soapmak3r

I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I loved the mod and got a ton of my friends playing it early on, and it was some of the most enjoyable, memorable gaming experiences of my life, exploring and trying to survive with them. I just haven't had that experience in the standalone, and the severe lack of infected, and performance issues/bugs with the engine are really, really difficult to see past. At the end of the day, you can't build a house on shaky foundations. My expectations were not that high. Far from unrealistic. I just wanted the main, game breaking bugs with the engine addressed. You may be being very open about the development, but at the same time, for people like myself that are just checking in every now and again (as opposed to stalking your every word), it is hard to keep track of progress and then we get our heads bit off for making that observation that not much appears to have changed.

Let's be realists here for a moment. In 1 and 1/2 years, this game will be lucky to even have an audience. The core audience of the mod just wanted a game that was the mod, but without the major bugs. All that I know (who adored the mod) have moved on (for myself Elite Dangerous scratches this itch). The foundation of the game is broken. It should have been bare bones, but solid at the release of the early access, then they would have been in the position to start adding content, deeper survival mechanics etc. (again, look at Frontier Developments and how they have developed Elite Dangerous for an example of how make to what amounts to DayZ in space). This was the plan (according to every interview with Dean), and that is why the core audience of the mod bought and supported the stand alone as soon as it launched. This hasn't happened. To use an analogy, it is like a band with a terrible drummer that is playing out of time and hitting loads of bum notes. It doesn't matter what the other musicians play over it, or how good they are, it will always be terrible because the foundation of the music is broken. ....and yet another person that is blindly defending criticism of a terrible, backwards development process that isn't going anywhere good (in the most predictable way imaginable).

Someone explain to me what the point of adding in tons of loot items is when the frame rate tanks any time you turn to look at a lootable area and the game is a buggier mess than the mod...? On a i5 2500K and a GTX 760 the fps goes from 150 to as low as 15 from just turning around to look at an area with buildings off in the distance. After one year, the game is still fundamentally broken at it's core, even on the most basic levels. These are the things from the mod that the players of the mod wanted fixed, yet they haven't been. All we wanted was the mod, with the main glaring, game breaking bugs fixed, with a bit more content/polish. Surely 2 years is ample time to do that? Encountered 3 infected in 2 hours, the animations combined with the hit detection, along with the horrible frame rate made these encounters as painful as they were laughably bad. The mod had better optimization (and it's optimization was shit), the infected and the way that they spawned was much better than it currently is, melee was workable and hit detection seemed a hell of a lot better too. Address the core issues and stop adding continual fluff to a turd to try and pretty it up. A pretty turd still stinks just as much as a regular one.

I should start looking for rotten fruit then...Maybe I will find something that is actually useful instead of just rotten fruit...

I hope that this means that there will be some serious optimization coming in the near future, because as it stands, on an i5 OC @4.2Ghz and a GTX760 I am getting 15-17 fps in towns, which makes it virtually unplayable. Not sure what the implications of the new renderer are for visual fidelity and performance, but hopefully a marked improvement for both.

I had to uninstall Gerforce Experience because it was conflicting with Cubase and making it crash. It doesn't seem to matter what settings I use though, the performance is pretty much the same...Crap. lol

I have a i5 2500K and a GTX 760 and my FPS in towns is 15-17 consistently....The game isn't optimised, yet... Hopefully it will be at some point though, because it is unplayable a lot of the time.

Well, that explains why any time I have been on experimental there has been no decent loot anywhere...lol

I tried out experimental last night. 2 servers were night servers and the 3rd was day. Each time I switched server, I was reset to a respawn, but I was respawned in a completely random location on the map. After an hour of searching, I only managed to find a couple of items. I ran into one person and they seemed to be in the same boat. No backpacks, no food, bare minimum of items (usually stray composite arrows). There was also a petrol station that kept blowing up every few minutes for no apparent reason...Performance in towns was 15-17 fps consistently on a i5 and a GTX760. For whatever reason, the Arma 2/DayZ engine makes the fans on my PC go faster than any other game too.

Most of my problems with Win8 have stemmed from application restrictions that were not present (or they actually worked) in Win 7. In order to solve these, you need to give administrative privileges to certain programs or they just won't run properly. Find the folder of the program...In this case something like Steam/steamapps/common/ Arma2OA or DayZ if you are playing the standalone. Right click the exe, select properties and set it to 'run as administrator'. If there is an exe for battleeye as well, that might be worth setting up too. No guarantee that this will work, but it has solved a few issues with Win8 and programs not working, for me. I'm done with Win8 though. Going back to Win7 this weekend. 8 is just not worth the hassle. *EDIT* To add...Search for 'SmartScreen filter' and disable that crap, as that has a habit of randomly stopping legitimate programs from loading at all. Also, disable UAC because it is also useless crap...and disable Windows firewall too and get TinyWall or Comodo free firewall instead as they are much better (I use Comodo, but be careful about Comodo installing a bunch of other bundled software. Nothing dodgy, just not useful).

I just got an update...Am I reading this right and they have re-added chopper crash sites into the game? If so, that is a major improvement...The game desperately needs more procedurally generated stuff to keep things fresh. How about hunting and animals? added yet? Have they pushed the path finding fix yet? Or is it close? It's getting difficult to keep up with progress and I haven't played since January. I am not really interested in playing until the path finding fix and the hunting is live.

As far as videocards go, I picked up a GTX 760 a few months ago for a couple of hundred dollars (£170). Really nice card for the money. Many places will sell a nicely discounted 'gamers bundle' that will include a mobo, RAM, CPU and an after-market cooler. Some places will even ship it to you assembled and literally all you have to do is put it into a case, hook up a decent power supply and your hard drive(s) and away you go.

I use Bandicam. Really good quality (with Mpeg VBR), not that heavy on system and allows you to choose the codec that it records in, as well as quality settings, so file sizes are very reasonable. I should probably check out Shadowplay though, seeing as I have an Nvidia card now.

Waited 6 months (+ 1 year) for that...That should have been the priority for the early access release, but seeing as it obviously wasn't, it should definitely be the priority now... In the latest dev interview at Pax, Dean said that the fix for zed clipping would come in 'quarter 2'...Hopefully sooner rather than later. I can't play it until that is fixed. I am not interested in the deathmatch game that DayZ has become...The mod was better than that and the SA deserves to be better still, or what is the point of it's existence?

does the physics solve zombie clipping through walls?

Anyone I have played the mod with from the early days bought the SA, played it a bit and made a unanimous "meh...". You'd do well to remove your noses from Dean's butt hole, that won't improve anything, although I am not sure that the game can be saved at this point. Seems like Dean has given up on the game himself, based on interviews he has given since the SA released. He has already made his excuses and got his escape plan sorted. He's also said that the game will never be as good as he wanted it to be. That bummed a lot of people out... The mod was a lot of fun until the hackers came in, server hopping, and then the item duping with tents... the survival became stale when you learnt how to get geared up and were left with nothing else to do... As pointed out by other people in this thread, because military loot is no longer procedural (like the chopper crashes sites in the mod were to an extent), it's just the same old, same old. Run through featureless countryside for 30-45 minutes, get geared up and....Nothing to do now. Shoot the odd broken zed. Murder players for no other reason but to make the game less boring...Which is usually how I die in the SA, because saying "Friendly" doesn't mean anything apparently. Then you have to rinse and repeat. The game is mostly running through featureless countryside. That isn't even a game. The game had a ton of potential, but the SA has failed to capture what made the mod great, but that is also the result of it's massive popularity and the general mentality of the players and community. Until they actually fix the zeds clipping through walls and objects, the game is trash anyway. Has there been any official word on what is preventing that fix? The fact that the most glaring issues of the mod have yet to be fixed is fairly frustrating.

There is no hope for the game if the devs only hear their apologists that shout the loudest and attack anyone that makes a valid suggestion. I challenge these people to find me one single source that says they could not add the Arma 2 bikes into the game right now if they wanted to. The devs keep adding in more and more complex gameplay mechanics, but they are completing ignoring what is fundamentally broken ie. the monotony of travelling through featureless countryside with nothing to do and zeds clipping through walls and other objects. They need to fix these things first before worrying about diseases, blood tests, transfusions, etc. etc. Increased realism in survival mechanics means absolutely nothing if zeds are running through walls like they don't exist, or you have to spend 45 minutes to an hour jogging across a map to rendezvous with your friends, just to have a more enjoyable, social experience with the game...

I am just sick of all the DayZ SA apologists. You are not helping the game get any better by blindly defending the devs and their continual excuse of "It's not our fault, the engine blah blah blah..." QQ They keep adding in new stuff without fixing what is already broken like zombies clipping through walls and objects. A bug that has existed since the beginning of the mod. Players don't clip through walls and objects, so why is it so hard to make zombies obey the same rule? Is the engine really that broken? Then the game is doomed. Rocket himself said just after reaping all the money from the alpha launch that the game would never be as good as he envisioned...Then he announced that he would jump ship. This doesn't sound to me like he has much confidence in their ability to make a good game to me. Sounds like he has his money and can't wait to wash his hands of it.

As in, the bikes that exist within the Arma 2 assets, that were in the mod that could be added into the SA... Sure, why not just spawn a few less f**king crash helmets, baseball caps or countless other useless crap...It's not like anyone gives a s**t.

The single worst bug of the mod and it still hasn't been fixed. In fact, you have made it much worse because now rather than slowing to a walk when clip through walls and objects, then just run through them like they aren't there... How was this not the No.1 priority on the bug list? How is it that 4 months after the alpha has launched, this hasn't been addressed? You roll out a patch that increases the amount of zeds, but haven't bothered to fix zed clipping yet? Your priorities are completely wrong. The failure to address and fix this bug above everything else makes the devs look completely incompetent. The failure to fix this one glaring, game breaking bug does not inspire any kind of confidence in the DayZ dev team. Sort it out.

I get that you are working on getting vehicles back into the game, but in the meantime, couldn't you put the old bikes back so that it isn't such a mind-numbing grind to get where you want to go on the map?

After getting to Stary Sobor and seeing that the military tents are no longer there, it got me thinking that it might be a good idea to make certain things about the map procedural. Such as, military camp positions, deer stands, water holes, wells, ponds and even holes in fences/walls that you can pass through... Perhaps also bring back randomly generated chopper crashsites, but also include things like train crashes, plane crashes, vehicle pile ups, and that kind of thing that can be looted for supplies. Changes like this would keep the experience unpredictable and fresh, to an extent, and prevent people from just camping well known, static loot sites, or becoming too familiar with the map layout.

It would keep people on their toes and help prevent loot camping and if it was a random setting on a server, it would help prevent server hopping loot hoarders.

But it is realistic for survivors to know every single patch of a huge map, including the location of military encampments, and even where holes in fences and walls are...Sure. I'm talking about ways to keep the game fresh and interesting for people. Yes, updates as in patches that change the map in specific ways. You are saying that military camps moving isn't realistic (notice that I said camps, not bases, and mentioned in the first post that the idea occurred to me after see that the military tents in Stary were gone)? Why not? Surely military camps moving would make a lot of sense? Tents are not fixed in the first place, and having their locations static, given that there are so many bandits around doesn't make a lick of sense, realistically ;)

I mean that every so often, there is an update to the game that switches things up a bit in terms of where military camps are located, or where deer stand are placed, what part of fences and walls are open etc. not that stuff is just randomly generated. Although, having crashsites of various kinds randomly generated on server restarts worked fine in the past and really added to the experience. So having that refined and expanded on as well as having map updates that come through steam would keep things new and interesting and prevent over-familiarity with the map.