jackwhitter

when shooting bullets out of a gun, then degradation would be slow. when your gun gets shot, then it would take damage and degrade very fast. a hit to the receiver could make the gun inoperable in a single shot. or you might take a glancing blow off the stock and still be functional. same effect for items getting shot but there is a little balance taking place. if you shot a backpack, there is a pretty good chance that it would not make it useless, however, if you hit the strap, then the backpack would not longer work as a backpack. rocket said he is working on the exact balance for damage of an item, anyways.

i think this is supremely likely if there are no or little zombies. a buddy and i were discussing how to stop griefers (different from banditing). the guy who just want to watch the world burn. in the alpha, i think high end military weapons should NOT be introduced until very late in the beta or even at retail. even regular military loot, ak/m4/sa.58, should not be in the alpha. the alpha should have maybe 1 magazine fed pistol and 1 magazine fed rifle, initially to test magazine dynamics. eventually, you can add the non magazine fed weapons. the primary weapons in the beginning should be melee weapons and hopefully crafted/modded melee weapons. i mean, a stick on the ground or off of a tree should let me beat at a zombie for a short while, and if i added barb wire or nails, then it should be that much quicker at ending a zombie. to stop griefers in the long run, zombies need to aggro only on highly unusual behaviour. walking slowly (crouch or full stand walk) through a town should not aggro a zombie unless you get very near or run into one, and if you do, then it should be a reasonable task to take out the zombie without alerting the entire town. alternatively, if you start running, that should attract zombies and if you take a shot, then the zombies should get VERY angry and all descend on you with prejudice. you could make players able to do a zombie like shuffle as a possible walk method that would avoid attention and allow more consistent zombie avoidance. the cost of trying to shoot a player or zombie in a town with other zombies around should be very risky. so either you melee another player, which requires getting very close and giving the target a better chance of getting away vs. shooting, or you have to stalk a player and follow them out of town before trying to waylay them. this would go along well with banditing by putting someone in handcuffs/zipties, since you would want to avoid zombie attention and towns and be less likely to execute someone after you get all the loot you want from them. you could bandit and just leave them there alive. the zombies are currently a planned nuisance. they are dangerous if caught off guard, but easy to get rid off, and there is almost no incentive to try going in sneaky as it is difficult to be 100% sneaky without spending 15 minutes crawling, and you end up aggroing anyways, which leads to the same ditching process. it is far more efficient to just plan to aggro and ditch, then move sneakily to your target and get out. new players get frustrated by the lack of zombie consistency, which is possibly part of the unknown, but there needs to be a more reliable means to move in a town non-aggresively, and a significantly more risky proposition if you try to turn aggressive on a person. even getting surprised in a building by another player should try to end in talking and not shooting because even if a shoot out ends in your favor, the zombie horde will descend and make the success shortlived.

awesome devblog! i love that magazines and ammo are separate now. i complained about that months ago in the guns recommendation thread. on magazines, i saw in the devblog that you reloaded all 30 rounds in a single click nearly instantly. is there a way you could create an animation showing loading 1 round at a time, and whenever you click reload, it starts the animation and continues until you move or interrupt it until the magazine is full. each round should take .5 to 1 second to reload, which is still faster than real life. having to reload each round would make magazines that much more valuable for the guns that require magazines. magazines design is as important as the gun for magazine fed weapons. in combat, having to stop and take 20 - 30 seconds to reload an empty mag would be very disconcerting, however, wherever you interrupted the reload would give you that many rounds.. so 10 seconds and you would have 10 rounds to reload into your rifle! this could also be used to top off partially filled magazines as you find more ammo for them. takes 1 * %time% for each round missing. non magazine fed weapons would also get a boost. winchester, the revolver, and the shotgun would be much more interesting during early survivor days. this would also help balance very high end and rare weapons as most of them are magazine fed. a semi auto .50 cal with a single 5 round magazine and 20 loose rounds is a less desirable weapon vs. a DMR that might have plenty of m14 mags available.

A little recognition to some of the guys/gals who give up their time for little to no thanks is a great thing! reskinning/renaming some cans is not game breaking or game changing, so there should be no issues. some names are silly, but who comes up with some of the names commercially? lucky charms for breakfast? twinkies? vegemite? spam? as for immersion, who is to say that these are not homemade cans produced after the zombies come to town?

the initial talk radius could be lowered to 60m or so, but the additional chain should occur though at an exponential decay rate... ie, 60m talk for the original zombie who sees you, 12m for the zombies who got the message from zombie #1, 6m, from zombie #2, 2m from zombie #3, and 1m from zombie #4... probably can stop at this point (if not sooner). this would give an actual max distance of close to 80m as originally intended without getting the whole city. whoever, this is calculated constantly, so any new zombie that sees you directly can reinitiate communication. i like the premise as this makes me want to NOT aggro zombies a lot more and makes a single aggro potentially very dangerous.

awesome update! you can have all my beans!

Changes are looking great and the hints to the directions the dev team is taking is awesome! have ALL my beans!

When changing magazines during reload, you should drop your current magazine onto the ground as is standard practice. if it still has ammo in it, then you would need to look down and select pick up to put it back into your inventory. if magazines could be reloaded (or HAD to be reloaded), then this would make keeping up with your magazines more important if you were not under heavy fire and on the run. magazines are one of the most important components to a magazine fed weapon. forcing people to keep up with magazines would make weapons like the revolver, enfield, and winchester more attractive, especially for the survivor. a carton of lose ammo would take up less space and weight than an equivalent number of full magazines.

I think the tech level should all be there, however, high tech comes with additional support costs. anything electrical requires batteries and should need to be continually refreshed somehow (have to find batteries). though you should be able build a solar recharge station or use a generator to recharge equipment. the higher the technical capability, usually, the device uses more power. a nightvision scope with IR assistive lights is very battery hungry. also, early generation night vision is not as good and still battery hungry, but better than no night vision. flashlights can last days on a charge. improvisation should be king in the world. rocket if you and your team could give us the raw materials to improvise, then we could really make our own stories! all the regular equipment, clothes, and trash should be combinable in different and in unique ways. some should be destructive combines where you can not uncombine an item without destroying whatever you used to combine it, but installing a pair of packs on a bicycle to add some storage should be able to pull the packs off. combining your starting civilian clothing or bandages + a long stick/club + gasoline will get you a flaming stick of death to quietly (relatively) beat zombies to death and to watch them burn. this would give more uses for fuel. as well some molotov cocktails. perhaps, fire should be the only thing that zombies don't like. ie, if you are being chases, throwing a molotov at the doorway you just ran through would make the zombies try to find another way or at least burn to death going through. along with ravin's idea of more regular objects like a football, you could fill the football with gas and make a molotov out of it or put trash metal inside and make a noise maker to attract zombies. the football would throw further than other items, but you could use nearly anything that will hold items. empty cans, canteens, emtpy bottles, etc.

We have had no end of problems with the gamespy nat negotiation attempts and people connecting to our server, which is hosted behind a cisco ASA firewall with all the proper ports forwarded, but the strange ways in which gamespy negotiates nats just dies at the firewall. smaller than normal icmp packets, etc. very frustrating. if you are running are server for public use, then you need to have a service capable of giving you a public IP (or at least the ports necessary). if you want to run a private server on your home connection for some buddies, forward your ports in your firewall or use a VPN service. make gamespy go away!

a big THANKS to the community and the dayz devs who work on this and continue to make it better!

how big is namalsk? looks very well done too!

i agree with the magazine and ammo separation. as ammo should be very rare.. it should be nearly impossible to find a weapon with any ammo or much ammo with it cause whoever died with the gun probably used all of his/her ammo before the zombies got him/her. so great, you found the best weapon in the game, but it is a well machined hammer until you get ammo. loose ammo should be what you find in small amounts in drawers (2 - 5 pieces). and to reload a magazine, you have to go into your inventory (not much fun if you are being chased by zombies). however, magazineless weapons do not have this problem. revolvers, lever guns, most shotguns, and older bolt action rifles with internal magazines could all be reloaded with just loose ammo at any time. loose ammo takes up less space but stills weighs the same if weight is calculated in the standalone. ammo rarity should be based on semi realistic conditions, but more importantly game balance. very unique and powerful weapons should be extremely difficult to find ammo for and magazine limited (maybe the only magazines you ever find are the ones that you found with the gun, empty, of course). a .50 cal with a single 5 round mag will be annoying to use. even if you find a few magazines worth of ammo, you have to go into your inventory to reload your mag once emptied cause you only have 1 magazine. mid grade weapons that use more common ammo would be far more useful even if less powerful, cause you can actually find ammo! this was partially evident in the alpha as i liked carrying the winchester since finding ammo was not a problem even if i found an ak variant or m4 variant, but the standalone should make this scale more extreme. like this: ammo rarity in a stash (for long guns) 10% (each) - mosin nagant/lee enfield, shotgun, winchester (though the winchester could use the same ammo as one of the revolvers) 3% - ak 47 and ak 74 ammo (this is eastern european and not nato country) 1% - stanag .01% - dmr and dragunov .00001% - .338 and .50cal and ammo is found lose in only handfuls! 2 - 5. and at any loot site trash should be 50%+ likely to spawn

awesome venthos! i wondered what the exact rules were. that agrees with what i've seen in finding downed helicopters.

we had a helicopter we flew around during the vehicle fiasco when they weren't saving (only had it fixed until next server restart). however, we flew around and found 4 downed helicopters, but i'm not sure if that was all of them. i can usually find 2 or 3 on foot/vehicle. i've seen them spawn nearly everywhere. anywhere a field is large enough, i've seen them spawn. there seems to be a higher chance that at least 1 spawns around stary/novy. i've seen a few as far north as the NE airfield (and even a little north of that). i've never seen one spawn north of podobo dam though. i've also come across the close helicopter spawn on multiple occasions.