flimsypremise

If you had bothered to inform yourself about the publicly announced roadmap, you'd know that there are plans to implement a global loot tracking system that permits capping the supply of specific items. So they can say, only 5 AK 101s anywhere, and no matter how many military spawns you check you won't find an AK 101 until an existing one despawns. You're complaining about an incomplete feature in an alpha release, and there's already a planned feature that completely solves the problem. I'm probably pissing into the wind here, but just. stop. posting.

OK Mr. Game Engine Expert, can you explain to us exactly what isn't optimized in the Arma III engine, what such optimization would entail, or really anything that might in any way let us verify your claims?

It would be extremely odd if the game was either RAM or CPU bottlenecked. That's almost never the case with games. A lot of the stuff that would require a lot of RAM or CPU is calculated server-side anyway. If you're seeing framerate drops, it's almost certainly a GPU issue. I also wouldn't trust the RAM usage reports in the Task Manager for much of anything. Modern operating system aggressively manage memory, paging shit in and out in anticipation of what will be needed in the near future. The machine is going to appear to use as much memory as you give it, but that doesn't mean much. Unless you're profiling the executable to see what's it's specifically doing at any point you're unlikely to have any idea how much RAM it's actually using.

Games are created on a timescale of years, not months. The game could be in alpha for 2 years and it would be well in the normal range. The fact that you think 8 months is a long time indicates that you don't really understand the nature of the problems that game developers have to solve. The DayZ devs are currently building a global loot tracking architecture for a distributed server infrastructure run by any number of different parties. It has to be scalable, performant and secure. That project alone could take a year to complete, and another year to test and debug. And here you are complaining that the controls are clunky in alpha. Get some perspective.

I love the combat in this game. It's one of the only FPS games I've played where situational awareness, positioning and planning beat reaction speed and other fundamental twitch skills. If someone has the jump on you, you can't just spin around and shoot them. You need to get to cover, prepare yourself, devise a response and act. Combat is chaotic and confusing, as it should be.

I agree with everything here 100%. I'd love to see slower, more numerous zombies that you can actually avoid with stealth.

Actually, Nietzsche is a harsh critic of nihilism, which he argues is a condition arising from the persistence of a morality based on Christian teaching absent the supernatural elements that ground Christianity. Nietzsche claims that nihilism stems from the propagation of a "slave morality" that allows the weak to subvert the strong, resulting in a society bereft of any struggle or conflict. This society produces complacent hedonist relativists, and it is these people that Nietzsche labels nihilists. DayZ is this context is a means to act out the sublimated desire for true conflict in civilized, comfortable post-industrial societies.

I Kant really get into him. I don't think the categorical imperative actually works all that well.

"Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. The world has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims of universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons."

Most of these issues are known bugs that came over from experimental. I'd maybe have kept 0.47 off stable for another week, but I don't know how the dev team is running their releases. I think that these behaviors also reflect larger issues with the network architecture and several of the new systems, and they may need a larger body of testers producing metrics in order to debug the problem. Keep in mind our role here is to generate debug data so that the full release doesn't have these problems, Either way, the nice thing about a rapid development cycle is you can wait a week and get a new build.

Sort of a silly position. Any mechanic that can be abused, will be abused. They're essentially practicing security by obscurity, which doesn't work. The goal should be to create mechanics that can't be abused.

I'm guessing that a lot of the performance issues you're all seeing when you join servers right after they start have to do with resource-intensive stuff that needs to happen right after a server instance starts. Object spawning doesn't seem happen pre-boot, so for instance maybe they're spawning every object on the map, and then caching everything that isn't with a player vicinity and moving it out of RAM. If people start logging in en-masse, I'd guess that causes a lot of simultaneous checks against a large number of objects concurrently with normal initialization processes. It's like how banks only work if everyone doesn't try and withdraw their money all at once. The server can handle the ordinary rate of player spawning and tracking of position—making sure the world is in place when you walk into an area—because those process are all optimized. But the when players start logging in all at once the server instance probably just runs out of resources. Here's my guess at the process: 1) server instance init -> world spawned and all world objects spawned (houses, trees, etc) 2) server instance up -> players can join and world starts populating items 3) server tries to cache objects that aren't in the vicinity of a player. As players join, lots of vicinity checks happen concurrently and the server has to load a lot of shit into RAM all at once instead of slowly over time. [edit] My recommendation: wait an hour before joining a server after startup.

You guys are a debating a mechanic that is only partially complete. Based on statements by the dev team, loot respawn will eventually be governed by a global cap on certain items, so items presumably won't respawn until the existing item despawns somewhere. We don't know what the despawn mechanic is either. I assume it has something to do with items getting ruined or consumed, but who knows.

Man, there are a lot of complaints in here about shit being broken. If I were the devs working on this games I would want to strangle you guys, quit, and go live on an island where I didn't have to listen to entitled jackasses whining that I'm not at work on the weekends fixing bugs in an experimental code branch. If my clients did that to me, I'd tell them where they could stick it pretty goddamn quickly. Do people not understands how difficult it is to debug and fix the sorts of problems we're all experiencing? And for those who say "I thought this was the place to talk about experimental"—yes, it is the place to talk about it. Not to bitch and moan. There's a huge difference between reporting an issue and complaining about it. You should be doing the former, not the latter.

Has anyone noticed that zombies never lose aggro? Is this a problem on stable as well? You should be able to lose them by breaking line of sight, but every zombie I encounter chases me pretty much forever, through multiple buildings and around fences, even if I'm crouching or prone.

If you've never worked on a game development process, you should probably not be offering opinions about the pace, approach or overall approach to developing DayZ. Building something like this is an incredibly complex project, and possibly the worst thing you can do is rush the process. Most software projects are rushed to completion, and software developers are almost always forced to sacrifice the best approach in order to hit arbitrary deadlines. Get over your sense of entitlement and stop harassing the development team about shit you know absolutely nothing about. It'll be done when it's done.

Could someone with knowledge of the game internals give us a better sense of why active game objects like zombies cause high server resource utilization? My understanding is that the current game version can support 5000 active game objects per instance. This seems to suggest that all zombie-like game objects are active at all times, even if a player isn't in the vicinity. From what I can gather, this is related somehow to making the item logic more robust, but it seems fairly expensive to do. I also wonder if there are certain kinds of zombie behavior that are cheaper than others. For instance, I'm assuming that ARMA 2 operates on an event loop, like most game engines. If zombies moved slower, could their AI poll at a lower rate? Could a horde of zombies share their compositional objects in ways that would lower the individual cost for a zombie as the number of zombies increase in a given area?

I like how everyone acts as if this behavior is somehow something unique to DayZ players. Welcome to the human race. You learned an important lesson about what happens when you encounter other humans unconstrained by laws or societal prohibitions on certain behavior.

The community is dead. Everyone I know that was playing has stopped.

Both the M107 and the AS50 have an audible range of 455m, which is the longest of any weapon in the game. For comparison, the Lee Enfield has an audible range of 162m, and the other sniper rifles have an audible range fo 180m. So if you're within a half-kilometer of any zombies, prepare to run.

What exactly is the argument for keeping sniping as it is?

Should change the title of this thread to "HEY EVERYONE I AM A HUGE DICK".

I think you seriously underestimate the lengths to which people will go to get an advantage in a game. And on the topic of hacking, I don't really think it's an inevitability. There are plenty of MMOs that aren't riddled with vulnerabilities. The reason DayZ is vulnerable to hacks is the unsuitability of Arma II to the sort of gameplay Rocket wants to achieve. I think we should expect that the standalone will not be susceptible to hacks. I don't see any need for skill training. I think future development should focus on fixing bugs, and developing existing mechanics rather than adding new ones. Adding more building interiors is the sort of thing that adds to DayZ without fundamentally changing it. Adding skill sets or specializations will fundamentally change the nature of the game, which I really don't think is necessary. The standalone should be improved version of DayZ, not an entirely different game.

I think there may be a solution involving a popular and widely used mechanic from other games: storage in furniture items in buildings. If Rocket were to implement a skyrim type system, and allow players to enter any building, players could create private caches of items in anonymous furniture. It would be susceptible to discovery, but a player would have to go around for hours checking empty drawers. The key would be the sheer number of players to keep stuff. The random sheds scattered around the map would suddenly become a real resource, rather than just useless scenery.