puppetworx

I found that the best way to not get killed as a hero was by using a gun with ironsights and just the normal hero skin, no ghillie and at most an ALICE pack. For me that meant rolling FN FAL, which is a great gun, the ammo is probably about as rare as CZ 550 ammo too. Ghillie, Camo, Coyote backpacks and M14 or other scoped weapons tended to make me a target. For the record I've found maybe five CZ 550s in 6 months of gameplay, while I've found tens of DMRs, M107s and AS50s. It's easier for some people to find them now due to private servers being so heavily modded but in vanilla DayZ they were always pretty damn rare by comparison - mostly due to scripting and duping. Definitely the rarest gun in the game for me.

I have so much contempt for scripters. I think they're all pathetic.

So long as the zombies are flawless (can't punch through walls/stairs, don't do the start-stop zig-zag running, can't punch from several metres away) the game should be good to go. Zombies are the only thing significantly holding the mod back IMO. I'd like harder zombies in the standalone, just not harder because they're glitchy.

Anyone else have the experience that every new piece of information about the standalone that gets released makes you want to play the mod less?

All of my this. If you could cancel the animations it would be bearable - you can't, so it's not a smart code change.

Blitzkreig anyone?

I'm outraged by nobody mentioning snakes in the standalone.

This is true. In DayZ I make a bit of an exception because I don't play it like a competitive shooter and I want it too look good, I think of it more like a Skyrim type adventure game then Battlefield 3. Plus I don't get much 'micro-stuttering' anyway. When I play Tribes: Ascend - it's a different story.

Damn I've been calling them 'helichopters', am I not cool?

Jelly of that setup OP. I've been fiddling around to increase frame-rates in cities myself (my PC is a lot weaker: Q6600 3.2Ghz, 4GB DDR2, GTX 660 2GB, Windows 7, playing at 1920x1080). I've tried pretty much every combination of startup parameters from here - http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma2:_Startup_Parameters - the only one which had any significant effect was -winXP which bumped my FPS in and immediately around Elektro on average by 10 FPS (25-50% depending on location), but it didn't really impact visual quality at all. I'm not jelly of your aliasing though OP. Turn up 3D rendering above 100% (over-rendering), it usually decreases aliasing without much (or any - even on my PC) performance hit, it should especially work on a PC like yours. Here's a screenshot of my settings, you can see that the building, fences and especially the frames of the crane have very little aliasing at these settings. I also found that I need ATOC on All Trees + grass and Anti-Aliasing at least on High in order for bushes, grass and trees to look acceptable (not like paper cut outs) this impacts framerates mainly outside of cities, turned off I would get 100+ FPS in fields with it on on I get 50-60 (my monitor is only 60Hz so it's good enough for me). No matter how low I set my settings (excluding lowering resolution) I rarely get more then 30 FPS when looking into a city though. Terrain and object detail impact performance a lot so I have these set to normal/low, this increases FPS but doesn't really degrade image quality much.

Why not? I've been playing Tetris without blocks for years.

It seems people with really good graphics cards will tell you ARMA 2 needs a really good CPU, while those with really good processors will tell you the game needs a really good GPU. You need both - and you need at least 4GB of RAM and preferably an SSD or at least well defragmented game files. But let me give you a little warning based on my own experience with DayZ: I have experimented with many crazy things in DayZ to try and bump performance (who hasn't?) - just one of which was limiting the access of the game to 1,2 or 3 cores (you can do this in Windows 7 task manager by clicking the process and selecting 'Set Affinity...'). With only one core active performance was degraded in a big way while using 2,3 or 4 cores didn't alter performance at all! So two cores is enough. Remember I said earlier, that bumping my clock speed by 33% didn't improve anything either - that suggests there is a bottleneck elsewhere not in the CPU, probably the GPU. I happen to have upgraded my GPU recently from a HD 5750 512MB to a GTX 660 2GB - which I guess is at least 3 times as fast on average (I'm gussing that because a HD 7770 1GB is half the speed of a GTX 660 2GB, on average, and a 5770 is about 75% as fast as a 7770). In Skyrim I now get 2-3 times the frame rate and have almost all the graphics options maxed out using the high resolution texture pack. In DayZ framerate has maybe doubled on average but I still get 20 FPS in some towns, no matter how low I turn down the settings. The result of an upgrade which on average would triple the framerate in a game has done nothing to framerates in towns in DayZ! I can turn things like anti-aliasing and 3D rendering way up now and it doesn't further decrease the frame-rate in towns like it used to but it's still only eeking past 20 in a town despite the fairly major upgrade. So the frame rate limit is not caused by the CPU because I throttled the CPU and performance wasn't hit. It's not the GPU because I performed a major upgrade and even with the settings turned all the way down if I walk into Elektro I'm still going to get 20 FPS in some parts. I have an SSD so it's not a slow hard drive. 4GB of RAM, it's not that because the game can only use a maximum of 2047MB. It's the game code, it's inefficient and apparently you cannot upgrade enough to satisfy it. So when all is said - and my rant is done :D - I don't think it will make much difference which ever chip you choose - for DayZ - however the evidence points to the next generation of consoles having multiple cores meaning games will be optimized for that. For me that tips the balance in favour of the Q6600 because of the somewhat better futureproofing.

Hey that sounds like you are looking at a E8400 (6MB, 3.0GHz) or Q6600 (8MB, 2.4GHz)? I'd go with the Q6600. Clock speed is more important then the number of cores generally speaking (cache is least important for performance it depends entirely on how optimized the cores are to use the cache), however, those extra cores are going to be more and more important as game developers shift to a multi-threading approach. On top of that I have a Q6600 and I've run it at stock (2.4GHz) and 33% overclcoked (3.2GHz) and it didn't improve frame rates in DayZ one bit! (My graphics card is a GTX 660 so unless your card is better then that no need to worry about theCPU being the bottleneck) DayZ is a really strange beast and you're not guaranteed much improvement from a single component upgrade. Be aware that the E8400 is 45nm process make sure your motherboard can run 45nm chips if you do go that route, the Q6600 is 65nm and will be fine in any 775 socket. You can pick a second hand Q6600 up on ebay for £50 they were a very popular chip much like the E8400. I wouldn't buy one new because they will be double that and for a little more you could buy next generation Intel motherboard, CPU and DDR3 RAM.

Oh. I 've never had to turn the engine off while the car is still moving, does this save the environment or something?

I use it because it gives me better vision - obviously. DayZ isn't actually a first person shooter. Sure if you want to hit shit you should use first person but a lot of the game isn't about shooting so it's not appropriate. Frankie(onPCin1080P) mentioned anecdotally that rocket chose to include third person because it gives you back some of the awareness that you lose when playing in first person on a small screen (i.e. your peripheral vision). There's also the fact that some of the greatest games ever made would have been absolute shit if they were exclusively first person (Metal Gear Solid, every GTA, etc). Just because you have some shooting in the game doesn't mean that you have to adhere strictly to the conventions of the first person shooter genre! But as others have doubtless said if it bugs you then stick to first person only servers. I'm fine with it.

The engine starts when you push your forward key.

I'd love a NZ map. Remote island with reasonable population, variable terrain and great scenery? Not to mention that it somewhat fits the story, NZ is the type of place you might try to escape to in a global zombie outbreak.

It's mainly because video games are made in the West for Western customers. Although the Cold War has ended Russia still make a good boogeyman.

I've never had what you're experiencing OP but I have had some strange things with controls for instance I recently had a CZ 550 (a gun I normally don't touch) and I couldn't zoom in or out with the gun lowered, I also cannot toggle zoom in more then once with a weapon raised in order to return to normal zoom I have to toggle zoom out twice. I changed a whole bunch of bindings - mouse wheel now toggles zoom, freelook and lights on are now bound to a mouse button, Q and E now toggle lean, shift toggles run, running macro added, etc, etc. It actully makes a huge difference.

Thrust Juice - I'll need that to wash down Matt's Saucy Meat. (No homo)

One thing I've noticed is that I can change my settings from high (AA, AF, ATOC on max) to low (disabled) inside a city and it will have only a negligible effect on frame rate, maybe 5 FPS at most. These variables have a large effect on frame rates in forrests and open fields but in a city it's practically nothing even though they improve visuals dramatically. Even turning object detail and 3D resolution up and down only has a minor effect on frame rates in cities for me. Like RJTurner said the bottleneck maybe the CPU as I'm still runing an old Core 2 Quad Q6600. The odd thing is I've tried it at stock (2.4GHz) and with a 33% overclock (3.2GHz) and framerates in cities hardly budged. ARMA 2 is a really strage beast.

Yes.

Yes I have this. I do not get the city lag while playing in the editor but if I jump into a game of DayZ then I will. Some people believe that this is a problem with disk access - I think it's more a problem of code efficiency however. If you have 8GB of RAM or more it may be worthwhile moving some or all of your game files to a RAM disk to see for yourself (only recommended for somewhat knowledgable computer users). Some people have reported great success with this technique in vanilla ARMA 2, it seems to fix the issue of 'texture popping' if nothing else. I have an SSD so I find it rather surprising that disk access is a problem but I haven't enough RAM to move the entire game directory to a RAM disk, I have tried moving both the @DayZ directory and the building.pbo files to a RAM disk but this didn't fix my city lag.

Honestly I don't listen to much while playing but when I do it's usually Thin Lizzy or the No Agenda Show.