wolfmat

Things I can confirm working: - Getting away from zombies by hiding in buildings in time to break LOS - Running around buildings until zombie breaks LOS on corner, then huffing it - Double barrel shotguns exist, high spawn rate - Deer stands are still functional - Aggro seems to be more in line with the displayed visibility / noise level - Objects seem to be shielding visibility, any sound occlusion ray casting magic in there as well? - Hills seem to work on occasion (tested it with the hill east of the Cherno construction site) - Buildings break LOS as long as zombies are outside Things that are weird: - Spawn rate for new shottie is high dude - Crouching directly when exiting a ladder results in a fall (might've been like that all along, not sure) - Zombies are in ground sometimes inside of buildings (saw it in Berezino apartments, ground level) - Zombie prostitutes price inflation is a little rapid for my money - No wizards

See thread title. Seriously, why not? No backpack, food, water, gun, ammo, torches, bandages, painkillers, morphine. Only the flashlight.

You would have to greatly reduce accuracy and increase recoil malus as well then. Because one-handed shooting doesn't really work well in practice. Anything beyond that, like gripping a pistol with both hands as well as a flashlight in one of them, doesn't seem to be a thing ArmA makes easy to mod in. I don't know how you actually hold a flashlight while holding a pistol anyway. But that's probably because I don't know much about actual shooting.

You mean ray casting, right? Because raytracing is usually associated with bounces haha

Direct Channel is a proximity chat. It bridges up to 30 meters or so. It also is directional (so you will hear players speaking to your right if their character is on your head's 3 o'clock).

Thanks for trying out the no weapons at spawn thing. Cool beans. Will check it out in like half an hour. Keep on rockin

I guess we're gonna be able to experience this now? I'm sorry if it sucks, but I think it's worth the experiment. Good luck out there.

This is a long post. It is a pie-in-the-sky collection of ideas. The concepts are interdependent. What drove me to write all this was the fact that I've played this mod for some time now and was missing an endgame beyond "repair a helicopter and fly around in it". The key concept is rewarding humanity, AND rewarding banditry, AND giving means to build a society, AND giving means to break society again. You will see how that works if you work through the roles, mostly. Civilians Civilians populate the map. They turn into zombies when they are bitten. Civilians fulfill NPC roles. See roles below. If they do not fulfill a role, they hide in churches, hospitals or hangars (or other buildings that make sense). Civilians enable certain types of events. See events below. Civilians do not run around, flee or anything like that. They crouch in fear when things get bad. When they switch to fulfilling a role, they simply respawn at the location that is associated with that role. Interacting with civilians amounts to picking dialogue choices. Needless to say, civilians have an inventory when they fulfill a role associated with items. They can trade according to trade tables. See trade below. When civilians die, they remain dead. They initially spawn when the server is started, and that's it. So if players want to eliminate all civilians, then that's what happens. Since they actually have items on them, that's sometimes necessary to survive. Murdering civilians of course costs humanity. Civilians have no needs of any kind (except for lookouts). They just either fulfill a role or don't. Civilians naturally attract zombies based on vicinity alone. NPCs carry food and water, of course; however, they do not trade it away. So to get at an NPC's food or water, one has to kill him. Civilians are hand-placed as a group inside appropriate shelter buildings. Currency The purpose of currency is enabling trade between players and NPCs. Anything can be used as currency. The unit of currency is the cheapest item (empty tin cans would make sense). Prices are dynamic. They start at a base price and are antiproportional to availabilty (less soda cans => more tin cans for one soda can). Trade Trade works as it ideally does right now between players: You give me this, I give you this. Trade is based on currency (s.a.). So as an example, one soda can costs 10 empty tin cans. Let's say a Makarov costs 20 empty tin cans. So you could give 20 empty tin cans, or one soda can and 10 empty tin cans, or 2 soda cans, for one Makarov. Or you could give an NPC one Makarov and receive 2 soda cans. This is not rocket science. You can of course overpay if you can't hit the exact price of something a trader has. Trader is an NPC role. See roles below. Roles NPC roles NPC roles need to be assigned by a coordinator (see PC roles -> Coordinator). Trader: A trader trades as outlined above. Inventory: Mostly crap, but a lot of it. Think tin cans. Trade inventory: Inventory + base trade inventory (TBD, randomized) + bought items - sold items. Infiltrated: Prices for stuff are better for bandits, worse for survivors. Medic: A medic does each medical operation a little cheaper than the associated item costs. So to get bandaged by a medic, you would pay a little less than you'd pay for bandages at a trader. Inventory: One of each medical items. Infiltrated: Prices are also skewed towards bandits. Scientist: A scientist uses zombie blood (see special items), an empty whiskey bottle, a Makarov magazine, a toolkit and some currency to produce one syringe of serum (or one syringe of virus if interacting with a bandit). A scientist will not cooperate with a bandit unless infiltrated. Inventory: Nothing. Infiltrated: An infiltrated scientist cooperates with bandits and produces the virus instead of the serum for survivors (without them knowing, of course). Lookout: A lookout is placed facing into a direction, and reports movement of hostiles (zombies or bandits) to all coordinators. Lookouts do not cooperate with bandits. Lookouts need food and water once a day to not die, and they will sleep for 12 hours every 12 hours, starting 12 hours after initial placement. Lookouts use flashlights at night. Inventory: Spying glasses, radio, map, compass, watch, flashlight. Infiltrated: The lookout will ignore bandits. Banker: A banker stashes items for a fee. The fee is half of what the item costs at a trader. Inventory: Lots of currency base unit. Infiltrated: Prices are skewed towards bandits. Mayor: Mayors hand out rewards. Inventory: Nothing. Infiltrated: Does not make a difference. PC roles PC roles have to be acquired. They are acquired by collecting the appropriate item and being of the associated type of player (survivor or bandit). A player can have multiple roles, and ditch roles as he sees fit. All items required for a role have to be in the inventory; otherwise, the role is lost. Switching player type makes the character lose all roles. Coordinator: Bandits cannot become coordinators. Coordinators assign roles to NPCs, and gather reports from NPC lookouts. Items needed: Radio, ID badge. Infiltrator: Only bandits can become infiltrators. Infiltrators break NPCs, which makes the NPCs not fulfill their roles properly. See individual NPC roles, heading "Infiltrated", to see how they misbehave. To infiltrate, an infiltrator has to bribe the NPC with currency. Items needed: ID badge. Hero: Bandits cannot become heroes. Heroes can collect zombie blood and administer the serum to zombies. Heroes eliminate the villain malus. Heroes intimidate bandits. Items needed: Hero medal, whiskey bottle if collecting zombie blood, serum syringe if administering serum. Intimidation effect: Bandits in sight of a hero will shake uncontrollably. Survivors in close vicinity to a hero will not be affected by the villain intimidation effect. Villain: Only bandits can become villains. Villains can collect zombie blood and administer the virus to zombies, NPCs and player characters. Villains eliminate the hero malus. Villains intimidate survivors. Items needed: Wanted poster, whiskey bottle if collecting zombie blood, virus syringe if administering virus. Intimidation effect: Survivors in sight of a villain will shake uncontrollably. Bandits in close vicinity to a villain will not be affected by the hero intimidation effect. Events — Randomly, a BIG zombie horde is spawned in locations where noone is around. The horde travels along the big roads. — Randomly, villages and towns that are well-populated with civilians are attacked by a zombie horde from all sides. The spawn points are in nearby forests. The civilians will radio to all players that they are being attacked. The zombies will start to actually march towards the town after 30 minutes so that players have a chance to get there. — Randomly, respawning players are spawned inside boats on the ocean without ANYTHING. Bad luck, dude. — Randomly, turners spawn amongst zombies. Turners take 3 hits or so from an M1911. Turners turn player characters into turners upon touch — the player is not aware of it, he just dies, and a turner spawns in his place, to make it easy to realize. Turners can effectively wipe the slate clean all by themselves if they are part of a travelling horde. Rewards 20 survivor kills reward a bandit with a wanted poster. 10 survivor kills reward a bandit with an ID badge. 10 bandit kills reward a survivor with a hero medal. 5 bandit kills reward a survivor with an ID badge. 1 bandit kill rewards a survivor with a radio. Face it, it's easier to kill survivors than it is to kill bandits. Special items — Zombie blood: Kill a zombie, collect his blood with a whiskey bottle. It is used to make serums. — ID badge: Needed for roles. — Serum syringe: Administering the serum to a zombie makes him turn into a civilian. Administering the serum to a turner makes him turn into a virus bomb. So he explodes, and every living and half-living thing that is hit by him is turned into a turner. — Virus syringe: Administering the virus to a zombie makes him turn into a turner. Administering the virus to a turner makes him turn into a virus bomb. So he explodes, and every living and half-living thing that is hit by him is turned into a turner. — Radio: Communication device, needed for roles. — Hero medal: Needed for roles. — Wanted poster: Needed for roles.

That's okay Marvforty2, I like it rough

70 inventory slots (about 3 Alice bags). The cart rolls down hills if let go on a slope. It can be shot to pieces. It takes damage equivalent to 10 cows until it breaks. When it breaks, it is replaced with a pile of rubble, and random items in it break (replace item with new item named "broken stuff" that cannot be picked up). Broken carts cannot be fixed. The item is as rare in terms of spawning as crashed helis, only to be found in supermarkets, and cannot be crafted or whatever. Carts cannot be stashed. When dragged: - Player cannot shoot (shooting from the hip is not supported in ArmA afaik, and it does you no good anyway, so don't do it in real life) - Player has walking speed, walks upright - Player makes noise equivalent to crouchrunning - Player is visible as if he was walking upright A cart has a really low chance of tipping over on uneven terrain. A tipped-over cart has to be put upright again, which is a scrollwheel action and takes 10s. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS: It's cool for mobile groups who want to gather supplies. But it's also a liability because of the reduced speed, the tipping-over thing and the fragility. It's basically a hypernerfed car.

This is not about clans or friends or whatever. Thanks for acknowledging this. Players can choose to group-spawn on a server when joining or respawning. What then happens is the server waits for enough players in the queue, then spawns them at a random location together. What constitutes enough players is up to debate. I propose 4 people. WHAT HAPPENS: You wait a minute or two until the queue is full, you spawn with random people together. Make the best of it. You can opt-out of the group spawn while waiting if you're getting fed-up; you're then spawned normally. DO OTHERS HAVE TO OPT-IN AS WELL: All but the last player in the group spawn have to opt-in. So if we're talking 4 for the group spawn target number, then the first 3 have to opt-in, and the fourth is just the next-best player who spawns (regardless of whether he chose to group-spawn or not). BUT I CAN ABUSE THE SYSTEM LIKE SO-AND-SO: Good for you. You found a way to get your clan buddies at a spawn together. Rock and roll!

Well, that is the nature of the game. Be prepared. I propose that the players face each other in a cross formation at a distance to the center of 10m so that escalations are extremely risky (you shoot the guy in front of you in the face, stuff gets random at that point).

This might actually warrant a forum-wide vote. Think about it, we're just like maybe 10 people saying "f yeah dude, just a flashlight and food and junk". But the rest of the community might be completely opposed. It would be kind of a big deal. Spawn campers would have no counterfire, for instance. That's something you have to keep in mind.

rocket spent time with his brother to work out how the zombie thing actually works. This is mentioned in the PCGamer interview - have a read: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/16/day-z-interview-how-zombies-arma-2-created-gamings-best-story-machine/ (That quote is from page 2. The whole interview is a really entertaining read though.) I mean, you could of course reject the influenza idea, but I like it a lot myself, that's why I'm bringing it up.

Alright, I'm cool with highscores. Just wanted a clarification.

The thing is these zombies are not undead in terms of lore, they are infected people. Basically, nasty rabies. You die when your blood reaches 0, right? Well, a zombie with 0 blood would also be dead. What I want to hint at is that player death wouldn't be the right choice for making a player a zombie. Rather, the player has to be alive to possibly become a zombie. You would have to introduce a new kind of infection besides the sickness you get from cooling out that's been introduced recently.

But to what end? Is it a highscore statistic?

You're excused, we're all super-tired, GUESS WHY haha. I'm down with coop objectives. Actually, one kind is already in the game - vehicle fixing. I would also like to mention my idea of wandering megahordes of zombies again. The power plant mechanics were already built by someone, as you might know, so they could actually work out. Player-run towns was something I tried to establish once also, so I'm down with that, too. I'm ambivalent about the information exchange idea though.

Plus, flashlights are the least intrusive light making devices. The AI simply doesn't know they exist right now. However, chemlights and flares attract AI. (Maybe the flashlight will eventually make you extremely visible to AI when it's on; actually, it's highly probable this will happen very soon, rocket-style)

You can just print the map out and get a pencil. I myself paint on the map jpg on my touch device of choice.

Like you know it from a roguelike, not like you know it from FRAPS. While a player plays, his movement and his surroundings are recorded. AI decision outcomes, player movement and damage and so on end up as scripts (basically path nodes and animation triggers with timestamps). Inventory management is reduced to a timestamped textlog to make things suck less for viewers (animations and sounds being preserved). The player can choose to have a recording bookmarked, can set a recording start in the past (within reasonable bounds) and keep recording seamlessly, and can also end recording, which exports the recorded data from recording start to end. Recordings are ArmA demos for playback with the DayZ mod being enabled. Most notably, the randomness that occurs in-game is eliminated completely from the view of the recording; spawns and stuff could result from a seed-timestamp-relationship. This is highly dependent on ArmA's and DayZ's determinism and inner workings, needs lots of CPU cycles, disk writes, optimization, encoding and all that. (Think about it, you stream a chunk of the world state to disk continuously.) Particle physics wouldn't be recorded, but rather still simulated upon playback of such a demo; same for negligible stuff like flying birds or randomized foliage sfx (you can't touch that stuff anyway, right?). I have to be honest, I don't really know how much happens around a player in a given timeslice (it's hard to estimate from a player's perspective). Obviously, it's a lot. The question is, does it exceed a reasonable filesize? Is it possible to get that data into a proper format for playback? All things that only an experienced modder of ArmA can really tell (well, and a Bohemia core development team member). I am not sure about the feasibility because the granularity in comparison to roguelike recordings is obviously on a much higher magnitude, and not necessarily synchronous. But it would be awesome to have such play recordings; especially when it comes to fights or cooperative efforts between players. I guess it's really nebulous as a concept. Sorry. If you like the idea, then maybe think about how you'd implement it for a while, then do a bit of educated guesswork regarding engineering efforts required / resources claimed / time eaten, then make a call concerning feasibility.

It's more on the level of CoH's play recordings. The cool thing is that you can pick viewpoints freely, alter playback time and all that with such recordings. If you want to record a video, you can record a video, and that works alright, but sometimes, you had that moment and wished you had recorded it, to name an example for a usecase.

Dog Controlled Player The player would be controlled by a dog. He couldn't use voice, or text, but would only have a couple options to either growl or bark in order to communicate (the idea is that him and his dog would learn to communicate this way), but the player could possibly hear the dog's voice. Maybe the dog could put a pack on the player for a little more cookies? Or maybe the dog is just dog controlled. :D SCNR I like the idea of taking control away from the player by giving him an animal to control that doesn't shoot, doesn't bandage itself, doesn't climb ladders, all that. Furthermore, the engine lets you control animals already, so just use that as a baseline. The question is though: Who would actually agree to playing as a dog? I think very few people would pick that option. But it's a cool novelty thing. And I like cool novelty things. Good stuff!