MrBrown (DayZ)

I ninja-edited my posting to state that Fallout actually uses the Gamebryo engine. I think that one might be worth a look, on the other hand in Fallout, Skyrim etc. each house has it's own loading zone, which I really dislike. If a house would have it's own loading zone, you couldn't look into the window to see if somebody is inside.

AFAIK Havoc is just a physics and animation middleware, not a complete engine with map editor, graphics pipeline etc. The engine which Fallout uses is "Gamebryo", Havoc physics is just a part of it.

But still different engines have different limitations. I doubt it would be easy to add a lot of buildings you can actually enter without loading screens in the GTA engine for example. And Unreal and CryEngine will have problems with the sheer size of the map. In the end the ArmA engine seems like the best fit to me, it needs only minor modifications to the inventory and world interaction system. And it needs to be less trusting to the client to make fighting hackers easier.

I hope the skins are coming back! While they might not be authentic, the low inhibition threshold we see when killing other people in the game isn't authentic either. And the skins are one possible way to counter that. In the end, you won't get 100% authentic gameplay by throwing people into a 100% authentic sandbox, that's just naive. You need mechanisms to stop people from jerking around and abusing their internet anonymity. I think the skins are going into the right direction concerning that.

I hope the engine will stay, but will be adapted to support DayZ better. I think if you have access to the source code, that will be entirely possible. There are no real alternatives. Frostbite? Too small maps, no real inventory or world interaction system. GTA engine is a bad joke, imagine a loading screen each time you enter a house, no thanks! I want to be able to look through windows and go inside/outside without any interruption of the gameplay. Cryengine and Unreal aren't really well-suited for such enormous map sizes either. I'm not sure if BattleEye will ever be able to handle the amount of popularity and attention this game is currently receiving, so it might be a good idea to get PunkBuster into the boat IMHO, or if going for full Steam API integration perhaps VAC.

AFAIK that podcast runs nearly two hours, can anyone tell me at which time they're talking about that and perhaps post a direct link to the video?

Sometimes non-native speakers are actually better at writing English than some native speakers. But not always. Just sayin' ^_^

I lol'd :P If you look closely, you might notice it's a parody of that thread *flies away*

IMPOSSIBRU!

In GB you're using imperial units and drive on the left side of the lane, god knows what kind of strange GPS devices you use :D

That argument is so stupid, and I'm so tired of reading it. Is it so freaking hard to interpret "realistic" as "plausible" or "credible" instead of giving that standard smart-ass response "But zombies don't exist in reality"? Yes :P

The far too low inhibition threshold when killing people in a game (compared to killing people in real life) is MUCH more unrealistic than any "branding" could ever be.

As long as there are no bandit skins and no other mechanism to stop the brain-AFK killing on sight, unfortunately there's no room in this game for this kind of roleplay/sandbox gameplay. Which is a pity as it would greatly enhance the game experience.

In the real world your sanity would snap if you repeatedly killed other people without knowing that they'd really pose a threat to you. Unless you're a psychopath to begin with of course. But that's not a character trait you should be able to "chose", as that would be unrealistic.

Fair enough, I'll avoid going off-topic. About the persistence, I think there should be a way for the information to "survive" the death of a single character to be really useful, even when servers or smaller communities with their own database become more common. For example a clan/squad system, where the "knowledge" is not stored per player but for the whole squad. Or some system where you can spread that knowledge to other players. So that they can give it back to your new character after death. If they want to.

While this is true, I think this is also problematic. It's just a too rare occurrence to randomly meet someone you've randomly met before without dying inbetween - but this is actually the only situation where the system outlined by the OP would be useful. To encourage cooperative survivor style gameplay, there needs to be a way to tell if that random encounter with a person you've never seen before is most likely a dangerous one or not, as unrealistic as it may be.

You can also play with friends, but without duping. Just sayin'... ;)

I just found this thread which discusses an alternative to the old bandit skin mechanism, I find the idea quite interesting: http://dayzmod.com/f...ication-system/ I also added a reply where I describe some additional ideas I had when I read that thread: http://dayzmod.com/f...711#entry530711

I like this idea very much. I have one suggestion to take this system one step further: Give players the possibility to exchange information on peaceful encounters. Like if you spend time in close proximity of another player for some time period, his knowledge will slowly become part of your memory too, just simulating the smalltalk between the characters in the game. For this to be useful, the categories and their corresponding color would need to be fixed though, although I don't see this as a big drawback. Then if you find a person somebody else has told you about, you would at least see how he categorized that player. The name of the player who gave you that information could be shown in brackets, so you know that's not your own categorization. But it would still be useful. Perhaps you don't really trust the categorization of that weird nut you walked some miles with, contrary to the categorization of a friend you regularly play with. This mechanism would avoid that it's too easy to get rid of a bad reputation. You have to consider that as long as nobody observes a bandit killing another survivor, you won't have the chance to "flag" him in your character's memory. If he kills you, your memory would be gone along with your character. But IF you can observe a murder and tell other survivors about it and the information spreads, then that bandit will have a hard time playing wolf in sheep's clothing. P.S.: An alternative, simplified approach: Imagine a "gossip meter", which fills up whenever you have a human encounter where the people at least talk before shooting, don't shoot at all or perhaps even team up for some time. It would be a gameplay mechanic which mimics the ingame characters talking to each other like: "Yesterday I saw this psycho with that tatoo on his neck murder some fellow survivors in Elektro." The more people you interact and talk to, the more knowledge the ingame character gains about other people. More knowledge would make it more probable to identify those badass bandits you've heard so many horror stories about. Not through some artificial skin he wears, but just by heavy breathing, some indicator when you're looking at him, or whatever. The opposite would also be possible, like identifying someone as a good person who is well-known for helping other people out. If you didn't hear enough gossip, you get no indication. I think that knowledge about other players should persist across different servers and also after a character dies, even though that would not exactly be realistic. If the player wants to change his image, it should take him some work. And if you have a very bad reputation, you'd have a hard time finding somebody who will let you come close with your blood bag to help. But this leads to the problem: How to automatically identify "bad" or "inhuman" behavior? I'm not really sure myself, I just see this as a brainstorming session where the DayZ devs can pick some ideas from if they read it. The same could be said about DayZ as a whole. I think it would be worth to give it a try. In reality people have different sizes, different shapes. Having different shirt colors and some baseball caps to choose from just isn't the same. We won't ever see a Bethesda-RPG-like character creation system in Day Z. And in reality some people can easily identified just by the specific way they run or walk, etc., but it's just technically impossible to get that into the game. And that's the point where the OP's suggestion comes in.

It's not about players hugging each other. Take a look at the DayZ Trailer again, the links starts the video at the "Paranoia" part: http://tinyurl.com/cqyckph I don't see people hugging each other there. But at least I hear the attempt to communicate before they start shooting each other. . Yup, same here.

Those guys who like the killing on sight and call it realistic are very good at cherry-picking those parts from "realism" which they like, while leaving out other realistic stuff because it doesn't fit into the KoS stupidity they like so much. In reality, killing a person out of fear without really knowing if he was a threat, will result in psychic trauma if you're not a total psychopath to begin with. On top of that, add the inability to to talk to other people or any other form of human interaction, which would help dealing with stuff like that. I'd like to see something as a "sanity meter". And then, for example, if that meter is too high and you got a weapon, your character will just shoot himself. I mean, in a real zombie apocalypse, there would definitely be suicides, right?

Non-retards might have also noticed that coop games have become increasingly popular over the last years and also require an internet connection. That's understandable - and that's exactly why the game needs to offer more incentive not to shoot on sight. It has to come from the gameplay mechanics, not from the people.

Technically they're both not perfect, but I like PB better because of communities like PBBans, where bans are shared across streaming servers.

That's oversimplifying the problem, the same can be done for the opposite: If you're on a zombie infested island with limited resources and found a ghillie suit and a sniper rifle, would you lay down at the forest line at the coast to shoot at every human being you can see through your scope, wasting your ammo, just to be able to collect another flashlight and a bandage afterwards? IMHO the problem is there is too little gameplay incentive to not go solo. Blood bags and the Epi-Pen are basically the only game mechanisms which reward coop play. And once you have a hatchet, matches and a knife, hunting animals becomes a very easy replacement for the blood bags. Possible ideas would be limiting healing with food. For example the amount of healing from eating could depend on if you're actually hungry. If you eat when you're really hungry, healing takes full effect. If you eat when the hunger indicator is green, you get almost no health. And/or simply no health from food above 8000 blood. And broken bones and morphine could be handled more realistically: So that you need the morphine to not get unconscious when another player has to set the bone before stabilizing/bandaging it.