Mark Darkers

Smoke would require more particles, which would be more intensive for the CPU, as particles are CPU calculated + more draw-calls because they are transparent, for transparent objects to be transparent, the gpu has to render the scene twice, one time for the transparency and one time for everything that is opaque. Normally this should not be a problem with an up to date renderer. Maybe we will see it in the future?

Like in the mod?

I agree, the fact that people are so geared is because they managed to stay alive and everything you find in that life cycle is earned. I also don't mind that there will be rifle significantly superior towards others, weapons don't need to be balanced out, some weapons are simply better than others, if you find one, lucky you and you deserve it.

I think you have to post this in the bug tracker, not much the forum admins can do about this.... And yes if you have searched the bug tracker, this has been adressed multiple times.

As far as I know the loot only spawns when the chopper spawns the first time (server reset = new spawn location = new loot).

This post makes so much sense, the frying pan comparison made it very good to understand. This should become a sticky, as most people have a deformed idea of what a game in alpha stage really is.

also assigning the hold breath functin to more than one key and then pressing both those hold breath keys, will make your aim super stable (when not out of breath), at the moment the player will hold his breath twice and you have double the steadyness.

Yea there are allot of pax, but it's good, not every one can always make it to the bigger events, to expensive for traveling. :)

What really happened was rule 4 of DayZ: If it looks like a stupid idea and you think it is going to kill you, then it is a stupid idea and it is going to kill you. I was at suicide bridge hiding on top, my friends actually did not manage to find me, wanted to walk down laughing, slipped, dead. Friends took these pics.

The biggest reason why they device it into alpha, beta, etc. is because they have to set mile stones, each of the type has within their own milestones too. This is so that there is a clear point the dev team has to work towards, if there was no goal set, development could turn out even slower.

well that pc should run Dayz, but you will have to lower a few of the standard settings, my former video card was a generation lower than the ATI RADEON 8570D and 4gb of ram is standard for every game, not much games even use that much. The only thing that is buggying about that pc is the cpu. It is to weak to run any game based on the arma engine properly, the VR and Enfusion engine are very cpu intensive and you need at least an Intel i5 to get a decent frame rate, i7 and i5 are the same in gaming performance i7 is only good if you also do lots of software editing (after effects and other render stuff). So everything in that pc is good escept for the cpu. Here is the benchmark chart I compared it with http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+A8-6600K+APU the top chart is the performance chart. So if you could select a custom cpu to put in there I would recommend anything that comes close to the i5 benchmark.

I don't like them either, but the more hackers now the better. The sooner they pinpoint the leaks and loopholes that makes it possible, the faster they can fix it before full release.

Well, I don't think they will hold it back, not the whole team is at pax, only dean and a few representatives I think.

always check the announcement/information section of this forum first, there you will find the minimum spects to run DayZ at normal mode, but even on a high end pc (like mine) you will only hit around 30 fps inside towns if you are lucky, 60 in forests, you will find it here

also, as soon as shock value out numbers the health of the player, the player will pass out even before the adrenaline would kick in.

Well it is only the new comers / minority that think that, the people who play how it should and enjoy the game, do not speak their thoughts on the forums. Unfortunately the childish nagging people are the only ones screaming their voices :)

Hi, today I played on some of the most annoying servers I have ever logged into. (sorry I did not manage to get the servers info). On login a greeting message appeared with the text: "greetings survivor! tired of running into looted areas? Loot your own piece of land at (link info)." Now what was basically happening, is that on the website of this admin, you could rent ground on Chernarus in DayZ. The pricing was based of 1 km by 1 km grid squares. This alone is already illegal (as far that I am aware of), but here comes the annoying part, when you as a 'not renter' enter that area, you are automatically kicked, several times ending up in getting a wipe. So not only makes this the game unplayable, unable to enter most of the towns without paying for it (because every step you take can be fatal), it is also extremely unfair as most of the loot areas are rented out and thus only accessible by the players who rent the patches of ground. I don't know where people get money to spend on such a thing, but I find this rather sad. Further more, to have this custom system working, they have to alter the server code (which is also not allowed) inject their own script (the rent detection) and connect a corrupt server to the hive. Yes, I know, you could always just play on another server, but I just wanted to put the spotlight on the activities that are happening and ruining the game. More and more of these profit aimed servers are popping up (not caring about gameplay or host rules) and I think that is a shame. They always give the same excuse it is to keep the server running, but what use does a server have if it has no players on it? Next time when I come across such a server, I will copy it's info and data over as an example (if I ever find one again).

No, you are wrong. even if it is a gfx increase, objects that are to far away to be even recognized as shapes, could be occluded, a programmer would simply create a collider(trigger) sphere and everything based on the view distance still possible in the fog and outside of this sphere will be occluded, it won't be a feature of the fog itself (this was never the case anyway in any game at all). Every old-school game used this technique. They created a simple checkup how far an object is and cull it whenever it is out of that range, this caused popping, they then added fog to hide the popping, everything that was still in the fog and also in the cull range, would look like if it was standing in the fog. This same thing apply's to the fog they are using. It would otherwise not make any sense to let their engine draw something that is not visible at all.

This depends on which occlusion culling technique you use. Because everything outside of the camera's frustum is always culled, everything under the ground mass is also always culled. And static culling is not that expensive, it is the dynamic culling that could get the overload you are mentioning. But with the amount of objects in DayZ I expect it to rather increase the fps than decrease it.

Yea your right, but as far as I know the wasteland on Arma 2 has private hives (just like the dayz mod has now) and character data will be saved depending on which version you run. But indeed the survival aspect is less fleshed out and more focused on preparing for combat and war.

I know how it is called and yes RV does this below world surface by default (one of the reasons underground bases can't be build yet). Also the view distance and object detail are all part of another culling process, however if I am right it does not use screen space Occlusion culling. An example would be the Umbra occlusion culling from the unity engine, in here static objects that are behind each other and thus out of view of the camera will be culled out, for dynamic objects (physics, players, etc...) the umbra system generates real time portals with position blocks where the camera can be and calculates real time occlusion from there on. here is a visual example. A room is represented with the player inside, on the left realtime occlusion culling is on, while on the right side it is off (currently what happens in DayZ and other VR related engines). As you can see the result for the camera will be the same. However this type off occlusion has a slight increase on cpu performance and is not worth the trouble for very small levels with low drawcalls (mobile games), however with the amount of objects that will be removed from drawing in the scale of Chernarus and DayZ, much more drawcalls can be saved and thus a performance increase will happen instead of a decrease. The network bubble already kinda does this but purely for behind the scene code (network architecture, script udpates). I think they would benefit by adding such an occlusion system, but whether it is easy to create it for their engine or not, is a question I can not answer.

If you got rid of the zombies, then you would have wasteland mod.

please define "basic" models, as this vary's per system and per engine/studio. There isn't really such a thing as a 'basic' model because every model will have its own poly count limit (given by the art director). For instance player's and zeds lookalike, but the player is way more dense then the zed's are in polygon counts. Yet they both are 'basic' models...

Indeed, most game engines / renderers do not render anything that is not visible, so if an object is completely occluded by the fog, it simply won't be drawn, this could increase fps allot in towns.

Except from my own experience with testing it unfortunately not. But it has been said before that server side desync can cause clipping errors.