Ancient (DayZ)

I've had a Coyote for weeks now... The only time I've died is when my buddy thought I was someone else and killed me. I got all my stuff back though. Found a Mountain Dew shortly thereafter, and then found 3 x ghillie suits, 2 of them were in the same house! lol.

Why would you want to hold a discussion on something that is not possible? Further, even if you did control the age group of the players, I don't think it would have the effect/impact that you seem to think it would.

The difference between hitting the disconnect button in-game and Alt+F4 is that pressing the disconnect button will cause a disconnect packet to be sent, whereas Alt+F4 will simply close the program. The next time that the server sends any sort of packet (after Alt+F4), it will get a response from your computer saying "I'm no longer using that port," and then disconnect you itself (this is typically within a second or two of Alt+F4'ing). This could further be compared to disconnecting your ethernet cable, where your computer simply no longer exists on the internet, therefore there is absolutely no response whatsoever. This is when you will timeout in-game, after the server attempts to re-send the packet X amount of times and waits Y milliseconds for a response. There are other situations as well, such as firewalls stealthing ports, packets actually getting lost or returning a bad checksum (rare), but that's sort of a tangent off your question. =P

Madness?

Using "anti-cheat" software is the worst way to go about preventing hackers, other than not doing anything at all. Rocket mentioned that the game will go stand-alone eventually, and I think herein is the solution. The best way to prevent cheating/hacking is to design the game in such a way that such exploits are not possible. This solution is nearly impossible in a mod to an existing game, so don't expect much on this front.

Yeah, until you realize that you're now relying on the server to properly timeout your connection, and possibly dying while not in-game.

What the fuck? Why would you 100% devote the server resources to character creation in the first place (with top priority)? Create a new, low-priority thread which generates new characters. Sure, the overall time to create the character will be longer, but there will be no interruption of service. That's of course assuming that the programmer(s) aren't retarded and don't dead/livelock the server. Basic realtime programming 101: kind of essential when making/designing a large scale game. The longer character creation time would probably deter people from mass respawning, anyways. /rant

Wrong. Go with i5 for gaming performance, as you will get higher clocks on less cores/threads. Additionally, Sandy Bridge OC's much better than Ivy Bridge, so if you're looking to get high clocks, go SB, not IB. Defragging NTFS is useless unless your HDD is absolutely full. Also, once the game is loaded into main memory, the HDD does virtually no work. Try a full reformat if you have a ton of shit on your computer eating memory and bandwidth.

Two points to add on: 1. Find and repair vehicles; and 2. The "game" is still in alpha, meaning that many more features are coming (I think player bases/safehouses will be able to be built). I imagine this game will not focus on balance, but on adding additional things to collect and aquire, either through farming or through goals/acheivements. At least this would constantly give you something new to work towards.

You should be able to run Arma on low/medium without FPS issues. What do your graphics settings look like right now?

Unless the engine was specifically built to accomodate this idea, I doubt it would work. Even if you had a way of knowing exactly what angle you were shooting at, your mouse DPI wouldn't support the adjustments required to shoot that far. Further, we don't really know if damage is a function of velocity or distance (based on round/weapon type). In short, I'd say this is pretty much impossible. Even if the rounds are velocity based, and properly effected by gravity, and you could get the proper angle, a long distance shot wouldn't have enough energy behind it to impart lethal damage (terminal velocity is not lethal); the person would just log off or run away.

The only time I ever killed someone was in a bus. I ran over him. I laughed my fucking ass off, and so did the other guy in the bus. My only regret is not getting it on FRAPS.

Could be a desync (ie, netcode bug), since it doesn't seem to be hardware dependant, and it seems to fix itself when you swap servers but stay in game. If this is the case, it could take a while to isolate and patch. It can be really hard to replicate an error (to identify it) if only a small percentage of people experience it.

You don't understand natural selection, that's why.

Look up what graphics card or which integrated graphics controller you have in your laptop, then look up benchmarks for your hardware. Some people are getting away with Intel-HD graphics (integrated graphics, not a stand-alone graphics card) and running the game on low settings. I would assume that you could at least do the same.

I have to agree with pretty much everyone here. It would be AWESOME to have multiple types of zombies, as long as you don't start implementing crazy zombie evolutions which aren't possible given the timeframe. Hordes, northern/southern are good ideas, as well as the police/military zombies being stronger or faster or whatever. It's unreasonable to have an "infestor" type; a zombie apocolypse is likely brought on by an airborne virus, which means that you, as a survivor, are likely immune to it. Getting puked on shouldn't do anything except possibly make you puke from disgust. Keep the creativity going though; I'm sure there are different "types" of zombies that aren't too far-fetched and would work well.

The only real way to accomplish this idea is to introduce hard-coded character classes which you must choose from. Then implement features or items which are only available or useable by specific classes. Once you implement this, you have an instant in-game economy. The problem(s) is(are): which classes do you make, what functionalities do you give them, what specific items do you make for them, and how do you balance the trade economy? Specifically in this game, how do you implement trade, when the person you're trading with can just shoot you and take what he wants? Should you even implement a "safe" trading system? That would be pretty unrealistic. Maybe just bring a bunch of buddies with you incase shit goes downhill (I like that one better). You get the idea. Shit gets big fast.

Welcome to a game in its alpha stage; software generally isn't even released to the public even in beta phase, let alone alpha. Get over it or get out.

Didn't your mother ever tell you to look both ways before crossing the road? Apparently a player (I won't disclose his name for his pride's sake) on server US 592 didn't receive this advice from his mother. While driving our stolen bus (I think a friend of mine posted the story of stealing the bus elsewhere on the forums; it's hilarious if you ever find it) from point A to point B (about 2/3 of the way across the map), we got stuck on a roadblock in an undisclosed town/city. While vigorously maneuvering the bus around the roadblock to make the turn, my buddy shouts out "Hey, there's a survivor over there!" At this point, I'm not really concerned about survivors unless they're shooting at our bus; I'm more concerned about getting off this frackin' broken-down car so we can continue our journey, hopefully with the bus in 1-piece. After all, the whole point of our journey is relocation of assets.I finally manage to get off the hunk of junk and make the right turn. Just as I start moving us down the road at a decent pace, I see a zomb... Wait a second, that's no zombie. I imagine at this point I have the biggest shit-eating grin on my face as I immediately decide my course of action. This guy is standing right in my path, not moving, and not looking in my direction. I'm not sure how he didn't hear a half-broken bus driving straight toward him (those things are LOUD!)... Or maybe he did, cuz he looked down the street - the wrong way down the street - just before I plowed over him. We burst out laughing as the death message pops up in the corner, and continue on our merry way. Of all the ways to die in DayZ, I think that getting dozed by a bus - just because you couldn't look both ways - takes the cake. Lesson learned: make sure your headphones aren't on backwards; it might save your life one day. Oh, and you'll be happy to know that we arrived at our destination, safe and sound.

Haha torytrae that would be awesome! Made me laugh just thinking about it. KField86 I imagine that would suck. My general rule of thumb when killing someone is to make it clean and quick, and then get the **** out ASAP before buddy calls in backup or glitch spawns where he died and kills you (it has happened before; my friend glitch spawned and followed the guys that killed him back to their camp, then took their bus with all their equipment in it).