jivix

No worries, it's what I do best. Hope you can be up and running DayZ soon :)

I'd recommend getting something a little more appropriate for your price range. That card seems a bit overpriced. The ATI card has better overall performance than the 2 Nvidia cards, so I would recommend that one. XFX Radeon HD 6570 (1-slot cooler) HDMI + DVI + VGA - $60 + $10 rebate + $3 shipping = $53 http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814150613 If you are against ATI cards for any reason, then here are some Nvidia options: Gigabyte GT 440 (2-slot cooler) HDMI + DVI + VGA - $64 + $20 rebate + $7 shipping = $51 http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814125429 Zotac GT 440 (1-slot cooler) 2x DVI + mini-HDMI - $60 + $15 rebate + $7 shipping = $52 http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814500252 Edit: If you're willing to go a few dollars past your budget, here is an option that will give you better performance than the others by a significant margin: XFX Radeon HD 6670 - $75 + $10 rebate + free shipping = $65 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150576

The loading screen seems to take longer regardless of the server speed now... I've have to wait at least a minute on any of the 15 servers I've joined today.

Don't set your video memory to Very High. Always keep it at Default, because Very High is a few steps below default. If I remember correctly, Very High caps your VRam at 512MB. Doesn't seem to make all that much of a difference, but I keep hearing about it. Try turning object detail down, perhaps it is trying to render all of the zombies through the buildings. Do not turn it to low though, because then it's no longer GPU-rendered.

Famas, I have some empathy for you. There are a lot of negative nancies on the forums, you should ignore the hate that will quickly build up. People are very bitter towards the hackers in Dayz atm, so anything you mention that could possibly place you in that category will make everyone hate you as well. I personally think your intentions were completely innocent and, frankly, logical, especially since you are a new player and wanted to familiarize yourself with the game. I can completely understand that. I am sorry that you have people laughing at the fact you had to buy a 2nd copy of the game just because you weren't crystal clear on Arma II's hacking policies. I'd recommend doing something like that on the Armory in Arma II: OA or at least hosting your custom server on LAN only with no internet access, with battleye uninstalled. Modding makes games fun, Dayz and Minecraft have both shown us this, and you got screwed over. Sorry about that. +1 to empathy

If you spawn West of Kamenka it usually says wilderness. There are 1-2 other places that you can spawn that also say wilderness, but if you are spawning in what is obviously Cherno/Elektro and it's still saying that then you have a problem, otherwise it's totally normal.

Sounds like the wheels got glitched, it happens with certain vehicle spawns. I know the green/red car at Stary was/is notorious for its parts not being repairable until you drove it away and the server reset. Welcome to the DayZ alpha.

Is your video memory set to default?

I've tried Strikeshot's suggestion on my own several times, and I can attest that it definitely does not work for me. I was doing a NWAF raid when all of the sudden my screen got artifacts no matter what direction I was facing, so I was forced to log out there because I did not know what direction I was running. Trying again a few hours later after getting back on DayZ didn't change anything, I had to have a non-artifacting friend lead me out of there like I was a blind survivor. I've tried setting memory to default, using the latest Beta patch (which seems to help in certain cases, at one point I was able to walk around Cherno normally), flushing, setting texture detail to low, lowering the 3d resolution, and nothing seems to help. I guess we just have to wait for 1.7.3 with the rebinarized model files.

I have absolutely no technical knowledge of how the hive database works (my bad), but if you want some sort of explanation from someone who knows anything about computers, here goes: One other issues in Dayz is saving vehicles. If you manipulate a car's inventory (remove/add an item), then within a minute or two save the vehicle and relog, you will often find an item is either missing or duplicated, depending on the operation you performed. This could be similar to what happened with you, perhaps you put one last meat steak or can of soda in the pack, then immediately logged out. The alternative explanation is that one item may have not been represented fully in the database (maybe it was supposed to be in your backpack, but the database couldn't find it, because it was actually in your inventory when you logged out), so the database assumed your entire pack was glitched, and deleted all of the objects in your backpack. Hope this brings some sort of comfort to you. If you find this happening in the future, I recommend trying the following: 1. Dropping/picking up your pack on flat ground 2. Putting all of your backpack contents into a pile, signing out 10-15m away from the pile, then logging back in and putting all of the items into the backpack, then waiting a few minutes and signing out again. 3. Going into the fetal position and crying your heart out. Hope this helps!

8400GS is too weak. Your CPU is fine (for now), clock speed is usually more important than cores for certain games, usually first person games. If you're playing modern-day shooters, you'll want at LEAST something in the GTX 260/ HD6770 range. You can take a look at this chart for examples. For Nvidia, I'd recommend a GTX 550/560 with a smaller budget, and for ATI I'd recommend the HD 6870 or the HD 6950 (I personally use this one).

I think what is going on is that your laptops' temperatures are going too high, thus forcing your laptop to step the gpu and cpu down in order to prevent overheating. A cooling pad should help quite a bit. If you are comfortable with it, you should probably dust out your laptop as well (there are tons of guides for cleaning your laptop online).

The best part about this is they disabled the respawn button. Probably the most hilariously useless change I've seen since I started playing. Seriously? What did this accomplish in any way, shape, or form? All it does is inconvenience everyone. I hope it gets reverted. -Inconveniences people trying to spawn somewhat near their friends, thus preventing enjoyable experiences -Inconveniences people turned into animals/teleported to the middle of nowhere by hackers, making hacking more aggravating then ever -RUINS the day of people glitched into walls/objects/rocks/underground who are unable to move That is all.

I think the population of people hacking in this game is actually larger than the honest players/fans of the game. Me any my teammates were always wondering how people could perfectly flank/assault us every time we tried to do some covert ops, turns out all they have to do is look at the in-game map and they can see all of our positions regardless of visibility or difficulty and teleport behind us to take us out. I'm not even going to bother playing on the public hive servers until the prolific hacking gets stopped. Story time: The other day we did a Stary run (6 of us), on a 18-person server. I was on the backside of the sniping hill (the hill next to the tents) with a buddy, and we were watching the deer hut on the other side of the valley. We had 2 snipers watching Stary (no zombies in town of course, we had it all to ourselves), and 2 people with silenced weapons went in. They finished looting and were on their way back up when a man with an AS50 teleports onto the crest of the hill opposite us (across Stary) and insta-headshots one of our guys. He teleports up to the other guy, my friend unloads into him, and he fires his AS50 several times into my friend. 2 more shots and he kills our 2 snipers on the hill, which he didnt have direct line-of-sigh with at the time. Me and my overwatch buddy were trying to bolt away at full speed towards the deer hut (to put some distance, maybe they wouldn't notice us). My friend had made it into the treeline, and I was about 15 feet away, but still shielded from the sniping hill by several of the large bushes (the kind only large vehicles can push over). Not only that, but I was feeling relieved because the weather was bad and I could no longer see the top of the sniping hill. The hacker must have turned on their aimhacks, because a second later, I saw a silhouette on the sniper hill, and they headshot me across the field, through two bushes, just outside of visible sight range. I had my friend abort because we couldn't let the hacker get everyone. Now for the sad part. Our surviving friend went on the next day to do some ops by themselves, but got thunderdomed by a hacker not 15 minutes after signing onto a server.

I think the poster should be getting much higher framerates. I highly recommend trying out the new AMD beta drivers to see if they help at all. I'm using the 12.7 beta drivers at the moment. (Uninstall with the Catalyst Install Manager, then reboot, then do the driver install). Make sure your Video Ram setting in Arma is always at "Default". The Arma II dev team has been quoted as not even knowing why they included the other memory settings, because they handicap the engine too much. (too lazy to find quote, read it in an article) Another thing I've noticed is that alt-tabbing while in game since 1.7.2.3 or so will sometimes cause the framerate to permanently drop, until you completely restart the game. The only other thing I can think of is that 4GB of ram is a tad low, particularly if you are running a 64-bit OS. Still, it shouldn't be a problem, assuming you have taken the necessary steps of shutting down extra software while playing (Firefox/Chrome can be a big one if left open with lots of tabs).