Junos

Man, lot of condescention and elitism here. I don't know about you guys, but I didn't start playing DayZ mod years ago because I wanted to farm imaginary food and pick imaginary apples. Minecraft is better for that, if that's really your cup of tea. I mean, it's fine for that to be in the game, but I don't want to spend 15 minutes clicking "Look for apples" and watching the same animation play 50 times only to get an apple 25% of the time which provides 5% of the nourishment of a can of tuna. That's not good gameplay; it's a waste of "operator" time. If farming and fishing is what you really want to do, try TerraFirmaCraft. That will engage that part of your psyche like nothing else. It has serious depth, unlike "walk up to tree, click search, wait for animation; repeat 3 times; eat 1 apple; repeat whole process for 15 minutes." Note: I'm all for DayZ being hard. But that doesn't mean that the current agriculture and foraging is good gameplay. So it boggles my mind to see people advocating it in its current state. It's nothing more than button-clicking and make-believe. If that excites you, good for you, I guess... As far as 0,56, yeah, the current experimental is more broken than 0.55. So what? The development process so far has been a lot of one-step-forward-two-steps-backward, and that's not going to be changing. Get used to it. Play 0.55 or some other game until a more playable build comes out. The real problems you should be concerned about are the deeper ones, like the combat-breaking 3rd-person view, and the incredibly poor performance. I hope their plans for those issues bear fruit (ha), but those are the real problems right now. And as far as you guys go: this is almost as bad as reddit. People who've been on the forum a couple months telling people to get lost. Well, I've got bad news for you: you've been cut from team DayZ forum. You didn't make the grade. Other people have been trying to voice concerns and have conversation without being a jerk, but it's just too hard for you. Not everyone can make it. That's ok, because it's no big surprise. We feel less of you as a person, but so what? It's the Internet. Thanks for not trying again. :P

This tip boils down to using the tbb4malloc_bi memory allocator. A quick Google search shows this: https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA_2:_Custom_Memory_Allocator This suggests that the -malloc=tbb4malloc_bi switch doesn't actually make any difference unless you're using an old version of the game. That same page also says this:

DayZ is not the game you are looking for.

Until the loot respawning is fixed, night servers are...well, they're either better for finding loot, or more frustrating to find loot on. If few players have been on since restart, it can be good. But if it hasn't restarted since night, it just takes a whole lot more time and effort to find loot--and if there is none to find, it's just frustrating. My first life on SA, I geared up at night. I did turn up the gamma, because pitch black is just impractical. But the other night, I decided to try a nighttime run again, and it was just more tiring, and I found less loot.

Until the pathing and clipping is fixed, they should not increase in number nor ability. Eventually, it would be ok for a few of them to be faster than other players, but not all of them. I think the primary danger should be from numbers and surprise, i.e. walking around a corner into a sleepy horde. Depending on their zombie lifecycle, maybe some of them could be faster and stronger.

Well, in the past two days I've had 7 or 8 friendly encounters and 4 unfriendly ones. In one life, I met 4 random guys in Elektro, and we all teamed up and went north. No funny business, just good guys. I've also run into and buddied up with 2 or 3 random solo players. I even ran into a player new to DayZ, and I gave him some supplies, including an extra axe I had. Yeah, 3 out of 4 of the unfriendly encounters involved childish people being the bad guys, and those are annoying. One of them was a guy sneaking up on me despite my head being on a swivel. That is actually less annoying. But all the friendly encounters have outnumbered the unfriendly ones by far in the past couple of days. I've been on hardcore servers--I don't know if that makes a difference. Anyway, don't give up completely. Be a hero once in a while. You might get killed, but you're still making the world a better place, one zombie at a time.

I'm also going to go with "no." We do not NEED a way to identify good guys and bad guys. One of the major selling points of DayZ is that you don't know who is good and bad, and you don't know what's going to happen. You say that realism isn't a valid argument, but that's a false dichotomy. If we didn't care about realism at all, we wouldn't have DayZ in the first place. It's a question of balancing realism with gameplay. The issue is really artificiality. Having a way to visually identify bandits--a way that the bandits can't control--would basically be like magic. This is not a fantasy game, it's reality-based. Shooting other players shouldn't magically cause your appearance to change. DayZ is about player choice, and that includes being able to choose your appearance. Instead, here is a way to discourage banditry in groups, and encourage good guys to stick together: For every murder that a player commits, he should become less comfortable and relaxed near other players. Eventually, after having committed enough murders, he should be very nervous when within 50-100m of other players. Think about it: if a bunch of conscience-less people were in a group and murdered a lot of innocent people, how could they even trust each other? If the people in their group are so comfortable with senseless killing, then why not senselessly kill one of their buddies if they want his stuff? The primary effect of being uncomfortable and nervous should be a shaky aim. It could also cause an increased metabolism, requiring more food and drink. and possibly reduce stamina. As a result, bandits would be encouraged to go solo, because as they group up and as they kill more innocent people, their combat effectiveness will be reduced. This will help reduce roving gangs of bandit bullies. And on the other hand, groups of heroes will be something for bandits to fear.

What makes this so frustrating is that it would be so easy to prevent from happening, if only the server would not let people connect when other players are close to their spawn point.

This is why we really need a system to prevent spawning in within, say, 200 meters of other players. All it has to do is say, "You're within 200m of another player. Try again in a few minutes, or try another server." There, now no more "beaming down" on top of other players. I'd even be fine with a higher limit, like 400m. My most annoying deaths in the latest patch? 1. First login after new patch. Trying to find a day server--several of them seem to lie. I found one, but it said, "No KoS" in the title--are you kidding me? There are no rules in DayZ! So I tried one more server...and it went from "Please wait..." to "You are dead." No sounds of fighting or anything, just dead. I don't have any idea why. I had all green, all military gear, M4 and Mosin, 45...all gone, and who knows why. 2. I met 4 random friendlies in Elektro! We ran north. Lost one guy to an air-launching glitch. Lost another to a random axe murderer in a random house. Then the third guy disconnected, so it was me and my Steam buddy. We went to the NW airfield. It was deserted. I checked the roof of the tower. As I climbed down the ladder, my buddy ran or glitched or lagged through me, and my body was pushed through the railing and I fell and died. Sigh. 3. Yesterday I was in Berezino. All I had was an axe and other random stuff. I heard multiple gunshots of multiple types. I looked down the street from a balcony and saw 7 or 8 guys milling about on the street. They looked like a ragtag bunch, and I'd had 4 or 5 friendly encounters in the past day, so I thought, why not, maybe they're friendly. I have little to lose. So they ran down the street and I got their attention. They filed into the courtyard and one said, "Hey, we're friendly, we're not going to kill you." I got a nice screenshot of 6 guys looking at me. I waved at them. Then one of them shot me. "No one messes with OUR TEAM!" They sounded like playground bullies. Sigh. 4. Today I met a random friendly at the shipwreck north of Berezino. We finished looting the ship together and headed north to the new town. We ran into a random guy in the town. He had a sawed off shotgun; we had axes. We said hello. I raised my hand in a wave. The shotgun was lowered. My framerate was so bad that all I saw was one frame of my hand waving, one frame of red blood splattering, and one frame of "You are dead." I heard the sound though. Then he shot my new friend. We had nothing worth taking. I was about to offer him some food. Bottom line, I don't generally have a problem being killed, because it's DayZ: the whole point is that there are no rules. But it's still lame to be murdered for no reason, when you're being friendly, you have no weapon, and no other gear worth stealing. It's lame to shoot people in the face just because you can. I'm not saying it should be against the rules--what is up with these "PvE" servers popping up? I get murdered on them more than others--but it's still lame. Any self-respecting bandit will hunt down prey worth killing and do it without being seen. Because it takes no talent other than a lack of conscience to lie to someone's face and then blow their brains out.

Consoles can do that because it's a closed system. People can't run TeamSpeak on their Xbox in the background. But console gamers can also open their laptop next to them and use TeamSpeak through that, and then they can talk to their teammates without being audible in-game. Or they can use their iPad, iPhone, landline phone, or even (gasp) meatspace! Do I really need to post my list of ways to get around this idea for the third time? Look, here's an analogy: I hate third-person view in DayZ/ARMA/etc. It's so unrealistic, and it ruins immersion, and it's cheap, etc. It doesn't belong in a realistic game, nor in military games. Optical devices like periscopes and mirrors are fine, if they are implemented in the game as those devices; but magic hovering out-of-body-experience camera mode shouldn't be in the game. But as long as it is in the game, I'm not going to purposely put myself at a disadvantage to all the other players on the server by refusing to use it when it helps. I really hope it's removed from the game completely, but until then, I would be more frustrated by dying to people who use it when I don't than I would be frustrated by using it. Now here's the key point: third-person view can be removed, and it cannot be worked around; at least, not without some sort of client-side engine hack that moves the camera POV. No one can use a separate device or program in the background to have an extra camera POV in the game. But on the other hand, there are innumerable ways to communicate outside of the game's built-in voice comms. So I would refuse to put myself at a disadvantage by only using in-game comms when other players will use OOB comms freely and have a large tactical advantage over me. Other players would also refuse to put themselves at a disadvantage, so the whole system would collapse, and you'd be right where we are now, except having wasted many man-hours on programming it all. It would be completely pointless. The bottom line is that it will not work, at least not on public servers. Maybe you can cultivate a community of scrupulous gamers who want as much realism as possible and won't break the rules to gain an advantage. An example of something like this is ShackTac, and maybe DayZRP servers. That is the only way this could work. Well, like I said earlier, the other way is to hire ex-Navy SEALs to infiltrate players' homes and destroy all other communication devices besides the DayZ-playing computer. They'd also need to kidnap players' friends to prevent them from playing together in meatspace. Good luck with that.

Once again: Ways to get around your idea: 1. Use a cell phone to make a phone call. 2. Use a cell phone with Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. 3. Use a landline phone. 4. Sit in the same room with a friend. 5. Use an iPad with Skype, etc. 6. Use a separate PC with whatever VOIP software you want. 7. Use a real radio to communicate with a friend down the street. 8. Use a ham radio to communicate with a friend on the other side of the world. What is wrong with you? If you cannot comprehend these simple ideas, I conclude that you are insane, and I wonder how you can operate a computer. Either that, or you're so stubborn that you refuse to admit your idea won't work, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Ways to get around this proposal: 1. Use my cell phone to make a phone call. 2. Use my cell phone with Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. 3. Use a landline phone. 4. Sit in the same room with my friend. 5. Use an iPad with Skype, etc. 6. Use a separate PC with whatever VOIP software you want. 7. Use a real radio to communicate with my friend down the street. 8. Use a ham radio to communicate with my friend on the other side of the world. 9. Do I really need to go on? Ways to make this idea work: 1. Hire an elite team of former Special Forces operators to track down DayZ players, infiltrate their homes, and destroy any other device which could be used for out-of-band communication. Oh, and kidnap any friends who might bring over their PC for a LAN party. 2. Oops, that's all. Do you understand now? Give it up!

You don't know how noise cancellation works. It's not magic. It can't distinguish between the human voice and every other possible sound. But that's not even the point. The point is that you cannot prevent anyone from using out-of-band comms unless you physically restrain them. I think Rocket is a bit too busy to go door-to-door enforcing rules on random people around the world. Let it go, dude. Let it go. Breathe.

Huh? The idea is that the connecting player is informed with a dialog box that has two buttons: WAIT and CHOOSE ANOTHER SERVER. That's all he sees. He doesn't get to see anything in the game world. All he knows is that there is one or more player(s) on this server within 200m of the last location his character was in. If he really wants to be on that server, he can wait until they move on. If he doesn't care, he can pick another server and spawn in immediately. This would have the side effect of encouraging people to log off in the woods rather than in towns.

This is cool, thanks for sharing. Must have taken you a while. I was hoping for screenshots of groupings though. :)