demine0

The last few days I've found that I've been having issues keeping my game playing above 10 FPS. I'll get random drops in busy area's where my CPU will strain to keep up with the game while my GPU stands by doing jack shit. A good example of a busy area is the Apartments west of Cherno. With these new settings my game runs at an average of about 30 FPS. It falls to about 20 FPS in busy areas. That's an average boost of about 20-25 FPS from what I used to get. As many of you guys know, DayZ is built off of the Arma II TOH engine. The way this engine handles certain graphic operations is a bit flawed. This is no surprise as the game is still in the alpha stages and has had no optimizations put into place. I've done a bit of research and found out a few things about the engine. This is all to the best of my knowledge, so PLEASE if any of this is wrong, let me know so I can correct it. First the game assumes that your graphic card won't be able to handle the full load of the game and automatically offloads certain graphic card operations off to the CPU. This is why your game often appears to be CPU bound. Secondly; Poorly implemented occlusion culling causes the game to render objects when they are out of line of sight causing FPS drops to occur. To demonstrate this; Stand inside a building in a large town on the coast; Look towards the ocean and you'll notice you get high FPS. Looking towards the city you'll get considerably lower FPS. Even while staring at a wall inside the building you'll notice the same issue. This has been a flaw since the early Arma II days. Instead of fixing the issue at the core of the engine they decided to rely on costly level of detail transitions. Accounting for level of detail involves decreasing the complexity of a 3D object representation as it moves away from the player. The settings I'm going to explain below will help your system deal with these bottle necks caused by the engine inefficiency's by forcing certain rendering controlled by the game to be rendered directly by the graphics card, and by reducing the distance at which certain objects are rendered in the game. First you should adjust the game settings the way you want them. I turned pretty much everything off except for AA. I left AA on so that DayZ would allow me to use the Alpha Coverage to make trees, plants, and grass look nice. Just copy my settings if you're unsure of what to set. My Game Settings (And Screen Shots from in the game): http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197965238711/screenshots/ After you save your settings, exit the game. It's time to edit some configuration files. First open: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\DayZ\DayZ.cfg You want to find and change/set the following config values: FSAA=1; postFX=0; GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1; GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1; HDRPrecision=8; vsync=0; AToC=7; SWLayersCount=0; PipQuality=3; PPAA=0; These settings cause the CPU and GPU to pre-render more content than they normally would. afaik GPU_DetectedFramesAhead is set on the server end in the DayZ client, so I don't know if this change is actually doing anything. The other values turn things like post processing and vsync off. Don't change or add any other config values. Save the file once your done, then make it read only. You do this by right clicking the file, going to properties and clicking the "Read Only" check box. This prevents the game from reverting certain settings on reload. Now open: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\DayZ Other Profiles\<STEAMPROFILENAME>\<STEAMPROFILENAME>.DayZProfile You want to find and change/set the following config values towards the bottom of the file: sceneComplexity=50000; shadowZDistance=100; viewDistance=2200; preferredObjectViewDistance=1800; Save that file and make it read only. Those settings tell the game not to render things that are super far from you. This is probably the second largest FPS saver. The lower you make shadowZDistance, viewDistance, and preferredObjectViewDistance; the better your performance will be at the cost of view distance. sceneComplexity is the in-game "Objects Detail" Setting. Putting this to values below 200,000 lets you get way more fps at the cost of some graphics detail. You can set this to 50000 for a good compromise between performance and quality. Much lower values can also work. With the above config I can still see far enough to snipe with a long range scope, but I don't get such a hard FPS hit in more busy area's. Next you need to offload some of the things you turned off or down onto the graphics card. These are the settings I am using for my nvidia card. If you have ATI or another brand you're on your own as I don't have the software to compare settings. If you post screen shots of your control panel like I did with mine below, I can give you some suggestions on what to set. Every PC setup is different though. Try different settings and see what get you the best FPS boost. http://img.sykotix.com/2014-01-01_12-01-23.png http://img.sykotix.com/2014-01-01_12-01-40.png http://img.sykotix.com/2014-01-01_12-01-55.png A few notes on my above settings: - If I could turn Ambient Occlusion off or down, I would as it's the largest FPS hog. This appears to be locked by the game itself. - FXAA: Although the game has it, this is one of the things that it offloads to the CPU(I think?). Turn this ALL the way down in game, and set your graphic card to override the game setting (this is so the graphic card handles the AA, but still allows the game to use Alpha coverage for tree's and grass. - Certain nvidia GPU's have the option to force applications to multithread graphic processes. I'm testing to see if this has any effect on DayZ. I think it does. Settings and Game Play Screenshots: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197965238711/screenshots/

@humberto; You're right; which is why my guide helps by taking some of the strain off the CPU. @Punkrawks: I agree with you. Quality does take a hit, but even you saw a 20+fps increase. While people with awesome rigs might not find these optimizations helpful, I'm sure people running with less specs will find some use from it.

I've been gone the past week or so moving to a new apartment. When I get home today I'll be updating US 5 to the latest version, and implementing a few fixes that I've been testing in a closed environment. DayZ has grown from a measly 1000 concurrent players to over half a million concurrent players. With that the demand for cheats rises as well. As far as the remaining issues with hacking, hopefully we'll have more anti-cheat tools to work with once 1.61 comes out.

I own US 5, and currently I'm the only person who has administrative access to that server. US 5 is scheduled to restart every 6 hours, so you most likely got caught by that. Earlier this week, (Or maybe it was late last week?) I had to restart the server a few times during the mid afternoon hours EST, to test out a new version of the hive. As for *my* comment on the unrepentantgaming.com forums, that went something like this: For you guys who don't know this little tidbit of information; Arma2 has a built in mission editor, that lets you load any map included in Arma 2, and make missions with them. Chernarus is one of those maps. You can use the mission editor to create your own little mini Arma 2(Not DayZ) server that other players can join. With Chernarus loaded, If you place a heli on this map you can use that to scout the map for camping places. This is totally legit, as it doesn't effect DayZ at all. If you guys haven't done this yet, I highly recomend it. The map looks totally different from the air, and you can really learn the lay of the land well. I'm currently in the middle of moving to a new State, so I really haven't had time to review my server logs. If you guys report back here with any times that you saw hacking attempts, just let me know and I'll get those ID's banned. I'm still moving so it may take a bit for that to happen. I may actually teach some of the Uey's (unrepentantgaming.com) to do that as well, so this server is upkept a bit better than it has lately.

The scroll wheel menu is a bit broken ATM. If you have Binocs, try taking them out first. Wheel should start working again. The L85 was taken out by the cleanup script to clean up any invalid weapons/items. We won't be doing any character restore due to the nature of an alpha.

Is this something you've allready begun working on?

It's possible, although not officially supported and actually not recommended by the DayZ staff at this time.

Zombies kick hard. Drink milk and you wouldn't experience these bugs.

How long has your support inquerys with HFB gone answered so far?

Honestly... Black listing is the last thing I ever want to do, for that very reason. I don't like when players loose their homes because of something an admin of their server has done. That's why I rather work them to get them back into compliance then have to resort to black listing.

sigh.... Actually. No you can't. If you read the agreement that you should have read before being given an instanceID, you would know that. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o70yiSuNe-ENhKjzs3B7ECXoOf-KW8BYnwNGpVsHXss/edit http://support.dayzmod.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displaycat&catid=1 You should also check out these two threads: http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=21034 http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=9427 I understand that PvE only is something people want, but right now it's just not available in DayZ, It actually hurts the community as a whole when admins try to enforce PvE only, since players can go on your PvE server to farm gear to use elseware without the worry of getting killed by players. I mean come on.. Lets face it, a group of 10 players would have a pretty easy time against most zombie mobs. If there are no players in that mix to disrupt that balance, it's super easy to sit at stary and northwest all day getting bomb ass weapons, then taking them to "normal" servers to dominate with. I would personally like to see PvE only at some point as well, but right now it's not a priority on our list. It would take a large infrastructural change which we're not prepared to take, especially while the game is still in the Alpha stage, in order to provide a PvE only experience that doesn't effect the rest of the non DayZ PvE Servers. I'll let this post serve as your first and only warning. Failure to adhear to the rules *will* result in me black listing your server.

From what I understand' date=' as I've asked Vipeax to clarify for me, the Linux version of the Arma2 Server binary doesn't support a function called callExtension( http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/callExtension ). callExtension is used to load the addons that are required for DayZ(and may other addons) to run. This functionality had been achieved by JayArma2Lib in the past(I use canned replies in PM's for common issues, I forgot to update that since we stopped using jayarma2. I get A LOT of PMs), but it was very unstable and required that JayArma2Lib be updated with every beta build of the arma2oa server. We also wanted DayZ to less dependent on 3rd party modules, so vipeax introduced @hiveext(Which is also an addon which requires callExtension to load). The above limitation is not something the DayZ team can fix, as it's an issue with the arma2oa server, and not the DayZ mod itself. As far as we know there are no plans by BI for linux support anytime in the near future. If your really set on getting DayZ working on a Linux box, you should bring up the subject on the BI forums. They've never contacted us regarding whitelisting. We also have an automated signup system at http://support.dayzmod.com that they can use to get whitelisted (Pending engineering team approval of course). I also don't see anywhere on their site that mentions a linux build of dayz. Google doesn't show anythng either.

US 5 is 6 hours.

Hey guys, We've been trying to enforce a new naming policy for DayZ servers for about a month now. In the future any server not running on our new naming convention would not be able to connect to our central database. We've tried contacting most of vilayers servers owners ourselves, but only 3 of them replied and made the changes they were suppose to make. The rest never replied. We then contacted Lee. Lee has gone further then the other GSP's, and has put a system in place that will automatically changes any settings on your servers to stay in compliance with DayZ guidelines and policy's. This new system that vilayer has put into place will assure that any of vilayers customers will not be blacklisted. If you need a refresher on the policy's, please re-read the agreement that all hosts had to agree to before getting an instance ID: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o70yiSuNe-ENhKjzs3B7ECXoOf-KW8BYnwNGpVsHXss/edit

They are. But this is only because they've come to us with a range of IP address's with servers allready pre-setup on them.

Trust me, I understand what ALL of you are going through. It was only 2 months ago that I was in your very same shoes waiting on my 2nd week for that e-mail to come with my instance ID. On top of new servers, the admin team is also tasked with supporting people who don't have the knowledge to maintain or get their server working, so over the past few weeks, the support requests have just piled up faster then we can answer them. We are aware of all the support requests, and we are aware of all the server setup requests, we just don't have the resources at the moment to hit every single one of them in a day. With the new systems we're putting in place this will change however. Those systems should be coming in place very soon.

Performance isn't poor because of it being a single database server. The database isn't even breaking a sweat at peak times. It's mostly limitations in the ARMA II engine that causes performance issues. A majority of the server load and bandwidth is actually between the DayZ Game server and the player. The amount of traffic between the Game Server and Central database is much smaller.

We ARE still processing server requests, almost every single day. The amount of people requesting servers actually is alot. It's way more than a small team like mine is able to handle, which is why we're going to have an automated signup system for new server requests very soon. We're close to done with it, and you'll likely see something after the 1.7.2 update. Until then just sit tight. We're taking them in the order we receive them in.

Oh great. People are going to be coming into the game and blowing dudes for can's of beans.

I have a g15 Keyboard. This script should work with any logitech gaming device though that supports scripts. function OnEvent(event, arg) --OutputLogMessage("event = %s, arg = %s\n", event, arg); end function OnEvent(event, arg) if (event=="G_PRESSED" and arg==7) then if (toggle==null) then PressKey(0x11); OutputLCDMessage("Sprinting",9999999); toggle=1; elseif (toggle==1) then ReleaseKey(0x11); ClearLCD (); toggle=nil; end end end It uses G key 7 to toggle holding "W".

One of the other DayZ Engineers, Dizzymagoo has been working on something pretty cool. He's got a lot of work on his plate at the moment, so it's going to be a little while till we see a first release.

You can use the log rotater at http://dayz.sykotix.com/dayz-server-utilities/. When your rotated logs directory gets too big, just delete your oldest logs. I also found that rotating logs makes it easier to find reported hackers when given a time that it happened.

I have the logs from that period on US5. I'll look through to see who was running the scripts and ban them accordingly.

*Spits on the back of this post, and sticks it up on the wall* .