yorkie065

This is something that I am both looking forward to but also fearing. Obviously rain is in the game, and clothing can become wet. Thats there already. We know theres going to be side affects of having wet clothes and we can all name a few I'm sure, but we don't really know the real specifics of them. This is something that I am actually looking forward to, and it would add a bit more depth to the game as when I first started playing DayZ mod, I used to sit and hide in buildings or trees and wait for it to pass in fear of getting cold and my character catching the flu. It made for some tense experiences with zombies (this was back in the first days of playing the mod so had no idea how to deal with them properly without shooting them with my makarov and 3 mags) and also interesting to watch other players in the distance brave out the rain and run through it. But my fear is this; people changing servers when it does rain. It kind of happens already a little when it does rain and visibility drops, people go to a server with clearer weather, and it's even more apparent when the server goes from day to night. Most of the players leave to find a day time server. It sucks as it breaks the immersion slightly, as people aren't experiencing the full game and it's potential, or tackling the different challenges the weather conditions offer. Obviously I'm going to keep playing in the rain, and deal with the affects of it and my actions. But I know about 80% of the player base will just change server. I basically don't want it to become a wasted feature and core mechanic of the game. Whats your thoughts?

This is one of the few options that I can think of, but then again I'm sure we'll get a fair few people complaining about it, similar to all the threads of people complaining about the majority of servers being at night. As for people switching server due to the rain, it doesn't really happen now as theres very few affects. However when they all start to come in and your character is much more likely to become ill and gear getting ruined much easier when it does rain, I can see a lot of people server hopping to avoid it. I'm hoping that I'm wrong and people will just play through it, but I have a feeling that a lot won't, especially the deathmatchers.

I've yet to play the latest build so I haven't seen the changes in action, but am aware of it in the patch notes. What you've bought up is a rather interesting thought and hopefully it will change the way people with full gear will play when it comes to zombies. Obviously it's a little difficult now with zombies glitching through walls, repsawning next to you and being invisible, but those bugs aside I feel it makes them more of a threat. You actually have to deal with them now when going into towns to loot rather than just running past them as if they're not there. Hopefully once the zombie bugs are fixed, performance improves we'll see more zombie numbers, and people actually having to fight zombies rather than get hit by them and run off thinking little of it.

I like parts of your idea, but dislike others so going to pull parts from it a bit for a similar one. Obviously zombie hordes are a must and the devs have said they are planned for the game. How many? I'm not sure but I imagine one or two roaming around the server for performance and gameplay balance, ontop of the zombie count they plan to have generally in towns and cities. As for the leader idea (this is what I don't really agree with), it's a little too fictional, however parts of your idea for it have promise. Different skin and heights are a little...almost cliche, and would make things a little too easy for people over time to distinguish which is the leader and kill it. Height of the zombie probably won't happen as it would mean changes in the animation rig and skeleton, which could lead to issues with broken animations and stretching. However what I do like from the idea is zombies attracting the attention of others with some kind of shriek or groan, similar to ones they already make. But I think it would be better for any zombie to do that when it gets alerted, alerting the zombies around it and nearby causing them to turn and head in your direction and if they gain sight, to then chase you too rather than just having one or two. This could mean half a town could end up heading in your direction, without you necessarily knowing depending on how focused or distracted you are with looting the town, and cause for rather tense and zombie related situations. Zombies will become a bigger threat with mini hordes following you around town, and also just generally increase their intelligence and perception of realism.

Just to let you know the bounding box with the ground/ terrain issue (causes shots to get blocked when prone) has been or is being addressed. A number of high profiler Youtubers mentioned it a while back, and I believe Dean had said in a livestream that they have fixed or are fixing it. As for still getting blocked shots when crouched and stood up....either desync, or you were behind cover slightly as well and bullets were then colliding with that models collision mesh. Also you may want to note the game mechanics differ massively to other shooters like BF4, here's to name a few: - Bullets don't come out of your face: It sounds stupid but Arma is one of the few shooters that I have played where bullets ACTUALLY come out the barrel of your gun. I.E. when your crouched behind cover, just because you can see over it, doesn't mean you can shoot over it. The barrel actually needs to be clear of walls (both horizontal and vertical) or any other objects for bullets to actually go any kind of distance. And don't say 'bullets don't come out your face in BF4'; because they do! Hence all the head glitching you get in the game....realistically they wouldn't be able to do that. - Bullets travel in the direction of your barrel: Yeh, where-ever it points is where the bullet goes. So instead of each round having a movement multiplier for each shot fired to create the effect of recoil, the weapon gets that multiplier instead. So the barrel goes up slightly, bullet actually travels where the barrel is pointing leading to quite a diverse spread in high recoil weapons when fired rapidly. So shooting rapidly in full auto, even when it looks like your holding the sights on your target, your bullets are going to spray and deviate quite far, especially over longer distances. - Stance, stamina and health affect accuracy: This is pretty much something that everyone knows anyway. Prone is most accurate, standing is least accurate, crouched is in between. All shooters have that and it's also quite pre-dominant in the Arma engine. Stamina and health (not to sure if health actually does in DayZ, but I imagine it would) also have an affect. If your injured or out of breathe, your weapons going to sway more making it harder to nail a shot. Also, holding your breathe is a thing! Holding right mouse button down holds the characters breathe and steadies the aim slightly for a few seconds. Mag dumping an M4 whilst holding right mouse button to hold the characters breathe does not work. First few shots will be accurate, but after a second or two, the character will stop holding their breathe, adding more muzzle sway and deviation.

Agreed! It's added depth. In the mod, it was get shot, loose blood, bandage, blood bag and morphine if you had broken legs, and I'm all fixed, good to go, no fucks given! Now, the effort needed to get yourself back to a healthy status is much large. Get shot, loose blood, saline, blood bag and slowly regen health, manage character to prevent a heart attack or disease (when more are in the game) morphine if got broken legs and basically carefully move around the place, giving an actual fuck about your character to get him back to full health. In many ways, the SA is too easy. Sprinting around everywhere for kilometres on end when in both the mod and real life, you can sprint for about 200 metres or so then you'll slowly drop down to a kind of jogging pace at around 400-500 metres. Obviously not everything is going to be spot on realistic as at the end of the day, it's a game. But it's a survival game, so things are going to be put in and work in a certain way that would make sense, without being outside the limitations of what the game can do. This added depth just increases the experience of the game, and it's rewards getting through the shit it throws at you. I mean the firefights in the mod used to be pretty epic, especially when a couple of people are on the brink of death, come out the other side and get blood bagged up. Imagine how that would be now when someone looses a shit ton of blood, has a heart attack and yet you still manage to keep him alive and get him healthy again after the winning the fight. A lot of the fear of heart attacks at the moment comes from people not knowing how it works, and I don't want the devs to tell us. The best thing about DayZ is learning how new mechanics work and discovering it for ourselves. I'm sure many people are doing this already, but jump on experimental and do some research into it. Not only will it help yourself, if you share that information and others want to read it, you'll be helping them too.

I think just stopping what your doing, and resting can be a solution. A slow one obviously, but a solution none the less. As for defibing yourself, don't think it's possible as of yet, maybe in the future. Should only defib someone in the game who has an irregular pulse. This video should give a whole load of info about it all from about 8.30 onwards: http://youtu.be/0PExkBTofho?t=8m30s

Basically what you said in your side note. Early alpha and still in early stages of development which everyones heard 10,000 times already. But from the dev blogs and interviews I've seen, what they're aiming to do with zombies has committed them down this path with pretty much no return. I mean, zombie hordes randomly wondering the map, zombies being generally more intelligent with their movements, tracking players, not walking through walls, responding to their surrounding in regards to players and other zombies. I mean they're a long way off what they want to achieve, but that end goal is what everyones after. The threat to be the zombies, not so much the players. I can't see Rocket and the team stopping work on the zombies until they've reached their goal. Constantly seeing performance fixes being tweeted out by the team which of course allows room for more zombies.

As much as an interesting experiment it would be, it's not something that should be put into the game. Not because it's PC to leave it out, but because it's bad game design to have something completely random that isn't controllable by the player and can give you huge disadvantages. This heart attack system has to be down to player choices and actions, it can't be random.

I haven't had a heart attack in the game myself, or actually seen one yet, so I don't have a full 100% idea as to what actually causes them. However from the Sacriel stream where rocket joined him for a while and was talking about it, I think it can be 1 of 4 things. 1- Your diet; as the guy you quoted said, dieting is something that is supposed to be coming into the game. As to whether or not it's fully there, or the basics of dieting are in, it could have played a part as to why you had a heart attack. The things that you listed probably wouldn't be too healthy to constantly eat or consume large quantities of at a time. 2- Exhaustion; you said you were looting Zelenogorsk, doing a mix of sprinting and walking between and inside buildings. Zelenogorsk is a big place, and sprinting frequently with very short rest is certainly a great way to get your heart rate up. Perhaps this now has an affect on your shock system too, and pushed it too far so you ended up having a heart attack. I haven't read anywhere about you saying whether you stopped and rested after seeing the message, or slowed down to a jogging or walking pace, but I imagine once that message pops up, stopping or slowing you pace down drastically would reduce your chance of having a heart attack in the next few minutes. I've seen you list your gear and it doesn't seem like you had too much on you, depending on how much you define "a normal amount of food and drink" is. But gear already has an affect on your characters stamina levels, again, probably contributing to the heart attack. 3- Shock; I haven't read it anywhere, but perhaps a slight fall (you know, the silly slip a metre or two down the stairs in arma type thing), getting hit by a zombie or a player within a certain amount of time (no idea how long, say maybe 30mins of gametime prior to heart attack) or something like that, that has the potential to damage you slightly and increase your shock metre. I've hear in the thread that unconsciousness and heart attacks happen when you shock metre is higher than your blood or health level or something? So perhaps it was that. 4- A combination of all the above; Obviously everything all at once will have a huge affect over time. It doesn't have to have an immediate affect, but say a punch up with a player 30mins ago, combined with consumption of poor dieting foods 20mins ago, and sprinting through towns looting in between and after could all add up to create a heart attack in say the next 5mins time. My guess is the reason for it to be put into the game is to make people actually look after their characters more. Consider the necessity of the items they're carrying and dropping anything they don't need on a long distance trip. Eating properly in a more balanced way rather than consuming 8 cans of food and drinking water from a fountain 30 times in 2mins. Or sprinting that 5 or 6 kilometres from Solnichniy to Elektro. All these kind of things that people have now gotten used to and have been taking advantage of since SA's release, were actually meant to have negatives to them. They didn't before, but perhaps they do now. Previously in the mod, you could sprint quickly for about 200-300 metres, after that the speed dropped off until about 500 metres after starting the sprint, you "sprint" at jogging/ running pace. I imagine they're trying to bring it back to a more realistic state and add negatives to different mechanics, and this obviously being a BIG negative. Hopefully people actually testing this out can confirm the theories people have posted in this thread to find what actually causes it.

It would be yeh. But then again when the stamina and health system with the full range of diseases gets implemented, there would be a whole load of negatives to going barefoot.

I believe it will be altered, as will a shit ton of other sounds in the game. I doubt it will be done for a while though considering their still adding a lot of new items and gear that will affect how much noise you make. Im pretty sure I heard in an interview or dev blog somewhere, that the sound you make and it's volume will depend on the shoes your wearing, what condition they're in, how heavy your gear is, what surface your travelling over, and how quickly. I imagine the best movement for being quite and sneaky is crouched with weapon raised.

OP I believe your mistake was the standing up part, like you said in the post. Very nice story though! That split second of over confidence and lack of concentration is one of the greatest things about Arma and DayZ for me. It's killed me numerous times, and it's killed others numerous times too. My most recent being me and 2 other mates got into a firefight with 6 other people, yet we didn't know the full number till the very end, at the military base SE of Vybor . The engagement went on for 45mins or so from our first initial sighting of us spotting them to me dying as the last guy on our side. My friends managed to kill 3 between the two of them before both dying. I then managed to kill another 2, one with an axe and the 2nd with the axed guys M4. Thinking that was it, 5 dead on their side, 2 on ours, I started looting the bodies when I took shots from the military compound. Fortunately for me, they all missed and hit the tree just next to me. I managed to get into cover and basically spent the next 10mins waiting for him to appear and also flank on a rough position of where I thought he would be. Eventually I made it to the wall and knew there was a gap in the bottom of the wall part of the way along on the East side. I didn't dare take the front entrance with the main gate, as thats where the shots roughly came from and thought that that is where he would be. So I crawled under the wall and lead there for about 2 seconds and looked both left and right. Seeing nothing I then got up into a crouched position thinking it was all clear and immediately took fire from very close to my right and died. I recorded the whole thing, and looking back at the footage afterwards, you could see a man crouched and moving in the bush to my immediate right. In the moment I completely missed him because I wasn't careful enough, and wanted to get over to a couple of dead bodies, but in the footage, he's pretty easy to spot.

The most people I've seen outside my mates who I play with is 6. That was in the SA a couple of days after it's release, where we had a 3v6 firefight (me and my 2 mates being the 3). Between us we managed to kill 5 and the fight lasted 50mins from first initial sighting, to the last shots being fired which was my death so their last guy walked away with a shit ton of loot. Only looked like there were 3 or 4 to start with lol. Having said that though, back in the mod, me and 7 other mates played together on a couple of occasions. Far too many people though. Very difficult to manage properly and effectively communicate. 3-4 people is probably the optimum number for strength, effectiveness, ease of communication and control.

I think the OP should go start up his own indie games company and create a game of the same magnitude to that of DayZ. Then he can come back and post such threads as this, crying about how an alpha, that has quite clearly stated upon purchase to "not to buy the game as its not going to be what you hoped for", hasn't reached his expectations. As hard as it may seem to believe, game developers aren't a bunch of magic wizards or gods, who create shit immediately out of thin air. It takes time.....a lot more time than you think.

All the weird combat things you mentioned are probably due to the server FPS or whatever Rocket refers to. I remember him saying that when the server goes below a certain FPS (or whatever) that weird things happen, so basically the desync your seeing with zombies and players going through walls. For me, the combat is (when theres more weapons) unbeatable when compared to any other shooter. The balance of a firefight can switch between either side in seconds due to mistakes or just peoples actions, and having a tactical mind that can adapt very quickly can help you win those battles. I find it some of the most tense and gut retching experiences in a game, something that I can't get enough of. As for the actual game itself, there is still a lot of to come. Just to name a few things; diseases, wildlife, vehicles and vehicle customization, bases/ hideouts/ tents, a lot more zombies and zombie hordes, more crafting options, more variation in weather, server and client performance, more loot types and weapons. And thats just a list of things coming from the dev side of things. We as a community and a player base have the options to take this sandbox game and create things within it that we want. For example trading outposts, currency (in one form or another), medic and mechanical teams or policing groups. This is something that would be soo much better if we ourselves setup in-game, rather than the devs doing it for us, and is something quite easily possible if it was advertised enough. It started to happen in the mod, and we can or will be able to do it quite easily in the SA. Thats my vision of what DayZ will become based off the intentions Rocket expressed from back in the mod, and also in the development of the SA.

This will be the reason why so few can openers, and soo many hacksaws. The devs want to make sure that everything works the way it's intended and eliminate any bugs people come across, especially as it's brand new stuff. We'll see this sort of thing with a lot more of the items that are going to be implemented between now and the release. I imagine once everything is all in and tested properly, only then will we see proper loot tables with balanced spawns. Even then I imagine can openers to be pretty darn rare considering it's perks it has over the quite large number of things that can open the cans of food.

This is something that should be easily done later on down the development line without having the need for artificial mechanics to be implemented which would take away the core of DayZ's appeal to players. I imagine radio's would be the best way to do it, as someone who witnessed the KoS but isn't equipped to deal with the KoS'er could report it server wide on a radio for others to deal with if they so wish. That would be a lot cooler, and more realistic I might add, than your name going on a list with last known location for everyone to see because the game has decided that you've killed a few too many people over time.

Amnesia should be the ultimate goal for door mechanics, although a little bit of a tricky one considering you have no weapons in amnesia, whereas in DayZ trying to open a door with say an M4, controlling both the door and M4 with mouse wouldn't really work at the same time, and can't use the mouse wheel either due to the action key and any other button combo would be a little too awkward. The idea of a simple fast and slow opening door option in the action menu though would work nicely (as mentioned by Spearbeers above), especially with the 20% chance of slow still being loud too. Perhaps drop it down to maybe 10% though as I imagine it would happen too often. Something I'm hoping for later down the line, but hopefully at least some sounds will be coming soon.

This is something that I'd like to see later on down the development line as theres a few things that are coming to the standalone which would be a great factor to this, and also the fact that the seasons could take a while to setup taking time away from valuable development time on features that have higher priority. So yeh, the 4 seasons would be kick ass to see in the game. Each season having it's own texture and model set, with different characteristics forcing players to adapt to the changes in weather and the like. Below are some of the things that would be cool to see in each season. Winter: December - February: Rooftops of buildings (especially flat ones), mountains, highlands, hills and some flat lower traffic areas covered in snow. A lot of the trees to be leafless or with very few leaves on them, bushes included and the evergreen/ fern trees to have snow on them. Reduced viewing distance/ visibility, higher chance of rain or snow and the odd chance of blizzards/ horrendous weather, shorter daylight hours and colder temperatures forcing players to use thick warm winter clothing. Seeking shelter more often, eating and drinking properly/ more often and finding heat sources to keep core temperatures up. Reduced wildlife for some types, but increased chance of seeing other wildlife that thrive in winter conditions. Spring: March - May: Very little snow in earlier weeks of the season in the higher places on map. Tree's and bushes re-growing their leaves, so a fair bit of green. Good viewing distance with a decent chance of rain, no snow, odd chance heavy rain and daylight hours getting longer with rising temperatures. Food becoming easier to find and growing on trees or vegetable patches with more wildlife appearing around the map. Summer: June - August: No snow, very hot and sunny with nice long view distance/ visibility, odd chance of rain and slightly more increased chances of thunderstorms. All trees and bushes in full bloom looking nice and green and thick. The hotter temperatures requiring thinner clothing, higher chance of dehydration and fevers or sun stroke. Decent amount of wildlife but less than what there was in the spring. Autumn: September - November: Basically what chernarus is now. A lot of orange and brown on trees with them loosing leaves, some still green. Moderate but cooling temperatures, ok daylight hours and visibility with mixed weather conditions and odd chance of storms. Food and water like it is in the standalone currently, with wildlife being rarer than Summer, but not too hard to find. It would be very cool if these seasons were to actually run alongside the real world seasons like the day and night cycle meaning that the updates for the world would come once every 3 months or so once all the seasons are finished. Obviously theres a lot of things that are going to be coming to SA before this, and I don't expect it anytime soon. If im honest I probably don't want to see this until the full game is actually released, and the seasons get put in as patches. They do kind of already have a summer styled map (or section of the chernarus map) in Arma 2 PMC, where it's all green and very vibrant looking. It's a very refreshing look, and seasons will hopefully bring new cool challenges for players with each change, keeping them engaged in the experience. Also theres probably a lot of things I've missed out for each season, so any further thoughts would be great to hear!

Don't like PvE at all, as even when player threats are around, zombies are still a pain in the ass. Back in the mod we'd often have a couple of people dedicated to dealing with the zombies whilst the rest of the group focused on trying to kill the other players in the firefights we used to get into. Great to have that team work, and that threat of both parties against you rather than just zombies, especially when you can just run away from them and break their line of sight. What needs to be done at the moment, is get the performance sorted so they can increase the zombie count so they are more of a threat than they are currently. That should in turn then hopefully reduce the PvP slightly in most situations. There are already ways of communicating with others in-game, if people don't use them then do not expect for things to go well. As for other characters, I've kind of thought it would be nice considering I now have a character that I would love to use for a story youtube series, and another so I can just jump on and play without having to worry about loosing the other before I have the chance to do any recording. But having said that, the perma death and single character design that DayZ is running is what sets it apart from every other game for me. Loose that, and a lot of the thrill from firefights will go too.

I'm pretty sure Rocket has said that he is wanting to do this, just obviously all the sounds at the moment are more place holder until things become more permanent and not constantly getting re-worked. Like the idea though, and the thought of having weight of your gear affect your noise levels is very cool as well.

I can fully appreciate the amount of work re-texturing everything would take as I've worked as a junior level designer in the industry and also created many 3D models for my uni course. Hence why I said I don't expect it to happen until the game has been fully released. Even if it was on a minimal level with say just the ground being textured with a frosty effect and not worry about the trees and just implement features that would represent winter time would be cool. The game looks like it's basically in winter, and it's current condition, even in the mod, cold wasn't overly too present unless it was raining and at night. So something a bit more extreme forcing players to adapt their clothing, sacrificing the military gear just to stay alive and the scarsity of wildlife when it gets put in would a fantastic and refreshing challenge. That would be amazing and would make journeys and firefights just that more interesting and difficult. BF4 has the slower run in deeper water which is cool and raises the weapon infront of your face to avoid getting it wet. Would love to see this kind of thing but as many say, we can only dream! I just hope Rocket has the same dream! ;)

The more people you throw into the development, the harder it is to communicate the original concept and achieve it. People always have their own ideas for different concepts which can be great, but when your making a game that is very different to a lot of other games at the time, it can also be a very bad thing. I personally think the small team that they have is great for the game. And with the patches coming out regularly (when it's not holiday season) I'd be happy for it to take a while as long as the end product stays true to the original concept.

It's annoying to see people take such cheap measures to "get the upper hand" on other players. But I often find that when it comes down to it, they either get complacent about the fact they're geared to the teeth and can take on anyone, or they lack the tactical knowledge when it comes to a firefight anyway. Both of which, usually ends up with their death and them in a not so happy mood. Obviously they carry some sort of advantage with them, in the fact that they have all the gear and you don't, but if you play your cards right and fight on your own terms then you can easily out play them. And yeh, they'll go back and loot farm again, but the process will become tiresome over time, they'll stop doing or stop playing all together, and we can say that they never truly experienced DayZ. Just a mentality to carry with you until some kind of proper solution comes around (if one ever does for the public hive).