Publik

Replaces vest, may even replace shirt, only 3 slot, bright poofy colors.

Found one but it was eaten by my backpack when I logged back in :( 3 slots, replaces vest.

Isn't low the only other setting for HDR other than Very Low? Also, the post processing looks like ass, no reason to keep it unless you want OMG MOTION BLUR SO REAL. Got my trees looking somewhat better by switching from High to Very High in Textures and Object/Terrain Models: Sorry about the blur, had post processing on. Turned it off and it made no difference except for the ugly blur.

l2eat, l2hydrate I started eating everything I find and I'm up to Healthy status. Don't get any indicators except when I'm thirsty, which happens once every hour or two. When that happens, I eat and drink whatever I couldn't pack down earlier and I'm good to go. I actually like the text system more than an icon only system; it can potentially give me more information about what's actually going on with my character. Which is easier to understand, "I'm really thirsty" or the correct shade of orange? How could you differentiate between medical statuses if it didn't tell you? How would you know if you're sick from the flu or sick because you ate a filthy kiwi? The little Thirsty, Hungry, etc labels could be prettied up and made into icons and the text could be reworded so it's easier to understand, but the text itself is fine.

Your suggestions are fine, and would be nice to see in-game. However, any time KoS is thrown into the mix you get problems. You can't punish or try to reduce any style of gameplay, even KoS. Say "Melee Balance to Improve Trust" or whatever instead. Bringing up KoS never encourages any sort of discussion.

Take "To Reduce ____" out of the title. None of your suggestions are bad, but trying to promote "Better melee" is a lot easier than "Better melee to prevent KoS".

The transition is abrupt, but the speed is fine.

I'd like to see 3rd person without a crosshair and without the zoom, making 3rd person unusable as a combat perspective.

Hmmm, nvm. In which case, allowing suicide whenever if you're crippled/near dead would be fine, even without a weapon.

But what's the purpose of using the suicide button? To get a better spawn? That's abusing a system. I understand suicide if you get stuck in a building or something, but there could be an "unstick" button or command instead that moves you to the nearest unobstructed position. The suicide button makes no sense, it's got no purpose.

For that matter, can we remove the suicide button? Or have something to deter its abuse?

Within the server logs?

I'd be fine with a mental health system, but when it's proposed as a punishment for any style of play I have to disagree. In general I like the idea of luxury items, downtime, good food, etc, but I'd tie that to a "happiness" meter instead of a "sanity" meter. If you're slogging through shit all day your character won't feel that great mentally, and their physical traits will suffer for it. If you take a break, have a nice steak, and pop a beer, your character feels better and is more responsive etc. It'd also be cool to have a "fear" meter that zombies cause, sort of like Amnesia I think where spooky ghosts make your character start to shake; anything to make the zombies unpleasant. There was someone who posted a few days ago about their first kill - that it made them feel physically sick. The focus should be on keeping that actual response, not putting in an artificial system.

KoS wasn't even mentioned yet, chill. The idea is that when you're shot, it doesn't immediately send you to "you are dead", you've got a few seconds to move around before you actually die. I'd like some sort of effect played where your character stumbles and starts to close their eyes, and once closed it brings up "you are dead". While you're stumbling/falling/dying you can still move around a little and pull your trigger.

It already does track player locations. You're trading off a distance check (is my distance to zombie squared > active distance squared?) for an entire zombie update, whatever that involves. Adding multiple heatmaps etc would add to the overhead, but would make the system a lot "smarter". A simple heatmap could be represented as a byte[,] which can be on the smaller end of things. It'd be a byte[150,150] for 100m heatmap chunks or a byte[1500,1500] for 10m chunks, or you could do 25m or 20m chunks etc. At 10m chunks that's about 2 1/4 MB of extra data to store in memory. The current method seems to be to spawn a zombie anywhere on the map and then constantly update all of them, even if there are no observers nearby.

Yeah, it all works it's way out of our groundwater after a few weeks, duh.

Doesn't really affect ghosting the same server, though the 30sec timer could be a hassle. What if my buddies and I are in a stalemate with some assailant. We've got each other pinned down pretty well and it's sort of quieted down. If I've got 30 seconds, I could just have my buddies cover my body while I jump.

Well, the loot items don't need to be "spawned" per-se, but they need ought to exist on the server. If I come back to building X on Nth street for that can of tuna I passed over, it should still be there unless someone else looted it first. With zombies though, I don't care if zombie X is the same zombie X I smacked in the face and ran away from. Zombies are mobile so it probably walked off somewhere else. I'm pretty sure right now loot items don't visually spawn on the client-side until you get close, at least that's what I've experienced. Loot tends to pop into view when I get within 20m or so, and I'm running on high settings. Edit: There's a suggestion here about gunfights and preventing people from spawning in during a fight. You could use a similar heatmap to the zombie activity for a "danger" map. If an area sees a large volume of gunshots and players getting shot, it heats up the map. If you try and spawn within a "hot" area it doesn't let you in or makes you wait until the area's cooled down enough to spawn :) Combining multiple heatmaps along with some player radii is the way to go.

There's something or another BIS put out that adds flooding.

Aww, but they're so nice! On topic: Go for it. I'd like to see vehicles take a large part, so having an anti-material rifle to take out vehicles would be great. Plus they'd be rare, and the ammo rarer, which is good for business :)

It's not a bad system, really. The only problem with the mod was that the radius for activating zombie spawns was too small, so you were able to tell where people where if there were zombies spawning. What you do is have each player have one radius (red), where zombies spawn and are actively updating on the server. These zombies get aggro'd, attack you, walk around, and do other normal zombie things. Players also have a second radius (blue) in which zombies are not actively spawned, but the ones that are there are not despawned either. Anything in that area is "asleep" and doesn't update. Once a zombie leaves the "asleep" zone, they have a countdown until they finally despawn or can be despawned immediately. So, if you're in Cherno and someone is in Elektro, zombies are active up and down the coast between the two cities, but not in Kamenka because there's no one anywhere near there. If a zombie enters the active zone it wakes up and continues on as if it had never gone to sleep in the first place. If a player spawns, during that load time the server can populate the zombies in that immediate area before the player is finished loading. You could tie this in with a heatmap in 10-100 meter chunks. The map tracks zombie deaths in the area, and can be "depleted" of zombies (hot = depleted, cold = abundant(?)). This heatmap gradually cools, allowing more zombies to be spawned in an area. You could also do other fun things with the heatmap, like having an active vehicle cools the cell it's in faster and thus zombies spawn more around active vehicles. You could even tie loud noises to the heatmap, so being loud cools it faster and makes zombies spawn more, or have a dead player rapidly cool an area. Edit: Forgot to mention, this also somewhat disconnects the zombies from fixed locations like buildings. You'd probably want a higher rate around the buildings and so on but you could still just spawn a zombie anywhere in the red and be good to go. Edit 2: This is basically what Warframe does, with a heatmap and inactive AI areas around the player. They gave a nice presentation (Jump to Tac Area Map) at the AI summit at GDC last year on the subject.

Should be stickied

Edit: All options on the poll are perfectly valid ways for DayZ to go. I'm in support of "Purely player knowledge". There's a debate related to the current weapon accuracy about whether or not our characters spawn as "trained" or "untrained"/civilian. If we're talking about this as it is, I like to think that every player that spawns has a few years of "backstory" time before they get to the coast. The Infection didn't happen last week, it happened years ago. Your character has been surviving since, hence your medical, weapon, and mechanical knowledge. There was a storm, you fell off the boat, washed up on the shore, etc. However, this thought process is just as wrong as the people that think that your player is a fresh civilian never-held-a-gun and the people that think that we're all veteran military sniper-medics that can repair and fly choppers. Your character in DayZ is YOU, the PLAYER YOUR knowledge is what defines your character. Do YOU know how to treat shock or prepare a splint or tourniquet? Do YOU know how a car works and how to hotwire it or replace its tire? Do YOU know how to start a helicopter and read the gauges, and land without an engine? Do YOU know how to zero a rifle and read the wind to take long shots or handload ammo? This should be what decides your "skill" level in DayZ, not some stat that levels up over time. Hopefully this is the direction DayZ takes, but who knows. Personally, I find the idea of learning real world skills from a survival game to be really interesting. Maybe when/if they release their roadmap we'll know for sure, but until then some discussion on the matter would probably be best. /Discuss Edit: And please post something to keep this thread up

On that subject, since the poll looks fairly even either way, are there any middle-of-the-road solutions? Like, you need to know the order in which to turn on your helicopter, but the speed at which you do it can be "leveled up"?

If yes, then no I don't like this idea, but I love the idea of skills based on repeating things in game, like higher stamina after running 10km, faster bandaging, faster scoping etc Whatever such a system might look like, but at the end of the day having a stat that determines how well you do X. It'd be good to point out that the health system is somewhat the same deal; you've got a "stat" that says how full your stomach is. The difference being that a stomach contents stat is different than a bandage faster stat because it reflects a physical system. Higher stamina should be tied to the health system, btw :P If you're healthy, you have more stamina. Eat pasta run fasta. Stats would be alright, I guess. Not really where I'd like the game to go (DayZ pvp builds anyone?), but I'd like to stress that all 3 options on the poll are perfectly valid.