy contact. If they just make contamination get you sick, and have to run around huge areas because you can't find any anti-rad pills, then that would be a huge design failure worthy of much scorn. Edit: This feature could also create some interesting tactics, like sending "runners" into the contamination to quickly get loot and get out. They'll die of the poisoning, but that's fine, they deliver the loot back to their squad. Then, other squads could see that and try to engage the squad where the loot was delivered. Etc.

The problem is that admins can kick people with impunity, and there's no accountability or tracability. What should happen is this: Every time an admin kicks a player, that kick activity sends relevant info to a central database. That data should at least include: admin_nameplayer_kicked_nameplayer_kicked_reasontimestampcurrent_player_countThen, BI writes a dead-simple script that checks this database for things like: number of kicks per hour per adminpercentage of total players kicked (1/current_player_count)average player countetc. Then, BI could manage THEIR OWN FING GAME and not have people use some wonky forum to report abuse.

"Like I suggested in the - uh - suggestions thread, we should have ways to waterproof our clothing ourselves. There are beehive models in the game and beesprodcuts have tons of antiseptical and norishing properties and beeswax can work as a natural waterproofing agent (like in Barbor jackets and other cotton clothing that is treated). So basically with this method you could turn any favorite clothes of yours into a waterproof garment. It isn't a far off idea, but probably nothing the devs have in mind." I really like the beeswax idea. In general, the more nature-based survival tactics they add, the better imo. I think the game is too focused on getting military gear asap, but I trust the devs know this and have a plan. But I would add natural waterproofing such as: extract certain plant oils and apply to clothingWool clothing is highly absorbentNeoprene clothingI would also add wind resistance as a property that can be added to clothing or as a basic property as well (might be already, but make it read better in the UI/tooltips) "What annoys me about the rain is only that it doesn't affect the advanced player at all." But actually, it does. TTsKO gear is supposed to be 60% absorbent, and keeps you warm, but in 0.58 that's just not the case. I get "completely drenched" in a matter of seconds, and I get those (sometimes completely) incurable shakes in under a minute. I've had to kill myself and run back to gear because of this. Gorka seems like the only "advanced" gear that isn't totally useless against the rain in the current build. As I mentioned, this feels like a bug with the rain/weather/temperature system right now, but I'd like to get some confirmation from BI that it's indeed broken and/or not working as intended. Totally agree about just how much rain/temperature gimps the freshspawn though.

Yeah I can confirm this too. Rain/temperature balance is out of control and buggy. I have full pristine TTsKO and I get completely drenched from a drizzle in 10-20 seconds flat. Then, if you stand around for more than about 30 seconds, I'm shaking. Get cold enough, and it takes literally HOURS to get your temperature back up to where you're not shaking, and you get no messages or indicators about your core temperature. I grew up in Eugene, OR. Me and the rain are tight. I know from experience that gore-tex or rainproof gear (standard in military gear) is extremely water resistant. You can stay bone dry out in the rain for hours if you have the right equipment. As of now I go from bone dry/warm to drenched-shaking in under a minute with top-end gear. Needs fixin'.