semipr0

Uh...haven't had that problem....had a nice train of zeds trying to chew my ass off coming out of Krasnostav awhile ago. Took me awhile to shake them...cause I hate wasting ammo on Zeds when there are plenty of bandits to shoot back at. Found a M4A1 and several STANAG clips in a deer stand, which was a far nicer loot than I've seen in a deerstand in the last version. I'm playing on 1.7.2.3 servers too, so not sure whats happening with your situation.

In all fairness, crafting or "jury rigging" which is mostly what it would be in the DayZ environment makes complete sense. Building outwards on a limited UGC (user generated content) mesh system is an obvious expansion for beta and beyond. I mean seriously if you could build a tree house in DayZ and store your crap in it, you'd think it was the shit. Defensible constructions are a definite area of expansion the game needs, things that create survival incentive and goals beyond shooting Zeds or other players are important. Cause as I've pointed out, I got a Coyote Backpack full of medical supplies, water bottles and free range steaks in it, I got a nice M4A1 and plenty of ammunition for it and a Colt 1911 and plenty of ammo for that...and if I die tonight, it really doesn't mean a damn thing to me cause I'll just build all that stuff back up again and...die again in a few more days. There has to be some kind of incentive to survive, I think constructive crafting is an incentive. Let me build a lean to or a tree house or something and I'll defend it to the death (and still die eventually), but I've an incentive to try to stay alive...so I can defend what I built and what is mine. Right now in DayZ, you don't OWN anything, you're just borrowing it til someone picks it up off your corpse. Game systems that engender a feeling of ownership and a need to protect ones assets would go a long way towards making DayZ more realistic....or at least as realistic as you can get in a game where you have "perma-death" but you can instantly respawn and try again....thats sort of a hilarious miuse of the term "perma-death" really.

I'm not really seeing the point of tents until I can get in one and get out of the rain. Freaking rain. 29C body temperature is not a good thing and nothing sucks worse than having to leave the woods to find shelter in a zombie infested town, only to have the rain stop AFTER you've reached the town, wasting all the time you used to get there....cause seriously who actually camps NEAR a town with buildings you can enter? Not me...thats for sure, too many chances to have someone notice your fire....but even deep out in the trees I don't like keeping a fire going at night for too long, cause its basically a big SHOOT OVER HERE sign.....so its either continually light fires and kill them to maintain your body temperature...or get indoors somewhere. Give me a tent I can get inside AND store crap in...and one that has a more natural profile that hides well in a tree line and its undergrowth, and I might have time for tents.

I've spawned a couple times in Novy Sobor, but the spawn was literally inside a building mesh, making getting out a little tricky. Other than the few times that occurred its pretty much always coast line...the Novy Sobor spawn point is probably a developer debug entry point that shouldn't spawn players at all.

Speaking of the woods, they're a bit too safe....I wouldn't go so far as to put trigger radius spawns in the tree lines but a random spawn generator which could target areas where there were active players and basically throw a percentile chance roll that a few small zombie spawns would be dropped in their map grid would make things interesting. While its nice to have "safe areas" and all that, if you live out in the woods, the only threat really is bandits, and given that server populations only average around 50 players per server, you could spend a whole night at your campsite and never have to deal with any threat at all. I'd probably use a player based locational trigger that the server does a random grid position look up for all active players and pulls idle times for the agents on the servers, high idle timers would then have have a percentile chance roll of a zed spawn in their grid....given that zed AI as it is, this still doesn't present a huge threat but it does mean that you could end up with a walker in your camp. Either that or add bears/wolves/wild boars that are semi-aggressive, I've spent a lot of time in the woods in my life and I can assure you that nothings quite as disconcerting as waking up in the middle of the night and realizing your fire went out and there are hoof/paw sounds and snuffling breathing inside your camp. Just a thought, when it comes to being out in the woods.

I think people are giving the OP a bit too much hell for using the word "end game", how about we all just agree what they mean is a deep enough sandbox content base to provide a consistent reason to play and let it go at that? Its a perma-death sandbox with infinite do overs, so there is no end game, but as I posted in my thoughts on it, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be more incentive to survive. So far DayZ seems to be a suicide simulator, you're either committing suicide by over-estimating your chances of getting some supplies you need, or under-estimating the depths of evil of other individuals on the internet....any way you cut it, its a suicide simulator. Incentive to survive is key. DayZ doesn't have that, and pretty much all the sandbox expansionary content in the world doesn't matter in an environment where its essentially more fun to see how many people you can off with a hatchet before you get your head chewed off by a zed or you get shot down in the process.

Scalability to radius size would create a nice variance on zed threat level depending on the size of the area. The larger the trigger radius, the larger the spawn, and I wouldn't widen, I'd contract, so you can...eventually, say, whittle down all the walking dead in an area after several waves, then have the original radius reset after a random timer. This would create better "zombie hordes" than the current method of AI spawn management.

Couple of things I'd like to see. More defensible constructions and the ability to fortify buildings/sites which actually keeps Zeds out. Changes to Zed AI spawn algorithm which changes the size of spawns randomly to ensure its not just...you showed up so here be zombies. Working Ghillie Suits/Camo Suits (bugged) and some other considerations in regards to military/para-military grade ballistic resistance gear which helps surviving for a few more seconds possibly. Some kind of incentive to survive...cause there really isn't one....death is so cheap in DayZ that no one cares that they die, losing gear doesn't matter much, overall. And even though you've "died" permanently, starting a new character is as easy as clicking a button...so, why care about dying? Thats really the crux of things with DayZ....death is certain, and it has no teeth...so no one cares to even really bother to survive.

Uh? Is the server version a couple numbers higher than the client beta update? Cause there is no 94878 for client updates. EDIT: 1.7.2.2 even...brain running faster than fingers again.

Now all the servers are running 94876 but the launchers are installing 94945....lol this is definitely a classic Friday the 13th update period.

Why is it when I just used the damn 94444 updater a few days ago it tells me wrong CD key today when I try to use it. Christ what a bugass patch system.

LOL well if the Six Updater is wrong, then maybe it should roll things back cause servers are whitelisting to 1.7.2.2 in droves right now. Someone might want to put the situation in reverse ASAP if this is true.

Wanted to drop a few things your direction but Twitter hardly means diddle these days when its busy. As a indy designer myself who hammered a persistent database driven gaming experience into a live environment that had no inherent advanced gaming functionality in it, I can definitely appreciate what you've achieved here with this mod. But there are a few things from a design perspective that I thought I'd share my thoughts on. agent_proximity_trigger (or whatever you're using) for zombie spawn control has its advantages from a server perspective in regards to performance. The less AI assets active, the better, but from a player perspective it turns pretty much all areas that a player must enter into a zombie theme park, rather than a realistic environment. Some may say that its less challenging if there are no AI hazards in relation to every place a player must enter to make any notable progress, but the simple facts are its a zombie apocalypse and lots of zombies have been killed, proximity triggers are good management for AI assets in play on a server that are in direct relation to player activity in proximity of trigger zones, but the proximity trigger should have a percentage tier chance of Maximum/Average/Minimal/None in regards to the AI trigger spawn. Trigger spawns also could use a unix timestamp with a randomly assigned timer value for when the next spawn of AI assets can be populated to the trigger zone. Lets be honest, if someone just killed 25 zombies, they probably deserve a breather to patch up and it would also probably take a little time for more zombies to crawl out of whatever theoretical hell of creation they come from. In plain English the current AI asset spawn system is too basic to be a realistic experience, and while at times challenging, the challenge it presents is artificial, and brutally attempting to make up for its non-complexity with overwhelming numbers. And I'm not saying that people don't prefer things difficult, but if you're wanting a realistic simulated environment, these are things I think you should take into consideration, Far as your player side system goes, its been pretty well thought out. I'll forgive you the allowance for Coke and Pepsi as sources of hydration since canteens aren't exactly abundant and water sources are pretty hard to get to for the average new player. But there is a facet of the player dynamics that falls into a level of very basic reality that I also think needs consideration. Food healing blood loss is all well and good but thats not how the body really works. Total blood volume is replaced, after hemorrhage, with both food and fluid intake, and its also a process that occurs over time. Having food just have a base effect of Eat = Health, is a very basic game play mechanic that could take the greater step of using a percentile modifier based off both food and drink intake...and also requires the player deal with the "healing effect" over time, based on how much blood they've actually lost. Effectively food and drink, must be used in combination to create a slow HoT effect. This forces people to retreat and recover from their wounds, or be given advanced medical attention by another player, rather than allowing a solo player to wolf down four pieces of cooked meat and be ready to roll in in the time it takes to do so. If a combined nutrition approach to recovering from blood loss is too complex, then a simple bottleneck on how much food per game hour can be consumed is also something to consider. Because to be honest if I was suffering from a major blood volume loss in real life, the least I'd be able to do is eat four huge pieces of meat. In total, recovery is a slow process and should be treated as such, but with that comes something of a negative observance......death is already so commonly expected in DayZ that no one really cares if they die anyways. Perma-death, as such, gives no real consequences for failure or success. You're just done....have a nice day starting over. So in that respect while I feel the considerations for healing I've made are good considerations, I'm not entirely sure they're necessary because the game style itself lends itself towards a distinct callous disregard for ones own safety. This is something I don't currently have an answer for and to be honest if I was to even suggest an answer for it I'd probably be bending your game vision to my own concepts of it and I get enough of that with my own game from my players so I won't tell you how to handle your primary game systems dynamics. Also just one thing, the proliferation of military hardware is something of a balance issue, a couple guys with NVG, a couple of good military grade weapons, and teamspeak can more or less keep anyone entering the Stary Sobor area back on the beach....its really not that hard, I played with my old clan the other day on the Seattle server and we spent most of our time split between the ridge and the tree line north of town picking off people as they tried to get into the area. Its just too easy to cut it off, and the other military grade loot spawns are no where near the quality of stuff you can find at Stary and the NW Airfield...and having two central bottlenecks for high end gear turns DayZ more or less, in its final product, into a death match game. Sure you can hunt and scrounge and survive in the wilderness and all that, but the primary rewards for surviving are gear, and the best gear shows up very predictably at the same two places, whereas the military grade spawns in Cherno/Elektro/Balota/Berezino and the Krasnostav airfield are so variably random that you're lucky if you find a gun, much less the ammunition to use it. In the end, great alpha, I mean seriously, super great alpha. Probably one of the best things made in a long time....and I wish you all the success in the world with the project, glad to see someone else taking the sandbox simulation game seriously. I don't expect Rocket to respond to this post personally, I'm just sharing it in hopes that he reads it and adds it to the pile of things other people think. You don't need to tell me how wrong you think I am, unless you're Rocket, cause all opinions are subjective and you're just as right to believe what you believe as I am. In the end, if you feel the need to troll the post, take the high road and just let the post sink to the bottom of the post list entirely, its far more effective than starting a flame war just because you disagree with one sentence in a post full of paragraphs. Thanks all, and have fun!

Well all the updated server versions on the six updater show 1.61.94878 for me, which is two numbers higher than the client beta version which is 1.61.94876....just a Six launcher table entry error then?

As long as an art resource isn't modified in a manner that gives a user a distinct and exploitable advantage over others, I see no issue with custom skinning. The difference between camo face paint and the lack thereof is not going to make much difference in your survival rate.

Newer player here but I watched a bunch of videos before getting into the game. Seems to me the zombie spawn algorithm has changed in the last few months, in the videos I was watching there would be thousands of zombies alive/dead. But in 1.7.2, the version I am playing, the zombie population is always around a 10:1 ratio to survivors on the server. While this is great in theory it presents something of a problem with entering abandoned civilized areas in search of much needed supplies. Previously, in the videos I'd watched, zombies in total radius affected by shot report awareness AI could be cleared out by someone with a weapon and for a short period there was a brief respite in which you could search for the supplies you came looking for. In 1.7.2, I've literally approached completely abandoned single buildings in the middle of no where, simply to watch 3 zombies spawn from there. If I shoot them all, more zombies spawn....this is exponentially worse in towns and cities because for every zombie you kill another two or three spawn. Basically keeping all areas where supplies are at consistently populated with zombies. Now while I can understand a higher ratio of risk vs reward in Cherno and Elektro, the situation as it plays out in Gvozdno is absolutely unplayable. I had actually gotten my head around sneaking and everything and had spent almost the whole day alive, making my way north, I'd picked up plenty of supplies but was missing one thing, a box of matches....so after a whole day of picking my way through the country side, Gvozdno became my tombstone cause there were no buildings near enough to it to use pathing exploits to peel zombies off of me, and the more I had to shoot, the more zombies started spawning....eventually I was out of ammo and running for my life, with two useless guns, an alice pack full of meat I wanted to cook and still no damn matches and no way to get any either. Eventually I ran out of blood while running, passed out, and was a tasty snack....all cause I wanted some matches. And its because the way spawns work now are directly relative to player activity in an area. If you scope a barn from far enough out with binoculars, there won't be any zombies there, but if you get within 1000 meters of it, sure as sunshine, here they come a-shufflin. So, sorry for the long post but....if I kill all the zombies in an area, shouldn't I get a little break for the ammunition I had to spend? That stuff isn't easy to come by after all....and you'd think it would take longer for more zombies to find the area I was at...or rise up out of the ground...or shuffle out of a toolshed, as they seem to be doing.

I find the penis art over the NW airfield to be the most informative marker of all.

So guys I've been clanning with for the last decade or so have been raving about DayZ as if its the second coming of the great mod's of yore, like Team Fortress and Weapons Factory and Counterstrike and all that jazz. So I watched a bunch of videos and decided, hey this looks pretty badass, so DayZ sells me a copy of Arma II Combined Operations, cause...yanno I'd have never bought one otherwise, and off I go. So right out of the gate I notice something is awry. After dragging myself through the rather onerous installation process (The Six Installer side of things was easy, but the 94444 beta patch stuff is not so easy and doesn't play nicely with direct Steam launches) I finally get on to a US server and...its night time....oookay. So I hit G to check my gear and I have a flashlight, some painkillers and....a bandage. Which just seems wrong cause everyone in the videos I've watched starts with a basic pistol....but no apparently that was too easy so 1.7.2 basically starts you out with nothing but the ability to crouch and belly crawl. So after hopping servers to find some daylight, I end up attempting to sneak my way around to finding some very basic supplies....I don't really care what they are, a gun would be great but at this point I'll take a 2x4 with a nail in it, long as I can defend myself. So five hours after install I've died like 20 times, because anywhere there might be something I could use to defend myself...there are things that I'd need to defend myself against, simply to be able to get to the gear. So in that five hours, I literally got a sore wrist from double jamming the W key and running freaking marathons trying to lose zombies....who are, overall, too dumb to get bored. Eventually I log out, close the game and wonder what I just wasted 30 dollars and six hours of my life on. I'm all for hardcore environments....but without an intimate knowledge of the game, starting survivors have almost no chance at all. I'm in an environment full of sticks and rocks and I can't even whack a zombie with a stick to try to stay alive...all I can do is not get noticed, or....run...and run...and run, forever. On the one life I did find a gun, I also found some road flares and the game decided to immediately throw the road flare the minute I exited my gear screen....attracting every zombie in the area and wasting the 15 rounds of shotgun slugs I found immediately...til I had to run...again, with a useless gun in my hands that I couldn't even flip around and use as a melee weapon to try to survive. So...yeah, nice mod, seems like it was better before today. And now it looks like the entire game's design premise has been designed around this statistic:

This would be a alot easier if there was a competent way to run the Steam Overlay for ArmaOA while using the 94444 beta. I've found some instructions on how to do it on the wiki but they don't seem to be as well explained as they could be. So mostly I'm using the Six Launcher to get into the game.Now even then, you hand me a map of the area, I still don't have a clue where I am. I can't read Russian, I know we start on the coast line...but is it the south or east coast? I don't know, I can barely see the sun even when it is daylight so I've got no idea what direction is what....its just...left...or right...oh look a sign that says 4EPORGKAK....whatever that freaking means, I guess that means 4EPORGKAK is in this direction...I guess I'll head that way.I did find Cherno once, I had to run up a building ladder to try to get away from the zombies there, only to be cracked in the head with an axe by another survivor who was up there that I was naive enough to believe wasn't a threat.

I actually went looking for a deer stand but, since I really don't have any idea where I am and I have no map...I might live longer but I'm far less apt to find anything.

Ahh I thought that was a recent change, and yeah the videos were from March or April as I remember it. Yeah I mean even in the current situation I could slowly make my way to gear, but never anything that gave me a fighting chance but once and even that didn't last very long. I'm not asking a survival game to hand me anything, and I was even working out how to sneak around zombies....but man theres just no room for a mistake at all. Unless you have a weapon, if you get noticed at all, its game over...you might as well not even run cause you're just going to die tired.

Eh I'm stubborn and to be honest I can see how I might enjoy this game even in its alpha state and Arma's wonky controls (key config files are apparently TEH DEVIL to this game), not really complaining about its alpha state I'm just not sure why it seems developmentally sound to take a mod that is getting so much player influx and media support right now and turn around and literally make starting out the highest potential failure curve of the experience. I'm all for death due to my own stupidity or even death because someone was simply faster/smarter/more accurate than me....got no problem with either. But this is all mostly death due to a complete inability to do anything BUT be zombie chow. And its not even like I couldn't sneak around zombies and get into buildings...I could, just 90% of the buildings I could get into were housing empty tin cans, piles of wood and the occasional bandage or bit of ammo but no guns. And then its all just down to the one mistake of getting noticed by a zombie and all you can do is run. Someone described this as a running simulator in one of their game videos and I laughed but wow, thats definitely what I was doing today.