Fraggle (DayZ)

But why though? Why does a "hardcore" dedicated PC game have to look bad? Is it just because we're used to it and accept it as the norm? It doesn't. It's laziness as far as I can see. Having a small budget/team is no excuse either. There's plenty of games like that with nice UI's but they seem to be in the minority because the UI get's overlooked.

Thankyou Nostradamus. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. It so is.

Stare at it. STARE AT IT.

Well it seems like people mainly want the same thing from a game then in terms of the UI. Functionality comes first but to many the actual look and feel of it is equally important as long as it's in keeping with the game. To me both of those things actually go hand in hand and in my experience that's what design is all about. There's some games where a slightly over the top UI works. Codemasters always have really nice menu's for their racing games. They're in your face and a tad dramatic but for the racing games they're designed for they fit well because the games themselves are all about giving you the adrenaline rush of racing. The swooshing menu's and heavy music add to the overall experience you're looking for when playing an arcadey racer. For slower paced games something much more minimalistic, clean and functional usually fits the bill although in my eyes that's still no excuse to leave it looking like it was designed by a colour-blind programmer. In my experience there's nothing worse than a project lead that doesn't give the UI designers any artistic licence. I've not been involved in game design but I have been involved in website design (although I hate it) and I can imagine many of the same issues arise. Usually you have a guy in charge that has a very clear picture in his head of what he wants things to look like. Sadly from a design point of view 90% of the time what he has in his head sucks. Instead of letting the artist/designer do what they're good at and then then go through a proper design process until both parties are happy, you end up with the guy in charge basically dictating to the artist exactly how things should be. The outcome is usually something that looks like shit and isn't practical to use because the artist/designer hasn't been given enough freedom to what they do best, in reality they've just acted as the boss's hands. The only person happy with the outcome in that scenario is the project lead because his ego has been massaged. The designer is left frustrated and the end user is left with something that isn't very pleasant to use. Anyhoo, I just hope that the SA devs spend some time in the future actually making the SA look like a professionally presented game. Just because it's a "hardcore" game aimed at us hipsters doesn't mean it can't look nice. We like pretty things too QQ.

Fixed =)

Did you invent Jalepino Poppers? If so well done, I'm sold hook line and sinker. Now you're about to tell me they're not jalepinos in there at all I guess.

But I'm enjoying the crazy speculation, it's awesome. In a crazy way.

What if I told you there was another server?

Yup, in an ideal world I think Dean wants to eliminate the HUD completely although that might not be practical. In the long term though I would like to see the whole UI get some more loving. It's too early to do that yet because it's all constantly subject to change, I'd like it to be kept really simple and minimalist too but still aesthitically pleasing. I would like to see some slick game menu's though to differentiate it further from Arma/ other BIS games. When I think of BIS games I think of really badly designed menu's although Arma 3 did a pretty good job, far better than Arma 2 anyway.

DIE INCEPTION. Oh soz I mean well done you, keep up the good work.

Couldn't agree more. Regarding the whole alpha/beta thing I do expect the initial release to be a proper alpha test phase, so expect many tears to be shed.

Agreed but really that's my point. It's not following the usual development path. The whole "selling an alpha" debate is something I've never been too sure about as a gamer. How well that works in practice and whether it can be seen as a cop-out seems to be dependent on how well the devs handle things during that process. A good example is Don't Starve but there's way more bad examples. I guess how long they decide to call it an alpha for depends on how well the initial alpha testing goes with large numbers of players. Why are you trying to force an interesting debate into this thread when we could be arguing about how Deans fucked up the SA based on no information?

No probs fella, welcome to the forums =)

DayZ doesn't really fit into the usual pigeon holes of gaming in development terms. That's why originally Dean wanted to call it a foundation build. Sadly WarZ stole that term less than a week later for their Steam release and thus it was tainted. They can call it what they like but I still deem the initial release to be a foundation build. Once they have that up and running adding content should be the easy bit (I say that knowing nothing about game development of course).

Moved to gallery>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Details... details.... Stop interrupting my skim-reading =)

I think people were watching the version numbers change a lot yesterday and interpreting that as: Dean is rubbish and has broken everything, Christmas is cancelled. There's a classic thread over on Reddit about it with some truly mental speculation. It makes this thread look vaguely sensible.

Moved to private hive discussion, not a DayZ issue.

You trolling? That's a tad different to actually saying that you're going to take a break from the social media stuff to focus on the game for the final push and you know it.

Haha, don't put words in my mouth goddamit. Instead of reading between the lines and getting it wrong just try reading the actual lines. And we wonder why Dean has been quiet...

Pics or it didn't happen.

Technically yes, but the doorways are only one pixel wide and two pixels tall so none of us have managed to fit through them yet.

Ok, here you go, promise not to tell. This is the newly re-modeled Electro: As you can see the lack of DX11 lighting means it's not up to Arma 3 standards in terms of prettiness but the framerates are awesome on any system.

This will be the website. Obviously there's some admin and re-organising to do but this will be the SA site with a sub-section for the mod.