Publik

votes++

32 people have so far said yes. Wut.

What if I want to join my friends?

Newspawns are just bandits incarnate. Why would you ever let one of those filthy things near you? I shoot any of them that get within 40m.

Solution for spawning players outside/inside of bases. Topic brought up here in relation to Rocket's talk today, and as promised here's a possible solution with workable prototype. Basic idea: When a player spawns, they "drift" 1-2km away from their login point.This "drift" would only happen on joining a new server and when the timer would be applied.The drift is influenced by nearby players, if there are any. A nearby player will push the player's spawn position away, meaning players will not spawn on top of other players.If there are no players nearby, drift is in a random direction.This does not happen if the influencing player is on the spawning player's friends list.Zombies apply a smaller push than players."Attractors" can be added (like camping parts, bases, vehicles, etc) that pull the player to spawn there.Attractors only apply if a player has interacted with that item (vehicles) or the player is on the friends list of the player that "owns" that item.Unaffiliated Attractors would severely push players away (someone else's base).Attached is a zip with a simple mockup in Unity. Extract it to your desktop or wherever and open the .html file and everything should work. Click to place a repeller (player, zombie, etc)Shift Click to place an attractor (a base you're a part of)Click an attractor/repeller to remove itEscape clears both itemsPlayer would spawn in the green wedge.Also included is the source, which can be opened as a project in Unity. If a mod wants to sticky this or promote these kinds of suggestions (with code or prototypes) I'd be more than OK with that. Hint hint. Welp, I've got a game jam to run off to, ciao. DayZ Spawn Mechanic.zip DayZ Spawn Mechanic Source.zip

What would that do? Just prevent you from logging on to the base? What if I had a ton of time on my hands and hopped like mad and built bases everywhere? I generally find Rocket & Co.'s solutions pretty bland.

Not directed at you, but related. CoD changes a lot between games. The core gameplay and engine is the essentially the same, but the gimmicks are often new and sometimes pretty interesting. Personally I avoid CoD and have since Black Ops, but it's a solid arcade FPS game. Anyone that denies that is either an idiot or narrow minded. A year for what CoD adds in each iteration is pretty damned quick, but it's because they're really good at pushing out games on that kind of schedule. The studios that do CoD are very well-oiled machines and are pretty fucking impressive. Skyrim is similar to CoD: it's built on the Morrowind+ engine and Bethesda knows their tools extremely well since they've been stuck with them for a decade and a half now. Both of these companies have such a quick turnaround and are so used to their development cycle that the alpha testing they do is all internal and is pretty light (more "is it fun" than "does the engine work"). I'd comment on L4D, but it's on the source engine and Valve knows their engine pretty damned well. Beta for large studios really just means "give us your money earlier for an unfinished product". Pros don't release alphas. None of those games do well as a litmus test for smaller production teams. Neither does Minecraft or KSP, as they both offer(ed) very solid products with novel gameplay, which has an easier time keeping fresh than something like DayZ, which is very feature-incomplete and gets stale very quickly because it doesn't offer anything with any longevity. Rust is also a bad example because Rust is actually striding forward very quickly. In Rust you have shit to do, recipes to collect, bases to build, though it still gets stale (just not nearly as quickly as DayZ). A better comparison to DayZ is Hawken. Lots of hype, mediocre release. Not a whole lot of new stuff since then, either (a year almost?). A few mechs, a few guns, some skins and shit, I think a gametype or 2. Stale, repetitive, had seen all it had to offer within a month. Enjoyed that month, but saw the writing on the wall and left. DayZ could've done a lot better by having alpha playtimes only on the weekends, sort of how ESO was. With players only able to play twice a week, they're not going to have enough time to do everything and won't get burned out. With that week in between you can add new whizbangs to keep them happy. Maybe have the first week of every month open for stress testing or whatever. To answer OP, DayZ gets roughly 3 updates a month. One content update, two to patch their mistakes. This latest update is either an irregularity or a sign of things to come. It took 6 weeks to get done and was broken on release. This next patch is expected to take about as long (1-1.5 months). Each update sees a small bump in the player count, but it drops back to pre-patch levels after about a week or so. People coming back, doing the new stuff, and leaving for another few weeks. They really should have two branches on their repo: one for core features (hunting, zombies, big stuff), and one for little things like weapons that don't rely on the core updates. Release a new build once a week with content, and a build with core updates once a month.

"Lack of other things to do"

Gear up, get food, wilderness, get bored, start trading company, find helicopter, make base, lose helicopter because Turbo wants to show us his cool "tricks". We had a blast.

ACRE is fantastic and adds a ton to the experience.

Wut. The Mod provided a great experience until the hackers ruined it and development slowed to a halt. There are a few simple things the dev team could implement to improve the situation tenfold, but probably won't because right now hunting and cooking are apparently a really important part of Dean Halls Glorious Vision.

Add a little bit of spawn drift to the relog timer. The drift causes you to spawn 1-2km from your logout point and is in a random direction. Other players not on your friends list push the direction away from them, so you'll never/rarely spawn near other players you don't know. This list could be editable in your settings (toggle some friends on/off). Things like bases would push you away stronger, and zombies would push you weaker. A base you're a part of would pull you towards it, as would nearby players you're friends with. If the selected spawn point is invalid, it picks a new one and tries again. Drift doesn't apply on rejoining a server, only when joining a new one. Would prevent people from server hopping without a 1-2km run back. Would prevent ghosting (you'd drift on server B and drift again before returning to server A and might have to wait up to 10 minutes).

Will make a video later tonight. The download is 34kb or something, and the Unity Webplayer is lightweight as well and you can just uninstall it later. As for your comments: If you're kicked or otherwise rejoining, it wouldn't apply. Rocket had mentioned turning off the timer for relogs to the same server in the livestream today. Likely what would happen is it would pick a location within the direction of the push, and if that location is invalid (clipped inside of something, underwater, hazardous, etc) it would pick another one in that green wedge (which could be wider). Go ahead and get into the problems with it :P The better the idea can be whittled down the more likely we'll get a fix for it.

Quoted instead of edited lol

If there are no players, drift is random. There wouldn't be a way to tell if you were pushed because of a player or because it just happened to land there.

Am I the only one that was somewhat irked when he brought up the "doors open and close randomly" thing and attributed it to one of the designers? I've seen that suggestion coming from the community many many times...

But I like my name how it is :(

Posted a spawning mechanic example here if anyone is interested.

When you spawn in, your character "drifts" 1-2km away from their start position and away from other players not on your friends list. In such a way, if you were to hop on an airfield, you'd always spawn 1-2km away. If someone was on the other side of the airfield, you'd spawn opposite. If your buddies joined in as well, they'd also spawn in the same direction as you since your character is ignored for the direction. I'll potatochop a visual in a second for how it could work. Some items for basebuilding (generators, etc) might increase this spawn distance for anyone not a part of that generator's list of inhabitants and might decrease the spawn distance for those that are on the list. Edit: Going to do some code stuff and make an example in Suggestions. brb.

Wow, way to keep your team up to date. Looks like it's still a one-man show.

Who has a link?

Yes, though whether or not that number was affecting spawn densities is another question.

tfw actually have Oculus right now That trailer looked like something you'd see out of Hollywood, props to the devs :)

How is the accuracy on the 1911? The configs list it at 0.03, which is nearly 3x better than the M4. Gews has shown me the error of my ways, nvm.

DayZ mod uses a "ticket" style random weighted selection algorithm. To be polite, it's inefficient and inflexible, allowing only 100 different levels of rarity for items. I'd pointed this out in the mod forums near when I left DayZ a year or whatever ago, and lo and behold the code's still here. I'm gonna repost it here since "it's been in the pipeline" for over a year now and would probably help out a bunch if the current spawning system takes too much time. Maybe it's already been fixed, just not on the client side. Edit: Now, this wouldn't be as good of a fit if they're still planning to do loot spawning in huge batches, though I don't have access to whatever the new equivalent of building_spawnLoot.sqf is now to tell. Still doesn't change the fact that the ticket system is ugly and makes me cry. In the mod, the array generated from fnc_buildWeightedArray was built every time something was spawned, so hopefully they're building the array once then doing a loop on it, but they're going to have to switch to incremental loot spawns sooner or later. compiles.sqf: // Original method:BIS_fnc_selectRandom = compile preprocessFileLineNumbers "\z\addons\dayz_code\compile\fn_selectRandom.sqf"; //Checks which actions for nearby casualty// Add:PUB_fnc_selectRandom = compile preprocessFileLineNumbers "\z\addons\dayz_code\compile\fn_selectRandomlyWithWeights.sqf"; //PUBLIK'S VERSIONIn building_spawnLoot.sqf and wherever weighted arrays are used: // Replace:_weights = [_itemType,_itemChance] call fnc_buildWeightedArray;_index = _weights call BIS_fnc_selectRandom;// With:_index = _itemChance call PUB_fnc_selectRandom;fn_selectRandomlyWithWeights.sqf /*Author: Jeff RosenbergTakes: [_weights]_weights: The array of number weights. Items array doesn't matter, as long as the arrays match indexes.Returns: The index of an item selected from a weighted list of passed length*/private["_sum", "_current", "_index", "_target"];// Get the sum of the weights_sum = 0;for "_number" from 0 to ((count _this) - 1) do{_sum = _sum + (_this select _number);};_current = 0;_index = -1;_target = random _sum; // Pick a number between 0 and _sum// Select the itemwhile { _current < _target; } do{_index = _index + 1; // Increment the index_current = _current + (_this select _index); // Add another weight. If we've passed _target, we've selected the index _target resides in};_indexI really think you guys should open up DayZ to the modding community while there's still interest.