decoman

Hehe, in Elektro, I had been moving up the tower in a fire station taking a rest at the floor beneath the top one, and then I suddenly heard someone began eating canned food and gulping cola. I tried to communicate but it ended up him peeking down the stairs and when we pointed our guns on each other, he fired once and I emptied my gun on him. I survived to my surprise and killed some other guy that came up the stairs moments later, unfortunately I was killed by a third guy standing outside someehere as I tried to exit the fire station. Oh, yes, about 20 zombies rushed up the stairs in order after the initial gunfire was exchanged.

Like in real life, movement will easily get you spotted because you stand out in an otherwise static terrain. So taking your time in evaluating your situation and taking into account your surroundings is benefitial, in spotting others, while not being detected. Whoever get to spot someone else first, has the inititative for setting up an attack unbeknownst to any unsupsecting player. Once any movement or noise is made, the privilege in attacking with less risk of being detected is gone. Like in Battlefield 3, repositioning is probably a good idea. I surmise that thoughts about repositioning should be worked out in your mind beforehand, else it might be too late once being in a dangerous situation where gunfire is exchanged. If on a hill, one can ideally move backwards and move away from a target with the benefit of cover and without the other knowing where you are going. It seems to me that the only two good places for attacking others, are on the very top hills and in dense forests. Spotting players with infrared scopes or low light condition scopes seem really dangerous and I wonder what real soldiers can do to prevent them easily being detected in such a manner. I think I once heard that uniforms can be coated with stuff to some degree prevent night time devices in detecting them. Who needs soldiers in the field, when artillery shells can be lobbed at all kinds of people spotted with night time devices from afar. :|

I had respawned and had been moving for a loong time in order to get back to my dead body, but a few hundre meters away the server restarts. When I log in and get back to the location, I no cannot find my body. Did my body and the stuff get wiped with the server restart?

Cue armor piercing bullets.

I am fairly certain I had a M4A3 in my inventory, however I got the impression that the STANAG magazines I had in my inventory did not register in the upper right side of my screen. The wiki for this weapon tell that the STANAG and STANAG SD are the ammo type for this weapon. So I wonder, does the STANAG magazine for the M16A2 work with the M4A3 CCO gun as well? I think so I am just not sure what to think.

I think the SD ammo is ammo primarily for use with guns with silencers. In battlefield 3, such guns have a larger bullet drop because of the special ammo, probably designed to be more quiet. I guess its nice having the M4A3 CCO assault rifle also using such type of ammo ingame, even though it doesn't have a silencer.

Thank you, I will check this again the next time I log in.

One might wonder how anyone is supposed to find and approach such an instanced camp/base that simply cannot be found when walking about. A more plausible solution for allowing access to a secluded camp/base, would be to create a mediating area inside the game that would either act as a door opening or a blocked passage (part of a tunnel for example). If the passage is open (people are online and the camp/base is active), then anyone could stroll in if they knew where to look. If the location of a camp/base is compromised with other people learning about its existence, then defending the camp/base might be problematic. Having players stick around near the base seem like a good idea, else it would probably be difficult to return to base quickly enough if the camp/base came under attack at some point in time. An different solution could be to have the players use a token, for teleporting into a secluded area from a nearby location. This other solution would limit who could possibly enter the secluded area, to whoever having aquired a token for passage. A token offering access would not work if an instanced camp/base is "offline" (players not logged in, or not enough players logged in). It seem sensible to perhaps have the token display when the camp/base is "online", or perhaps a better solution is to simply display a 24 hour delayed response, in which a hostile party would have to guess when people will be online on the day if they want to try an attack. The more time they use for taking note of when the camp is labeled "online", the better the prospects are for actually being able to attack at a time when the camp/base is open for access. Exploit potential: If one guy (perhaps together with other peole) were to create such an instanced camp with the sole purpose of keeping it hidden by always being run by that one guy using the camp, thus making sure that the camp would never be accessible to others if the "onlinging" requirement were say two people, then some kind of limitation would have to be imposed to prevent such an unintended consequence. A solution to such a situation, could be to deny the possibility of a camp/base being accessible to group members when being "offline". That would mean that for example 10 of out 100 in a group would have to be online and playing in-game in order for being able to access their own camp/base in the instanced area. There would still be a potential for an exploit, by hiding stuff at a secluded camp/base if run by only one player, though that one player would be locked out of his own camp/base, if not calling in other group members to temporarily open the camp/base for acceess. If the players in a group were to be allowed for deciding themselves on the fly how many players were to be online for the camp/base to be online, then this could be exploited, by denying attackers access, on a whim. If the players in a group were to be allowed to offline their camp/base on the fly by all logging out within a minute, this would be considered an exploit. One way of preventing this exploit just mentioned, where there is an instalogging in order to quickly offline a camp/base, could be to have camps/bases be open for a minimum of say 30min or 60 min in increments. This would mean that if the camp/base goes online at 12:00, then it will not be possible to offline the base until 12:30 or perhaps and hour later at 13:00. If the camp/base is kept online at 13:01, then any offlining is not possible until 13:31 or perhaps an hour later at 14:01. This way, a defending and attacking party will each have their initiative for resolving the situation. The defender will have to anticipate an attack, and the attacker will have to anticipate a logoff. If the timestamp for when a camp/base was initially put online is kept hidden from an attacker, then the outcome of an assualt should be equally favourable to both parties. I think it would be a good idea to force a camp/base to be open once an attacking party managed to gain access into the secluded area. Offlining a camp/base when under attack seem like a bad and unrewarding feature. This leads to the obvious problem of exploit like situations, where an attacker might sneak in and hide inside someones base, to try force the camp/base to stay open after the defenders have logged off. This might or might not be an interesting feature. Another twist to the camp/base idea (important): If protecting an online camp/base from potential attacks seem overly burdensome to a group of players, then maybe a base should only be accessible when at least one player is moving about inside the instanced area or nearby. This would mean that a camp/base could be online but locked, and only truly opened once a player belonging to the group owning the camp/base is actually around or nearby. This way, a group of players could be all over the map without having to worry too much about loosing all their stuff just because they wanted to play on some distant area of the map. A multidimentional world could be interesting still: If one did accept the notion of a multi dimentional world, it could be rewarding by having the instanced areas look like any other landscape found ingame. This way there could be grass fields, forests and housing. It would be weird though, if the location cannot be reached and there probably would be an obvious challenge in designing these areas where the stuff seen in the horizon might seem overly fake or unfamiliar. This kind of concept, where the instanced area is an open landscape, allows for a hostile party to spawn on the outer area somewhere along the circle with the camp/base found in the middle. Defenders would have the challenge of suppressing an advancing force from maybe several directions. However, sniping would probably be overpowered in a large open landscape. If the defenders could be automatically notified of intrusion, then perhaps the overpowered benefit with the use of surprise sniper attack can be mitigated. If an instanced area were to be an entire island (small one) then the blatant use of a multidimentional world could be hidden from the players and otherwise appear to make good sense.

A particular problem with metagaming (that also can be compensated for): It just occurred to me that if an instance is onlined by the presence of a single player, then this would probably lead to metagaming, which could be interesting I guess, where an agent/spy could simply log on for allowing "bandits" enter the secluded area unbeknownst to the other players in the group if they are not logged on. With small camps this type of problem would have much less an impact than if it affected a large camp. To alleviate the horrific impact of spies exposing a large base to "bandits" because of a single spy, a large base could be "onlined" and accessible to outsiders only by having more than one player logged in. That one guy that isnt a spy could easily be killed by the spy or anyone entering the area, however the guy dying would be able to try alert the others if possible, so that they could log into the game and defend their property. It would thus seem like a good idea to avoid having too many spies around. If the requirement to online a base and making it accessible to a hostile party were set to be 10 people for example, a single spy would be faced with the challenge of possibly having to kill his 9 fellow group members, or simply wait for his bandits to appear. The game mechanics that allows an intruder to gain access to a "online" camp that is accessible would be important to decide upon, for determining if a spy inside a camp/base can let outsiders move into the camp/base or not. Else an attacking party will have to be given the tools or opportunity for accesssing the secluded camp/base on their own. The particular concerns of being a part of a group and residing in an instanced camp open to attack should probably be divided into several factors: 1 The residing members of a group, being a bunch of people located at one spot, would be open for attack and thus be one kind of objective for the attackers to accomplish in a raid. 2 Any structures would be susceptible to player attacks inside the camp/base 3 Any player items stored around might be looted if simply lying around, but one might ask if players would even dare having stuff lying around with regard to the items possibly being stolen by other group members. 4 An attacker might want to pursue the defenders and chase them around in their own base. I.e defenders having a need for defensive structures like walls, sandbags, trenches, gun positions or whatnot.

I wonder, when looking through the binoculars and then being shot at, is it possible to lie down immediately, or must one put the binoculars away first?

Very well. I do find the notion of "a play style" to be self reflexive and ultimately void of meaning with regard to game design, because of the paradox of there being game mechanics in a game like DayZ or Arma 2 in itself hardly being designed for certain play styles (except games like "Predator vs Aliens", where colonial marines fight predators and aliens, or the predator plays against the others, or the aliens play against the others). So a "play style" would as I see it come to mean some kind of sentiment that exsist at the side of the game mechanics, which is ok, but is imo best if substantiated by being somehow glorified or substantiated in some way. Because if a playing style were to understood solely to be a privilege of anti social behaviour, one might want to speculate why this is benefitial if directly conflicting with other "play styles". One sensible excuse imo would be to tailor game mechanics for play styles to some extent. This way, I attempted to debase the notion of "punishment" as being relevant to game design and for promoting the very idea that we were talking about. :) Edit: Rewrote a sentence with regard to this notion of mine about there being a paradox. I guess a clarification is in order. The paradox would be that if there are game mechanics, that sort of excludes play styles coming into it as a part of design. Edit2: I guess one could easily argue that by omitting something or not adding something, that could actually have been a real intention explicitly made for being relevant with regard to other parts of the game design (for a game).

I like BazBake's suggestion of having bandits (blatent murderers) attract more zombies when approaching buildings. ^^ http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/55532-what-if-regions-zombie-spawn-was-linked-to-humanity/page__st__20#entry538905

It is not my intention to derail OP's thread here, but my mind churned out this alternative that OP perhaps might like, which incidentally is something I already thought about prior to this: Generally speaking, respawning a character is usually very unrealistic, but perhaps one could create a range of characters that are linked to a players account (imagine relatives of a character). The purpose of this is to fit supplementary characters with items, in the event of the first one dying. It would not be possible to select which one to play. Stuff placed in the pool with each characters will be stuck there on that one character until such a character is used when the current character dies. It is sort of an inheritance system, except it would be bad if stuff on a current character was transferred to other characters on death, preventing any looting. Also, a family surname could ensure a players characters to gain fame regardless of their first name. I think OP might want to clarify his motivations with regard to this idea of his, to perchance clarify why he likes the general idea of having more characters to play with.

I wonder if this idea sort of psychologically feels awkward, because of the self fulfilling aspect of wanting and ending up with aquiring new weapons, by shooting zombies and for shooting more zombies to get weapons.

Thanks! :) It just occurred to me that the type of barren inaccessible houses in DayZ could be used as instanced player housing. :) When player is online the house is accessible, and when he is offline the entire house becomes inaccessible (maybe with a few minutes delay before offlining as an anti-exploit measure). An obvious exploit, would be that people would occupy all housing to prevent others to move in. A combo solution could be to allow a house to be occupied by more than one player, which would mean that two stranger going online can suddenly meet eachother in some hallway. The instanced area would in such case be an appartment room, with a magically locked door that is unbreakable. A obvious consequence of such mechanics, will probably be that people will try to camp individual houses or even camp individual doors inside a building.

I get this notion of a time sink if a lense wipe would be needed for using a rifle with a scope at all, so I would think a good solution is to be able to swipe the lens with your clothing as a partial cleanup and then having to use some particular equipment for achieving the best result. Preferably, any lens goo should buildup and not simply change state from clear, dirty and really dirty. Probably exploitable if a player tampers with texture files on his own computer. Maybe a hard coded procedural texture would work well for this.

I did a search and found only three threads relevant to a search for the word "stretcher" and I think I might simply add what I had in mind to this one. I like the idea of allowing two people to use a stretcher for saving a third person. I could totally accept a stretcher spawning out of thin air for the sake of gameplay if developing more elaborate animations are too ambitious. Another use for a stretcher could be preventing blood loss when already bleeding, either when moving or preferably also when simply lying on a stretcher. Place anyone bleeding on a stretcher to prevent blood loss. The two carrying the stretcher would be sitting ducks so to speak. :) There seem to be some kind of exploit potential in simply placing someone on a strecher, but with no intention for moving them, in order to simply prevent blood loss. I guess one could program in a limtation of sorts, where blood loss is only prevented when the strecher is being moved, while blood loss will continue when being idle, for the sake of making this idea work this way and to prevent anyone gaming this feature for easily preventing blood loss. Summary: • Use stretcher for halting blood loss in a player lying on a stretcher, or limit the blood stopping feature for people lying on a stretcher that is actually being moved. • Use strethcer for moving unconscious people • Use stretcher for moving people with broken legs • Use stretcher for kidnapping unconscious people (possible consequence of using a stretcher) • Being able to exit the stretcher or resist being put onto a strecher should perhaps be a feature

I think: • It would be necessary for a character to hold a large weapon like a rifle with two hands, in order to aim or even fire in any way • Pistols would all be one hand weapons • Other one handed items like flashlight and binoculars could easily be used in one hand while any other weapon is being held in the other hand • Using two hands for holding binoculars is unnecessary • Rifles should always be held in one hand, opposite to any existing pistol holster on the other side of the body, to be pulled out with any free right hand (so there is no crossing and shuffling of items between hands) • A left handed / right handed character option might be helpful for those being accustomed to holding a gun on either their left or right hand. • It would then seem ok to have a character hold, aim and fire a pistol with his left hand, while also holding or aiming a flashlight forwards. • Btw, how about being able to hit people unconscious with a flashlight? :) I think guards and police officers are trained in assaulting people with their heavy mag light flashlight. • So if holding a rifle in one hand and something else in the other, the item in the "offhand" could be either put back into the inventory OR dropped quickly on the groun in order to aim and fire the rifle. • With the concept of using two hands, dual hand usage raises an obvious problem with regard to handguns. Disallowing the use of two guns seem odd with this system imo. Axes would be considered two handed. • It would then seem sensible to carry two rifles at the same time, but without being able to aim and fire any weapon, unless one is dropped. • It seem sensible to infer some kind of stamina penalty for carrying a weighty weapon in each hand, to prevent someone ALWAYS walking around with a different type of rifle in each of their hands. • Being able to use two hands for carrying items might be a more convenient alternative for picking up loot, instead of having to always restort to managing the inventory before moving on.

I just cannot help but adding some sensible variants with regard to tracks in the snow. Cold weather and clear skies could make tracks stick as long as they otherwise would. Milder temperatures with rain could make tracks dissipate somewhat quicker. Cold weather with snow could make tracks dissipate at a maximum rate. The dissipation of tracks could simply mean a shorter distance for which the tracks in the snow will start to autofade and vanish at the end of the path following someone walking around in the snow.

5. Snow or heavy rain reduces visibility for snipers in particular. :) Also affecting others with scopes, like binocuclars. Should also impact anyone just looking around, but not so bad that they cannot orient themselves in environment. Not sure how realistic that is with regard to existing visual ranges and gunfire ranges in game, but I would love the notion of having improved odds at moving around with less risk of being spotted and gunned down by a sniper.

Btw, I used to think rabbits ran around all the time, but one rabbit did stand still near me for some time until it started moving around again.

I just got this idea for perhaps allowing more zombies to move about and to move enmasse. How about using the left over cpu power of a gamer's own multicore cpu, to help the server he plays on to calculate zombie movements. Leaving combat resolution to the server. It should be arranged so that a player cannot tamper and dictate where the zombies appear, to avoid griefing others. Perhaps a player's cpu could also resolve combat information, when resolving data for an anonymous player on some randomly chosen part of the map. All that is needed is the server to send some kind of contextual data that the cpu has to respond to, as a limited task, obvivious to where this is happening on a map.

I like this idea lot. The subtle increased movement is nice, being practical being a player and all, and as an extra factor other than obvously being the guy with a backpack or with a weapon walking around like a zombie. Might fool people at a distance I think.

In order to promote a fair fight condition for players with differing motivations, I suggest the following game mechanics: Three roles (game mechanics) 1) Survivor 2) Bandit 3) Soldier • Basicly, everyone starts out as survivors and any of the other two roles will be by their own choosing. • No role will be imposed automatically. • The role of bandit is to be pretty much permanent, perhaps with some way to change ones way later on. • The role of soldier is special and will be in effect when wearing clothing resembling a uniformed soldier (specifically wearing a particular uniform). • The role of soldier should be temporary, limited to a 24 hour basis, after which anyone can take their unifom off and become a survivor again. • It is important to differentiate between how the game mechanics work with the roles and how the game mechanics work with the various equipment associated with the roles (if any). • The distinction made for a soldier and a survivor, is to reflect the tension and drama where armed strangers meet with other armed strangers, allowing bad things to happen, but without them becoming tagged as bandits. A uniformed soldier should be considered a potential bandit by survivors, however the soldier risk being gunned down if displaying an aggressive behavior (raised weapon). • It is imperative for there to be some way to alway being able to get to know the name of the player (at least viewing a dogtag/drivers licence in the inventory, fixed object, preferably on the uniform/clothing) • A system of penalizing a character (or perhaps any character linked with cd keys or somesuch), means worse aim, worse health, slower movement or other bad things that increase in severity with repeated offences. • This system discourages a mixing of survivors with bandits or soldiers in a group of people (unless they are all trusted friends ofc). About survivors • A survivor is free to wound or kill bandits, with no penalties. • A survivor is free to wound or kill a soldier in aggressive stance, but risk being covertly tagged as bandit if wounding or killing a soldier in passive stance. • A survivor is to NOT wound or kill other survivors, doing so leads to severe penalties that are cumulative, which will not go away (unless choosing to switch to becoming a bandit). About bandits • All bandits are former survivors that made the explicit choice of becoming a bandit • A survivor with crippling penalties will want to become a bandit to become care free and rid himself of the imposed penalties. • All bandits are tagged as bandits in some way, like imposed bandit clothing or something to that effect, making them easily identifiable to others visually. About soldiers • Soldiers are allowed to wound and kill other soldiers regardless (as if they all were bandits). • All soldiers must wear a uniform to be considered being in the soldier role/mode. • Any survivor putting on a soldiers uniform, has to wear it on for 24 hours (for example) before being allowed to take it off. • A basic mechanic for soldiers will be about expressing either a passive or aggressive stance (the raising/lowering of their weapon). • A soldier with a lowered weapon is considered to be a survivor to other survivors, with regard to the player (soldier) not being a free kill in passive stance. • A soldier with a raised weapon is considered to be a general threat, and is considered being a bandit with regard to the player a being free kill in aggressive stance. • If a survivor wound or kill a soldier that express' a passive stance, that survivor is covertly tagged as bandit and is a free kill. Survior is also penalized. • If a soldier wound or kill a survivor, the soldier is covertly tagged as a bandit and is a free kill. Soldier is also penalized. Concerns • A soldier that logs off cannot sit and wait for his mandatory 24 hour requirement to vanish. • No bandit can become a soldier BUT he can wear a soldiers uniform together with this bandit tag (bandit clothing) • A bandit should NOT be able to flip between being a bandit and a survivor • All soldiers weaponry should really allow for displaying a passive and an aggressive stance (animation) • A helicopter or vehicle crewed by a combination of bandits, survivors and soldiers might cause some odd issues. Haven't thought much about this. • A player is (afaik) currently free to switch character and go play either being a bandit or a survivor. This seem at odds of the spirit of this system, so only one name should be allowed per cd key. Obviously, this way, buying an additional cd key for easily playing a different role resembles an exploit. • Players exchanging cd keys with each other in order to switch roles seem to be another form of exploit. • Penalizing movement speed is perhaps bad in context of playing with others, a stamina drain of sorts seem better. At least everyone can move at the same speed. Summary • Killing other players is generally bad, avoiding killing people is generally good, but with this system there will be an opportunity for doing either thing. • Putting on a soldiers uniform, is like becoming a temporary bandit, with the limiation of not really being allowed to wound or kill survivors without being penalized. • Any survivor or soldier having been covertly tagged as a bandit risk being identified and pursued by others. Inspecting a body to find the killer can be a good idea for this to work, although not being realistic. • Anyone having been covertly tagged as a bandit might end up being treated as a free kill forever (like being a bandit, but still not allowed to kill other survivors). A bad reputation will thus have consequences, social complications might arise depending on how people want to treat you, knowing that you are coverty tagged as a bandit. • There is nothing wrong with bandits having a survivor friend around to trick other survivors, but that one guy risk being attacked by other bandits again. • There is no benefit in mixing soldiers with survivors in a group afaik. • Night time fighting might be complicated. Best to properly identify any targets before opening fire. • Perhaps the core mechanic of penalizing a character (or player with all his characters) could best be toggled off at night time if the whole idea for some reason doesn't work that well at night time. Anyone finding a damning flaw with this, is welcome in pointing this out to me. Edit: I removed a part of a sentence: "nobody will be punished by the game itself" under "summary", because it was inconsistent with what I wrote earlier. The whole sentence was cleaned up. Edit2: Corrected an embarrasing mistake, where I wrote that bandits should be able to flip between being a bandit and a survivor. Might have been a mistake I made when/if I rewrote the sentence earlier. Addendum • I guess that with this idea, one could allow survivors being plagued by penalties, to put on a soldiers uniform, in order to temporarily remove the penalties for the duration of wearing the uniform. • The whole point to penalizing bad behavior as a survivor, is to promote fair play, where the freedom to just shoot anyone for any reason at any time, is burdened with some restrictions either forced (penalties) or coerced (roles) onto the individual player. • I guess that with a survivor becoming a soldier (for 24 hours at least), could remove some and all of the penalty a survivor get for killing other survivors, a penance of sorts where the "reward" kicks in after doing time as a soldier. I imagined some kind of rock-paper-scissor theme for all of this earlier, but ultimately it never materialized into something that simple. At the very least one can notice some subtleties that I think people would appreciate, instead of simply wanting the freedom of playing heh chaotic neutral all the time.

I am fascinated by the possibility of perhaps being able to follow peoples tracks in the snow. :D Maybe some kind of spline could shape the general direction of the path, with some automatic fadeoff after some distance of say 50m, 200m, 1km.