hatfieldcw

Yes, 10-gauge is bigger and stronger than 12-gauge, followed by 16-gauge, 20-gauge and .410 bore, in that order. As for a carbine firing a pistol cartridge having comparable hitting power to a revolver, barrel length matters quite a bit. A longer barrel, in general, means more time for the gasses to be compressed, thus more time for force to be exerted on the projectile, thus a higher muzzle velocity and more kinetic energy when it comes to terminal ballistics. More shock, more penetration, more knockdown, more range, more precision. There are different kinds of gunpowder, and pistol powders generally burn faster, creating more expansive gas in less time so the shot will accelerate as much as possible in a short barrel. Rifle powders tend to burn more slowly, so they'll always be building pressure even as the expansion chamber (the space delineated by the breach, the circumference of the barrel, and the back of the bullet as it moves away) grows larger with bullet travel through the bore. All the same, it's safe to say that all the fire and smoke that shoots out of the gun is potentially useful energy that's being lost as it's vented. Since a revolver throws fire out the sides and puts up a big flash and cloud at the muzzle almost before the bullet gets moving, while a carbine directs all that gas down the barrel behind the accelerating slug, the carbine should get a bonus to range, accuracy and power even with the same cartridge. I always wanted to have a revolver and a lever-action carbine in .357 magnum, so I could load both from a single bandoleer of cartridges, but my research quickly taught me that it would be beneficial to have different .357 shells for each.

A headlamp's a great idea. It would be far more useful with the control scheme we currently use, and it wouldn't take up the secondary weapon slot, which would be great for those times when you want to see where you're going but don't want to throw your pistol on the ground to do it.

To the contrary, .410 is the weakest of the commonly used shotgun cartridges. It's different from the others because it's described by its caliber (410 thousands of an inch in diameter). The "gauge" on most shells works like the gauge on wire or metal plating--smaller numbers are bigger diameters. Technically, the gauge tells you how many spheres of that size you can get out of a pound of lead. 10-gauge means each ball of that diameter would weigh a tenth of a pound, so they're the biggest of all. 12-gauge slugs, however, tend to be one ounce, or one sixteenth of a pound, since they are hollow, and not solid spheres. Anyway, enough jabber, the 1866 kicks zombie ass and can win a gunfight, also it looks and sounds good to me. I say leave it the hell alone.

I loves me some DayZ, but Arma2 hasn't been cutting edge for some time. Looking back to 2009, my Xbox 360 was still giving my PC a run for its money most days, and recent Xbox titles are showing how far that old tech can be stretched with focused optimization for familiar and universal hardware.10kmx10km map? Totally doable. Just Cause 2 is something like 30kmx30km, and not ugly. Remember, Chernarus is mostly wilderness, with trees and roads and rocks. When it has buildings, most of them are just cardboard boxes, like in GTA. 50 players on a server? It'd require a dedicated server, but it could be done. How many players did MAG support? 256? That game has graphics that rival Arma2. Xbox 360 came out in 2005, Crysis kicked all but the most expensive gaming PCs in the wiener in 2007, and in 2011 Crysis got ported to Xbox 360. They can shoehorn demanding software onto old consoles.

The modern Yellowboy can be chambered for .45 Colt with a 13+1 magazine. .45 Colt guns can load and fire .410 shotshells, so maybe that's the explanation, although the longer shotshell would reduce capacity considerably. Other, later designs were often chambered for .410 directly, but 14+1 rounds still feels like a lot. The smallest .410, the 2.25 inch, would require a magazine almost a yard long to contain 14 shells. I still tend to think of it as a .410. It explains the low noise, low range and lack of ammo compatibility with other shotguns.

Night time should be tougher, but not so silly that it becomes the domain of NVG guys exclusively. I think it would be nearly impossible to fix the exploit permanently, but I'd like night to get some attention. A few observations: Even away from artificial lights, it's rarely so pitch black that you cannot see your hand in front of your face. A few stars, a sliver of moon, these will give your eyes enough light to see your immediate surroundings after you've become acclimated to it. It can take a few minutes for your eyes to adjust, of course. The game has to keep rendering the environment out past what you can see, so that distant light sources can be seen and intermediate obstructions can occlude them. Everyone has a certain amount of tactile and kinaesthetic sense, such that you know the angle of the ground you're walking on, whether you're touching a wall and whether leaves or zombies are smacking you in the face. Since the game has to present that kind of information visually, it's appropriate for some limited visibility to be available even in the absence of light. The Arma2 flashlight blows goats. It seriously sucks. Arma2 was designed for play with NVGs. The light needs a local area effect, akin to a white chemlight, in addition to a wider, more diffuse beam. Especially indoors, that thing's a joke. SInce I can't move my wrist to look at something up close or shine it on the ceiling to illuminate the whole room, the game needs to cheat a little to approximate those uses for it.

I think it could work, but it'll need some serious tweaking. Obviously some additional mods etc. will be called for, but I'm feeling like some clever players will be able to buy in for $10 and walk away with a bajillion of these mooks' dollars by farming zombies in the most efficient possible way, using a campfire and a hallway and two hatchets, or by cloistering the Outlaw until he's worth eighty bucks, then offing him. I say run it like a poker tournament, where everyone pays a flat buy-in price and the payouts come from that. Have between ten and fifty players in a tourney. Everyone gets a set number of lives, and there's a time limit on the whole affair. At the end, the money's distributed based on how it went. Here's an off-the-cuff breakdown: Buy-In: $5.00 Lives: 5 Time Limit: 3 Hours Payouts are simple. Of each $5 paid in: $1.00 (20%) zombie kills $1.00 (20%) survivor kills $1.00 (20%) bandit kills $1.00 (20%) hero kills $0.15 (3%) zombie kills record $0.15 (3%) survivor kill record $0.15 (3%) bandit kill record $0.15 (3%) hero kill record $0.10 (2%) longest life $0.10 (2%) highest kill/death ratio $0.20 (4%) goes to the server admin for the "rake" to cover server fees, weird porn, etc. Also, they get any scraps left over from rounding. The individual pots are paid out in shares for kill tallies, and lump sums for the distinctions. So, let's say you've got 20 dudes in the game. That's $100 total in the pot. At the end, when the scores are all counted up, let's say there are 1000 total zombie kills by all players (trying to keep my math simple). You've got twenty bucks in the zombie kill pot, so each player gets two cents per zombie whacked. If ten bandits get killed, that's two dollars a head. If only one guy gets a hero skin, then the lucky bastard who brings him down pockets the whole $20. If, for any reason, one of those categories comes up zero (no heroes, most likely), that pot gets redistributed to the other categories, as evenly as possible, with extra pennies going to the zombie pot or the admin's pockets. Distinctions are simpler. The guy who gets top score in those categories gets the money set aside for it. Top zombie slayer gets $3.00 no questions asked, etc. In the event of a tie, it's divided evenly among top scorers. If a challenge goes unanswered (no heroes) it's spread among the other categories. There you have it. It's an idiot-proof way to pay real money for in-game performance without ever having to pay out more than you take in. You'll monitor the game carefully and disqualify cheaters, you'll control who gets in to avoid tampering and you'll have everyone's payment info at the outset. If people want to team up and farm zombies together to split a pot, or farm humanity by bloodbagging each other for an hour, then shoot each other to get on the hero killer bracket, or feed each other kills, or whatever, you can make the determination of how to deal with it, but no matter what they can't break the game. Throw in a fun bonus objective sometimes, like longest distance traveled by car or most vehicles repaired or have a tally for Mountain Dew or CZ ammo. Allow a re-buy for five more lives if you get wiped out in the first hour. Do whatever you want, and keep your players coming back for more. Also, this sounds like it's probably illegal for one or more reasons, so don't actually do it. I'm just saying these guys offering payouts independent of their revenue are probably going to get burned one way or another.

I don't like the idea of certs that persist between lives, and I hate the idea of grinding up my helicoptering cert every time I respawn before I can go get my heli out of the bushes where I left it. So no, I don't like this idea. Also, no to tanks or "whatever".

Nah, real-world assets just make the game an unacceptable expense, and people will quit. It's not real life, after all. The rules are different. Use in-game prices for penalties. Just like people are willing to work their nuts off to get days survivied or humanity scores where they want them, make a real in-game score that can be both attained and leveraged in-game, then encourage survival to accrue or maintain that score.

Take out the text play-by-play of emotes, and you'll be closer to the mark, I'd say. I don't know about you guys, but when I'm with people, at work or at play, my body language is varied and expressive, and accounts for a lot of the communication. Just last night, my elite sniper team (consisting of a casino dealer, an honest-to-goodness soldier, a college co-ed and some kind of contractor) finished killing all three of the other dudes on our low-pop server just five minutes before a scheduled restart. We immediately reported to the middle of the road and took turns strutting up and down the yellow line, using hilarious combinations of posture and pace to either drag our noses along the highway, carry our rifles like flags, fellate ourselves or flap our arms like chickens. We had a great time (and a few more drinks) and accused one another of sexual deviance over VoIP. It was no more ridiculous than an officially sanctioned "Masturbate Furiously" animation. Adding them in would allow doofuses to spam them, but they already spam vaults and surrenders and log rolls, so that kind of dickery would be neither enabled nor impeded. I say go crazy, let us do all kinds of semi-useful things with our bodies.

I tried really hard to give you a good response there. There are dozens of threads like this one, started with a post about how people are not nice and people should be nice, asking why people are not nice. I decided to refrain from calling you a newbie or ask to have your stuff, and instead forge a dialogue based on your initial post.I spent a good half-hour writing and re-writing that post, deleting whole paragraphs and reformatting it so it would be easy to understand and on-topic. You wanted to know why people shoot you in Elektro, and I gave a detailed, thoughtful response that outlined my observations on how people behave in DayZ and why they behave that way. You responded by dismissing my contribution in a single non-sensical line. How can you have done that? Did you not see that freaking dissertation I authored? Do you not respect me? Do you think that a big chunk of my time and effort and thought are worth nothing? Well, here's a more concise answer: When I see you running on a rooftop in Elektro, all your in-game effort and all your gear and all your loot and all your humanity points are worth as much to me as my 724-word response to your initial post. If I can spend a Lee Enfield bullet to get a can of beans from your still-warm corpse, it's worth it, and my sweet headshot in that imaginary city is no more unethical or cavalier than your manners in this forum thread. You're going to get shot when I see you. That's a game. That's why.

QEQE wiggle is always good, especially if done while saluting. I also endorse the whisper kick. The surrender animation is nice for freshies, but it doesn't stick with a weapon, so sitting down is a much more effective gesture of submission. I'd like a wave animation, so I can get a guy's attention or reveal my position from far away. I'd also like voice transmissions on direct chat to add a visual indication of the speaker's position, in case the listener can't pinpoint the source of the sound.

Yes and yes to the questions. Why did you log out on the Elektro fire station roof? Why were you up there to begin with? The zombies are part of the setting of DayZ. Mostly it's a sociological game, providing a sandbox environment in which people can interact. The interactions can range from simple avoidance to malicious violence to high-level cooperation. Different players have different approaches to the game, and when players meet, their play styles can complement each other or contrast with each other. Here are some of my observations: Gear influences personality. Everyone's friendly when they can't fight. If I spawn on the coast and meet another player there, I won't hesitate to introduce myself and cooperate to get started. We'll raid a few barns, look out for bandits, share food or drinks or otherwise help each other out. However, as soon as I hear, "Hey, I found a Lee Enfield" from the next building over, I know to start watching out. Because if he finds a gun in the same town where I find a tent, there'll likely be a guy with a tent and a gun leaving that town alone. If we stay friendly past the first gun, we stop being nice to strangers, and we'll shoot a guy more readily than we'll offer a bandage. After all, meeting a stranger and getting some free ammo from his corpse leaves me feeling a lot safer than meeting a stranger and then having an armed man somewhere behind me. Heck, even letting an unarmed fresh spawn past you can be dangerous, because when that guy walks into a barn and finds a CZ 550 a minute later, his first thought might be, "Where have I recently seen someone I can shoot with this?" Survival is, after all, the goal. The game recognizes and scores combat. There's a counter in the game for zombie kills, zombie headshots, murders and bandit kills. Any one of those numbers can become an in-game objective for a player. I'll spend hours chopping through waves of the undead until my name's on top when I hit the "i" key. I'll sit on a hill and shoot random strangers just because I found an M24 and want to wear that bandit head for a while. I'll sit in the woods for an hour or more with my sights on a common sniper nest, waiting to rack up another ear and some loot. These metagames give players direction, and nobody can deny that meeting goals is rewarding. The only reward I get for a two-hour tire hunt is a working GAZ, and it'll likely be gone next time I log in, due to clever hunters or hackers. My kill score persists and can define me. Cooperation is often not worth the inconvenience. There are only two good reasons that I've found for working in a team, besides camaraderie. The first is loot farming, either for weapons or for vehicle repairs. The second is battle. A single player with a good backpack can carry everything he needs for days of surviving, even without a vehicle or tent. Risking your gear always ends in tragedy, as all my taxis and party buses can attest. I'd estimate that it takes between one and three hours to get a van or bus running, and once you start driving down the coast honking at strangers or advertising your services over side chat, you've got about twenty minutes before someone lights up your ride. If you want the game to be carebear central, take some time to check out a few of the friendly-only servers. It's a rifle-stacking simulation, the challenge lies in finding more places to put tents so you can store all your FALs and NVGs and spare ghillie suits and backup car engine blocks. You get yelled at by self-important jerks because you don't cycle barracks loot in the most efficient possible way, or because you put a plebian AKM in the UAZ that's reserved for L85s or because your camping tent isn't lined up with all the other camping tents. You wind up with twenty working vehicles parked in a field that's more showroom than base of operations, and when it's all collected and all done, players stop logging in because it's boring. I'll take the DayZ Douchebag Simulator every time.

Note: I'm assuming that Standalone DayZ will have multiple maps, and that players will be limited to one character. For an end-game event that isn't death, I'd like to see a way to move your whole team (even if you're a one-man team), complete with inventory and score history, to a different island. You get together, do what you're doing, and then all pile into a vehicle and head for the horizon. If certain conditions are met (critical mass of fuel and provisions) then you get the option to leave the map and have your characters transferred to a different map. You won't quite retain the vehicle, but your mode of transport will decide how you arrive at your destination. You'll spawn next to your vehicle, which will be damaged such that it doesn't work, but can be repaired. If it's a chopper, you spawn somewhere in the wilderness with dinged up engine and rotors. Cars/trucks will have wheels broken, boats will be on the beach and have heavy engine and hull damage, as if they've run aground. All your equipment will be in the vehicle and your inventories, minus the cost of the trip. The trip will cost, hypothetically, five food items and five drink items per player in the vehicle, and a tank full of fuel plus five filled jerry cans. So if you have a Ural or something, it'll be trivial to carry enough for the journey, while a motorbike would require you to leave a lot of stuff behind and carry gear in your packs. Nothing stops you from bringing enough parts to patch the thing right back up when you stagger into the new place, but you have to collect them. As for how the destination is chosen, I'd like to see it chosen randomly, with some restrictions. You can't get to Lingor in a car and no boat can sail to Takistan, and the UH-1 has an operational range of about 500km, according to Wikipedia, but with enough jerry cans and our in-born mechanical expertise, I bet we could get most anywhere in one, with enough beans. Having a GPS might allow you to choose your destination island, though. This would be a good way to provide major cooperative challenges to players that don't end with the same guys in the same town with slightly better guns asking each other, "Now what?" until somebody finally says, "Heck, let's just go shoot newbies at the Elektro supermarket."

Yeah, above all else, I want a sort of "grey death" area, where solo players will hit the respawn button but you could choose to hang in there if you have buddies in the area who can revive you. They'll have to do more than "Hold X to Revive", though. Bandages, antiseptic, whatever you need to make the guy well again should be called for. The point is that I want to see situations in which I bodily lift a teammate and carry him to the truck, throw him in the bed, then drive him to meet with a medic who treats his wounds and gets him back into the game instead of just watching him die, then waiting fifteen minutes while he runs from the coast to reclaim his equipment.

I like it. I don't know how well the standalone engine will be able to handle that, but I love a good, detailed wound system, and would like to see the interface from MGS3 combined with the depth and granularity of Dwarf Fortress for medical treatment. I remember the ArmA tutorial having a whole segment where you grab a wounded guy, hoist him up on your shoulder, then carry him to a safe place to patch him up. I want to be doing CPR, applying splints and tourniquets, disinfecting wounds, the whole nine yards. If death is really going to be a serious problem, there should be ways to resist it besides "don't get shot". So much could be done with it, and a gritty medical simulation would add a lot to the sense of surviving. So yeah, you get some beans.

More different choppers would be great, as long as none of them are more powerful than the current UH-1H. It's a lot of gun, more isn't needed. But yeah, I'd be in favor of not knowing what kind of chopper you might find on a given server, and having one get destroyed and a different type of bird spawn next restart. Get that variety.

I guess it's my play style, but I stick to low-pop or private hive servers where this sort of thing is tightly controlled. Yeah, there's duping, but no scripted in weapons last past a server audit, and the offenders are banned promptly. I don't know how much advancement can be expected on the main hive, but we're probably about due for a hive wipe and some upgrades to server security. If a private hive owner can come up with an automated system that spots unsupported weapons and hammers their owner, then I think the main server release can likely mimic that. I'd like to start with a map/compass/knife, though. I never feel like I'm ready to play the game until I have those.

Kill a zombie, take his shoes. Awesome. I agree that the footstep sound is sometimes extreme, but since we're hurt by the imperfect audio provided by even the best speakers, some cheats are good in that regard. I just hate the sound it makes when I clomp through an apartment building.

You open a can like a dwarf carves a +microcline mug+. With your beard.

I'm way on the other side of this one, I think that dying should be a bigger inconvenience, not a smaller one. People count the time it takes to regroup with their buddies to score a duped pack or hit up their corpse to re-arm as part of the "respawn timer" of DayZ, and they can't play the game they like until they've got that AS50/L85/M4 CCO SD/Ghillie/whatever their "loadout" consists of, so they whine about having to run farther and risk the corpse vanishing or their clan racking up too many headshots without them. Bah, I say. Dying should carry a 24-hour server ban, so killing one douche would cause all his douche buddies to go somewhere else to play with him.

When I find a vehicle, all its parts are in the red and it needs a lot of work to get it running. I often replace the fuel tank, the engine, and most or all of the wheels, plus some scrap metal to strap onto the frame to hold the whole thing together. It's in bad shape, is what I'm saying, but it can be salvaged. Then, a couple km down the road, some jerk puts three 12.7mm bullets or a half-magazine of 5.45 AK ammo through it and it's a flaming hulk, totally unsalvageable. What the actual fuck? It should be possible to disable vehicles by shooting them, absolutely. It should also be possible to repair vehicles that have been disabled by gunfire. This GTA kablooie vehicle health needs to go. Finding cars at their spawns and being able to fix them is great. Finding shot-up cars by the side of the road and being able to fix them up would also be great. Just boost the "hull" by about 1000%. Shooting at a car would disable it in the normal amount of time/shots, then you'd see the passengers pile out and the fight would be resolved in the normal way. At that time, the car would still be enterable, the car's inventory would still be accessible, and the car could still be patched up as usual. Maybe it takes some more scrap metal to get the hull back up to 100%, but it doesn't magically transform into a flaming wreck that's no good to anybody. This would reduce the number of cars at regular spawns, but having a car that's in the red in one or more categories respawn in its default derelict state after just two days, regardless of saving, could get around that handily.

People in DayZ are not survivors, they are weapons. Give them a target, and they'll engage it. I sometimes play on private hives, and if I fix up a vehicle and broadcast my location on side or global chat and explicitly state that I'm an unarmed vehicle offering rides or straight-up giving the car to the next guy I meet, I still get shot by the next person that sees me four out of five times. These people are sociopaths, and they will always gravitate toward the most violent course of action that's made available to them. I obviously blame violent videogames for their bad attitude, but the fact of the matter remains that you need to insulate the game against their playstyle. You need to realize that they will follow the path of least resistance, and then introduce resistance to herd them toward a more interesting experience. When nobody has a gun, there are some great cooperative operations that take place. You've got people running interference and distracting zombies and/or snipers to allow a larger and more beautiful plan to come together. Once you have a hatchet or makarov, it's a bloodbath and nobody gives a shit about anybody else, they're just working on their kill/death ratio and finding mouths to put their scrotum in.

Fairy costumes suit everybody. No exceptions. They make you look pretty, and magical. Keep 'em, you won't regret it. I like that a comment about fuel availability was prefaced by "On Topic:". You guys are on so many tangents that going back to a previous tangent counts as buckling down. The vehicles that spawn are riddled with bullet holes, spotted with rust and missing tires, but we're able to fix them up and ride them to death and glory. I want to be able to do the same fix-up magic on vehicles that have been disabled in combat, instead of having "killed" cars go supernova. That's the topic here.

Getting hit by a vehicle is easily the most awesome way to die in DayZ. Landed on by a chopper is bonus points, of course.