hatfieldcw

Yeah, no real advantage to smoking. And don't try to tell me than these survivors are smokers. They've got cardio for days and days. I like smoking as a character trait and as a visual effect, but it's not needed here. The smoke in ArmA2 isn't the best anyway. If anything, I'd like to see a cigarette as an emote. Anyone play Soldat? It's action packed with Predator references, for some reason, and the emotes including lighting a cigar and chewing tobacco. It's fun to get back to base with the flag, type out some recommendations for the next run, and see one of the guys on your team flick open his Zippo and light up before he heads out to cover an approach. On the topic of emotes, I think character animations should be legion in standalone. I don't want my guy to hunker down and make a slurping sound when he eats a tin of beans. I want to see a whole long animation for that happening. Walk around with that Pepsi. Crack that Chemlight, strike that flare, gut that boar.

Go, go, MSPaint! Yeah, sounds good. I've never really shot any bushes, so I don't know what it's supposed to look like, and I've never really been downrange of rifle fire, so I don't know what that's supposed to sound like, but it seems to me that if a guy who's in a bush that's being shot wouldn't be able to tell where the bullets were coming from, we shouldn't be able to tell in game. I know that feeling, though. I hate hearing a shot impact near me, then hitting the dirt and trying to figure out where it came from. Seems to me you ought to be able to hear a rifle shot from up to a KM away. Rifles are loud, dude.

Am I on Gamedev.net? This kind of thing used to come up every few months there. "I want a game like the Matrix, where every blade of grass and every breath of wind and every rock and pond are perfectly simulated, and then I want people to go in there and have a wonderful time playing my game which will have wizards and dragons and ninjas and robots and pirates and fighter jets and knights and rocket ships and you can choose to mine ores out of the planet's core (watch out for giant moles and worms lol!) or build a boat and sail forever to the horizon. Maybe you could be lucky and discover an ancient ruin or a crashed alien spaceship and fly to new adventures with the wife you married and the dog you adopted when it wandered onto your farm back on Earth (or is it really Earth? You have to find that out for yourself lol!) and the three of you could meet aliens and bring back their technology to beat the necromancer that's sending vampires to kill the orphans in your home town so they can be re-animated as were-vampires that turn into trees. Maybe the only way to stop them is to join the clergy so you can make holy water, and then use the holy water to consecrate a silver spear. Then you have to be really good at God of War, because you'll have to fight your way into the vampire stronghold and slay the necromancer so you can get his crown that powers your antimatter engine and lets you colonize the stars!" Man, if you want every story ever told, with infinite imagination and a ruleset that can accomodate different situations in different ways, you're not looking for a video game. You're looking for your local library. These pie-in-the-sky game ideas are always half-baked plans to write emergent fiction. If you have a story to tell, don't waste your time trying to build a universe in which it could happen. Sit down at the keyboard and tell your story.

The closest I'd ever seen to DayZ in any game before this mod came out was probably Red Dead Redemption on Xbox Live multiplayer. Start without gear, go find a gun, work on either PvE or PvP, team up with strangers, shoot them for no reason, have great shouting matching on direct comms via headset. They soon patched RDR to where the multiplayer was PvP-resistant, but it was a good time. To this day I think my gamer rep is garbage due to Red Dead. "Hey, buddy! I see you're shooting at those bandits!" *lights dynamite* "Want some help?" So, in conclusion, even if the ArmA engine doesn't port well, even if some compromises have to be made on controls or map size, I think the core gameplay and social dynamics of DayZ could be made to work on consoles. Since consoles tend to be more secure from hacking and the communications are built into the game, you might have a purer experience, since everyone would have to have their voice comms going over the game, rather than through Teamspeak. No more would there be one button for, "Hey, dude, I'm friendly!" and another button for, "Okay, he's buying it. I'll try to get him over to the window."

You can almost never find a helicopter at their normal spawn point. The reason they were always there before, was that they didn't save right, so as you discovered, they reset after every server restart.

Non-hive, non-official server. Not even the official map. This is not the place to discuss it. For the record, you are kind of a jerk, going to a server that's maintained by a group for, primarily, their own amusement. You said yourself that you were able to get an L85 and NVG without their fortifications stopping you, and then you went to their base and trolled them out of spite. That's bad sportsmanship. Go to another server if you want to get helicopters. And with regards to your thread title, you know full well that you were banned for ghosting, not for stealing the helicopter.

Hero skin is child's play to obtain anyway, unless you're one of those Cherno AS50 TWS guys, you cna just sit down with a buddy in a hospital. Have one guy fill up on medical gear and the other guy go stand where zombies can hit him. Bag and bandage for a few minutes (make sure your backpack is on the ground beside you) and you get a nice plaid shirt and associated body armor. I didn't know about the armor, myself.

If you've got a support group, then heck yeah, get it now and play with buddies. If you don't, then you need to take an introspective moment. You've read a lot, you've browsed the forums here, you have a general idea of what you're up against. Are you the kind of guy who can enjoy testing an alpha? Servers that eat your stuff? Tents that eat your stuff? Backpacks that eat your stuff? Ghillie suits that eat your backpack? Hackers? Vindictive admins? Opaque rules? Broken mechanics? Bored dickheads? If so, you might like DayZ, but... Are you also a bad enough dude to deal with an ArmA2 mod? Doors that break your leg if you open/close them wrong? A good three seconds of pointing at different parts of a ladder to find the spot that you can interact with? A button that mantles over fences, some of the time? An inventory interface that confuses and angers you every time? A completely different procedure for filling a canteen in a lake versus filling a jerry can at a fuel tank? Vehicles that feel nothing like any other game you've played? A helicopter that doesn't care whether you live or die? Long distances to cover on foot? Unexpected one-shot critical KOs from zombies that are on the other side of a concrete wall? What I'm saying is, the game is good, and I want to recommend it, and if you buy ArmA2 for the mod, you also get to play ArmA2, which I love to do. I don't want to recommend it to someone who will hate it and be on the forums in a day crying and calling us names for liking a game he doesn't like. If you're that guy, just walk away. Pro Tip: If the standalone really does follow the Minecraft development model, we can expect it to be a bugfest, too.

Sure, RPG-7. Why not? I don't see why anyone would use it, really. It's not a terribly handy weapon in this situation anyway. A 40mm GL does as well or better against zombies and light vehicles, and it doesn't take up your backpack slot. KSVK is a sweet gun. If I wasn't opposed to anti-materiel rifles as they exist now in DayZ (make it take the packpack slot, I'll be okay with it), I'd definitely be in favor of adding the KSVK. The backstory of DayZ hasn't been made very clear to me, but if it's in line with the ArmA2 campaign, Chernarus is wall-to-wall with American troops and equipment. It shouldn't be strange at all to find US gear laying around, and the Humvees are fine, too. British gear comes from crashed British helicopters, so that's spot on (excepting the Lee Enfield, which should be a Mosin Nagant, although it's more trouble than it's worth to add it at this point in the mod's development). It hurts a little in terms of immersion when the "best end-game" gear includes no Russian weaponry. I for one vastly prefer the aesthetics of the Russian guns. I like a little wood on the stock, I like the AK sound, and I like feeling like I'm a Chernarussian survivor, rather than a PMC dude who fell off a boat. More SVDs, fix the AK damage vis-a-vis the AR damage, let me carry around a Kalashnikov without feeling like I'm hobbling myself for roleplay purposes. On my list: Scorpion instead of PDW PKM instead of Mk. 48 mod 0 KSVK instead of AS50 SVD instead of DMR RPG-7V instead of M136 Obviously, I'm okay with every "instead" being "in addition to", since more guns is more fun. I'd also like to see less interchangeability on magazines. Guns should feel right.

Berets should spawn at helicopter crash sites.

I'd like to see better fuel economy on vehicles myself, it's weird having to gas up a motorcoach twice to go 20km. Game balance needs to be considered, of course, but it feels like every time we do anything with a vehicle, we have to make sure there's a stop on the route to refuel.

Neither do guns, or bandages, or car tires, or road flares, or hunting knives, or weeks-old, unrefrigerated blood transfusion bags. I'm not interested in smelting iron to make my hunting knife, and I'm not interested in planting seeds to grow food.I'd be in favor of apples spawning on trees in the orchards, or the ability to harvest and cook pumpkins, but other than that I'm opposed to agriculture in the game.

How about if the actions you take in a given life allow you to select a related skin type when you respawn? Just off the top of my head, I'd say that meeting the conditions for the skin would allow you to pick that skin the next three times you respawn, after which you'd have to meet the criteria again. Some examples: Bandit Skin: Kill 10 players in one life or reach a low humanity threshold. Hero Skin: Kill 2 bandits in one life or reach a high humanity threshold. Zombie Hunter Skin: Kill 150 zombies in one life. Medic Skin: Perform 10 medical procedures (bandage, transfusion, Epipen, etc.) on other players in one life. Rugged Survivor Skin: Regain perfect health after surviving a serious ailment (hypothermia, fracture, <3000 blood, infection) 3 times in one life. Hunter Skin: Gut 15 animals and cook 30 pieces of meat in one life. Driver Skin: Drive more than 50km in one life. Mechanic Skin: Perform 10 or more maintenance operations (repair/refuel) on vehicles in one life. Helicopter Pilot Skin: Fly a helicopter for 30 minutes or more in one life. The list could go on and on, of course, and the numbers are straight off the top of my head, but the idea is that a player's appearance would offer a hint as to their style of play. Totally optional, of course. When you respawn, you'll get the usual Male/Female choices, but if you meet any of the skins' requirements, you'll also see "Bandit" or "Medic" or "Hunter" on the list. You still spawn at the coast with normal starting gear. The key element here is that there can be no bluffing, since you can't wear a skin without earning it (Camo/Ghillie excepted, obviously). A guy who looks like a survivor could be anything, but a guy who looks like a bandit has to have had a blood-soaked run in the recent past.

Yep, the game's not even feature-complete yet, much less polished. What we have here amounts to a proof-of-concept, a test of the basic mechanics of what will (hopefully) turn into a game in the future. It's a lot of fun, but complaining about things like hacking, server stability, control variances and even core play mechanics like tents and vehicles not working correctly is a fool's errand. There's a list of things to do as long as your arm, and a list of things to fix that goes for miles and grows every day. Either get comfortable with the game not working right, or stop trying to play it until the full, complete version is released.

There was a thread about flare guns a while back. The M203 flares are awesome, but the gun is so rare, and not terribly good as a gun. I think that a special secondary weapon should be introduced that fires 40mm flares and smoke (maybe HE too?) so we can use the flares without having to saddle ourselves with the M16 with the M203 attached. Seriously, those flares are awesome, and they're already in the game. I find them all the time in deer stands and even non-military spots. Being able to pop them up more often would make my day.

I've seen this too. I always assumed it was a latency thing. If the zombie is just roaming, it's being controlled server-side (aggro'd zombie AI is run on the client of the guy they're chasing, I understand) so it's possible for your client to not have fully updated zombie position information. When the update comes, if the zombie is a few meters from where your client displays it, then it'll move, in your sight, from where your client thought it was to where it actually is. In order to eliminate teleporting and minimize skating, the character model will move across that distance in a believable way, i.e. running. The zombie isn't really aggro'd, it's just correcting its position and the ArmA engine isn't shy about using the run animation to do that.

Okay, ignoring the weighting, how does everyone feel about the personal loot? Three guys search a barn, they get three times as much loot as one guy searching that same barn. Good? Bad?

To the contrary, I spent hours in Berezino one day, running from supermarket to supermarket and getting piles of wristwatches and ALICE packs, but no map. It was terrible. I'd trade every pile of loot in that store for a "Find a freaking map" command that leaves me vulnerable for five minutes and then yields one.

I find them all the time in industrial sites. I always hope they're STANAG when I first spot them, and am disappointed. One DMR mag is four M24 reloads, I think they might be more common than CZ ammo at that rate, not to mention easier to carry in bulk.I'd like to see an ammo revamp, so that ammunition for the M24, CZ, revolver and enfield aren't always packed up in one-reload stripper clips. You can load these weapons with loose cartridges, so it would become possible to have CZ ammo in stacks of twenty for space economy and just have five loaded at a time. Shotgun shells could work the same way, since there's no reason I'd have to take three out of my 870 in order to put five in. It's my understanding that the ArmA engine doesn't tolerate that sort of thing, but the standalone can probably manage it.

I obviously misunderstood. Re-reading the original post, I'm horrified. You're saying that we should have to cultivate beans in a region or else cans of beans will cease to appear in the nearby houses and supermarkets. We're not exporting cocoa beans to ensure new shipments of Pasta roll into Berezino each week, we're not growing our own food and canning it for the winter, we're not setting up communes and making a new, sustainable world for our children. We're scrabbling for survival, scraping the last bits of civilization into a pile and hoping we can live on it for another day.

Humanity is not a very effective metric as it exists now. Bandits can wear hero skins all day long if they keep bandaging and bloodbagging each other. You only need to be humane to one guy, and can be a villain to all the rest, as long as you do it right. Heck, a few minutes at the Berez hospital on a low-population server with a pal, taking turns jumping off the ladder and patching each other up with supplies out of the boxes, and it's a plaid shirt convention. Besides, banditry is well-served by group play just as much or more than survival, since legitimate bandits depend on successful PvP for their food and medicine and ammunition, while survivors can graze on loot spawns without having to kill them first. I know when I play solo, I have an easier time avoiding fights than seeking them, and I don't have the bandit skin. Having the bandit skin makes you an instant target, so you have to quickly meet up with the guys who know you well enough to refrain from going spastic when they see your hat. There has to be a better way to track humanity and have it influence the game. There's no computer algorithm that can extrapolate your personality from your in-game actions, it just turns into a slider with triggers to move it this way and that. It can be tricked, and it can mislead. The best thing I can think of for balancing bandit/survivor lifestyles would be a loot revamp, like this.

It would be a pretty big interruption of service. The hive would have to refuse to sync with servers that didn't update, to avoid carryover of duped gear. There'd be a dead zone between when the hive is wiped and when the servers get updated, during which you'd basically be unable to play. What happens if you log into a server that isn't connected to the hive? Do you just pick a gender and spawn on the coast every time you log in? I might actually want to try that.

So you start at 50%, with "occasional twitches, cold sweats, coughing, occasional shakes". That's the first thing new players will see when they log in? They have to kill zombies, beat bandits, give items away and bloodbag each other 50 times to become fully human for the first time? That seems demoralizing. I can be a bandit and just make sure I kill one zombie for every survivor I kill to maintain 100% humanity? That seems ineffective. At 100% humanity, nobody has humanity higher than me, so the only way I can lose that first point is by killing another guy who has a perfect 100%? That would be a bloodbath, especially when I get above 55% or so and can farm humanity by massacring the newbies who are spawning at 50%. If I want to try playing as a zombie and get all the way down to 0%, I'll be unable to use medical supplies or give away items, so I'll have to stumble around punching other (non-hostile) zombies in the face to get back up to where I can swing an ax and regain my humanity? This idea is not good. I'm thinking I don't like you. You seem unpleasant, egotistical and condescending. Starting replies with, "Sorry but you're wrong," and "Erm... yes it is." is not a good way to discuss an idea. You seem defensive and rude, which makes me think that you haven't thought your (terrible) idea through with an eye to improving the game, and are instead looking for a way to get your whine on while seeming smart. This idea is heavy-handed, poorly structured and superficial. It comes down to, "I want to make people play in a certain way, but I don't want to be met with the same valid responses that always shout down this discussion," and then you dress it up with clumsy butt-numbers and weak rhetoric in the hope that nobody will see through your sham. When you get called out on it, you reply with, "You're too dumb to understand why this isn't what you think it is," and a bunch of fuzzy mechanics that took less time to formulate than they took to type. Humanity systems and related gameplay features are interesting to me, and I'd like to explore them, but this thread's probably not going to bear much fruit.

In a map this small it doesn't make much sense to have different crops or livestock. It's not like there are different climates in different parts of South Zagoria. And we already have this feature, to an extent. There are districts with a higher occurrence of military loot, industrial loot, food, helicopter crash sites or backpacks. If you're suggesting that areas could become overharvested and produce less loot, I say no. For me, loot respawning counters the relative lack of enterable buildings. Sure, you can loot the lobby of the hotel a dozen times in a day, but since you can never go up the stairs and check the rooms or the kitchen or the dumpsters out back, that's okay. The station might repopulate its ten loot spots every ten minutes, but you never get to see where those poles go or what's behind that door, so it's fair to assume that there's stuff in the building that the game's restrictions keep you from.

I'd like to see survival more central, too. Many servers don't even have night anymore, just restarting every six hours so it's always daytime. You don't worry about getting cold, or wet, or sick. I've played a lot, and I've had antibiotics a few times, but I've never needed them. If you aren't bleeding or fractured, you're pretty much worry-free. I used to play me some Clonk Planet, and the arctic level was my favorite. You had to stay inside almost all the time to keep from freezing, and even after you killed a seal and made an anorak and waterproofed it with blubber you were looking at a few minutes before you have to get back to the igloo. If you fall in the water, you've got about twenty seconds to get out and build a fire or you're done. That's some intense gameplay, with very little margin for error, even before your LAN buddy kayaks over there and starts chucking harpoons at you. My dream for DayZ is a relentless roguelike experience. I want to die about as often as I do now, but instead of Elekro snipers and trigger-happy randoms on the road, I want to be brought down by zombies, by cold, by infection, by exposure. I want some Hunger Games crap going on out there, to the point where a chance encounter with a player almost always means an alliance. Here's my recommendation: Reduced inventory space. We start out with 12 primary, 8 secondary and 12 belt slots, plus an 8-slot pack that can be expanded to 24, and is usually at 20. That's a lot of effing gear right there. You can carry everything you could possibly need right on your back. Plenty of food, drink, medicine, ammo, tools and materials. Unless you're hauling car parts, you're not hurting for space, even when you have a second primary in the pack. You're a mule. If you had to choose between ammo and medicine, there'd be less shooting going on, and bandits would really be living kill to kill, rather than having a whole carebear kit along with seven DMR magazines. Drop main and secondary inventory by half, to 6 and 4 slots respectively. Restrict us to 4 tools, cut backpack size by half, start us out with a vest pouch and have the patrol pack take the place of the vest pouch in residential spawns and supermarkets. Hatchet can no longer be put on the belt, it's always a weapon, always ten slots. It retains its right-click wood harvesting ability when equipped. Primary weapons cannot be placed in packs, even ALICE and Coyote. Sidearms take only one backpack slot. Car wheels and engine parts, when carried, act like a body being carried, reducing travel speed and preventing the use of weapons. This will seriously impact gameplay. It'll make it slower. It'll make it tougher. You can no longer carry all your gear plus a cow worth of raw meat, so you'll leave a lot behind when you butcher an animal. You won't be able to leave Cherno with three morphine injectors and two bloodbags every time, because you'll have no room left for ammo and food. Other players will be worth more alive than dead, because you'll want them around with the medicine and food you're unable to haul, and killing them will do you little good, since you can't carry away the stuff you need. Bandits will kill a guy, eat his beans right there on the spot, and head out looking for another guy to prey upon before they get hungry again. Medics will depend on a team to keep them protected, while the team will depend on them to have medicine. Everyone will want to be with "The guy with the ax". We'll have threads here about loadouts and equipment that don't end with, "And then as many primary mags and bandages as you can fit, I usually have 6 of each".