Rigor Mortis (DayZ)

Don't worry, I'm sure the devs don't read anything on here anyways. And improving the descriptions would be nice, but my main complaint is that many weapons don't list what calibur they use... which is just silly.

Bump for the umbrellas! I have had sooooo many times lately when I was in a server and it just would not stop raining... it would make my day to have a poncho or an umbrella.

So, does anyone else think it's a little crazy that you have to open your whole inventory to access your pockets? Also, why does the quick access bar give access to stuff buried in your backpack? My suggestion is to get rid of that quick access bar and add a simple replacement that has a spot for your carried/slung weapons and a row showing everything in your pockets. If you want something to be 'quick access' you just jam it in a pocket instead of in your bag. Perhaps a key could be used to show the pocket contents so they aren't always there cluttering up things. Opinions?

Somewhere in my readings on here I saw a post recommending that if you have a mag in your backpack, you should have to open the bag to get it, but if you have one in a pocket or other easily accessible spot, you should be able to just hit 'r'. I think a good way to implement this would be to add an 'ammo' bar off to the side of your inventory, and it would allow you to put whatever mags you want into a list (only if they are in an easily accessible location, and they would stay in that location). When you hit 'r' it would automatically grab the next one on the list.

http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/199261-suggestion-improved-first-aid/#entry2004668

The goal of this enhancement to the game would be to reduce killing on sight by introducing a couple of mechanics that will reward players for interacting. I understand it is against the goals of the DayZ developers to reward/punish certain play styles, but I (and I'm sure others) think that randomly killing people for no reason but psychopathic pleasure is not a "play style"... so continuing on with the assumption that we want to try to increase bandit/survivor behavior.... Everyone spawns with a 0 minute death timer. Every 1 minute in the game you gain 1 minute on your death timer until you hit 10 minutes in game, which leaves you with a 10 minute death timer. This eliminates the problem of people just killing you as soon as you spawn to make you wait 10 more minutes to play. At least you have a few minutes to get off the coast/away from the spawn area. It also helps reduce suiciding because it's hard to find a suicide method that will work in less than a minute from spawning in the game. Through certain actions you can reduce your death timer back to zero, or increase it to a cap of 30 minutes. It would suck to wait 30 minutes to play, but it's not so long as to totally ruin a gaming night (at least imo), and reducing your death timer would be beneficial to all players. Allies: All players could make allies - just go up to a player, mousewheel to the menu option 'offer alliance,' the other player gets a passive indicator that they can accept (it shouldn't interfere with their actions to see this option). Making an ally reduces your death timer by 5 minutes. Cancelling an alliance increases the death timer by 5 minutes. Killing an ally increases your death timer by 10 minutes. You share rewards with allies for certain actions/events -- and you cannot share with people you are not allied with. Surviving for an hour reduces your death timer by 1 minute. Killing 10 zombies reduces your death timer by 1 minute. Murder increases your death timer by 10 minutes. Self defense does not count as murder -- this might be hard to calculate in game, but I would say if someone shot at or hit you in any way (within some reasonable limits) you could retaliate with deadly force with no repercussions on your death timer. This would include all allies of the person who shot at or hit you. Since the game has to calculate how close a shot is to you already (the distance of the trajectory of the bullet from you changes the sound produced), it should be pretty easy for the developers to add this option. Robberies: A successful robbery reduces your death timer by 15 minutes and can be accomplished in 2 ways: 1. robbery action - just aim at a player from within talking range and select 'rob.' The player would be informed that this is a robbery and they would get the chance to hand over their stuff, fight, or run for their lives... just like in any other robbery, but this way the bandit gets their death timer reduction and they don't have to kill anyone. They still can if they want to, but letting the player live increases the benefit to the bandit. Of course if you accidentally clicked 'rob' on a friend, you could cancel the robbery.... or just take their stuff and part ways 5 minutes richer (-15 for the robbery, +10 for losing an ally)...up to you. 2. murder/loot. You kill a player and as long as you loot the corpse, it reduces your death timer(s) by 15 minutes. The murder still costs you 10 minutes. If two or more people are involved in a robbery or murder and they are allies, they all get the same rewards/punishments. To be more precise, any ally who dealt damage to, activated a 'robbery' on a player that equipment was then taken from, or took equipment from the player is included. Allying with someone you have previously robbed will increase your death timer by 15 minutes. Example 1: I kill a guy, my friend runs up and grabs his gear and we get out of there. If we are allied, we both get a murder and a robbery - totalling reduced time on our death timers of 5 minutes each. If we are not, I gain 10 minutes for murder and my friend gets nothing for looting a corpse. Example 2: Two friends and I hold up a guy and steal a bunch of stuff from him. One of my friends activates the 'robbery' on the guy and the other takes the gear. Since I did not interact in the robbery I get nothing while my friends both get 15 minute reductions. All I had to do was click 'rob' or take a piece of gear to get the reduction :(. Example 3: I'm a moron who thinks this is 'CoD: Survivor Edition' and just shoot everyone I meet. My death timer will basically always be 30 minutes.

You might not be able to tear thicker materials by hand, but there's no reason you can't cut them up with something sharp.

Right now the dry <-> soaking indicator doesn't really do anything except indicate how long you were in the rain (or how deep you got into a pond), but I think it's pretty obvious that their intention is to implement what you are talking about here. I doubt the developers added this feature and have no future plans for it.

http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/199253-chernarus-really-needs-a-river/?hl=river I don't know what the developers are planning once they get the game engine under control, but I have to assume they will be improving the overall 'feel' of the game to make it more DayZ and less Arma.

To answer your questions 1 at a time: "What's your definition of a playstyle? It seems pretty arbitrary if you are trying to say that it needs interaction, and even then, killing someone is still interacting with them, just in a negative manner." I did not say that a play style requires interactions. As you may note, just killing zeds and staying alive for a while in my system can easily reduce your death timer to zero. I'm certainly not saying we should force people to play a certain way, but it would be freakin' nice to give some motivation for more people to act like _people_ in this apocalyptic survival game and less like homicidal respawning warriors. What do I mean by 'act like people' you might ask? Well, I mean that some people might decide it's better to get their gear by killing and taking it off the corpse, whereas others might find it better to find gear for themselves... and even others might decide to rob people for food or gear (and the thrill of the robbery). Some could be lone wolves, just hunting in the woods and surviving indefinitely... there are so many options other than 'kill everyone I see.' -- and this system wouldn't even stop that entirely, it would just discourage it. Why does defending yourself from one person grant you immunity from their other allies? Someone could have easily just made a friendship with someone and is now free to be killed because their ally was stupid and fired on someone they couldn't kill This is all part of choosing your friends wisely. By becoming someone's ally, you are specifically stating that you agree with their decisions and choose to work together with them. If you don't want the possibility of repercussions from some moron acting all crazy, then _choose your friends wisely_. Also, the person who got shot at would have no way of knowing who was allied with who and which players they could randomly kill for free... so from their point of view firing at the guy who is saying "friendly, friendly, that guy wasn't my friend" has just as high of a risk as shooting at anyone else. Why is killing someone without using the "rob" interaction psychopathic, but using the rob interaction and then killing them somehow better. It's not? In both circumstances under my system you get the same time added to your death timer for murder. The difference is that when you complete the robbery you reduce your death timer. And how is it any less psychopathic if you kill someone but open up their loot afterwards? People could do this and get reduced timers. It shows that you had a reason to kill them - the point was to get their gear, not just to kill them. And again you still get the same time addition for murder - the looting after murder just counts as robbing them. And why is it impossible for you to "ally" with someone you have robbed in the past? Apparently forgiveness doesn't exist anymore. It is not impossible? I specifically stated the time gains for this action (15 min). The reason for the overall time gain is to avoid friends from 'robbing' each other over and over to drive their respawn timers down. If you have forgiven someone for robbing you then you should be willing to accept the time increase to become friends, considering that you still gain 10 minutes for making an ally so really it only adds 5 minutes. Why do all of these things apply to your allies? Congratulations, your ally is a douchebag and has given you a 30 minute timer for something they've done halfway across the map! Hooray! I apologize for not making this more clear - I meant for it to apply to allies that were _involved_ in the action. You can't gain or lose time for something you were not directly involved in... oh wait, I wrote that in my original post _and_ made an example to make it clear. You must not have read that. Also, why are you allied with so many douchebags? This solution doesn't even stop it, it just means that using long ranged combat is no longer a viable option unless you want to wait half an hour before you can play again. As long as you're able to get close enough to someone to initiate a "robbery", then you're free to do whatever the hell you want. Except make friends, of course. What exactly do you mean by 'long ranged combat'? Killing people for no reason at extreme range? Yes, it does discourage that. As for doing whatever you want after initiating a robbery... that's just not true or close to what I said in my OP. You still get the same time increase for murder after completing a robbery. The best way to reduce spawn time as a bandit would be to rob people without killing them. Also, I hope I made clear that you can befriend whoever you like in this system... no idea why you think you can't. Thanks for the fodder for this post.

Just as a friendly informative post here - it's best to just not respond to ridiculous comments like the one from Anox. Fueling an argument on here just wastes everyone's time and detracts from the topic at hand. Usually I wouldn't even take the time to write this, but your question of "what's a fag" made me click respond.... I don't know where you're from, but a 'fag' in the American vernacular is a slur for a homosexual man. There are still many people in our country who are ignorant bigots, and sadly it often gets rubbed off onto our children.

Until there is a good reason to interact with people, logically speaking KoS is the safest way to go. Here's my logic When you see a person you have 2 basic options: 1. Letting them live: no benefit (currently) 2. Killing them: instant gear and guaranteed safety for you and your party What's hilarious to me is that any suggestion to try to add value to players' lives or to try to get players to interact more gets flamed to death on here as 'enforcing play styles' or 'too much like an RPG.' To me, this game is an RPG with survival elements... I'd love to see people get pushed into behaving more like real people in game and less like the crazy KoS monsters that we are currently encouraged to become. Here's my most recent suggestion to help increase player interactions: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/200031-suggestion-robberies-and-allies/

I would be OK with making gunshots attract zeds, but not people b/c one makes sense and the other has no basis in logic (i killed a guy, so why are the zeds attracted to me now more than other people?). In fact, I think gunshots should not only attract zeds, it should spawn them (from very far away, running towards you, more for each shot) because it will attract 'dormant' zombies. It might even be fun to do... get on a building, shoot, enjoy incoming stream of zombie target practice.

It's my understanding that the devs have limited the spawns on the alpha to force everyone together so they can test the game thoroughly. I don't see any reason to believe that this won't change when the game is released.

Great idea. I hope they implement this.

The idea of punishing someone for surviving longer by increasing their death timer is incredibly dumb... don't even know why anyone would suggest that. With the way the game is currently, I think the system should be set up so that everyone has to wait until their body despawns to respawn... max time 10 minutes. This isn't so much a punishment as a forced break from the game and a deterrent to running back to get your gear (yes I know it won't stop everyone).

I agree that anyone can grab a mag, but you need to look at it to determine which end has the bullets and which direction they are going unless you are trained well (and I've even seen trained soldiers f this one up.) I disagree about putting a single round in... I used single shot rifles for many years and it was rather easy for me to reach in my pocket while talking to a friend, open the bolt, and drop a round in without looking. Why? I could feel which end of the bullet was which easily (they do have a rather unique shape) and the chamber of my weapon never changed shape... it's super easy after just a few rounds fired. Now, doing the same with semi-automatic weapons can be tricky -- for example, with my Springfield XD .40 I have to aim the weapon down and carefully drop the round in or sometimes it doesn't align properly and falls out or (worse) gets jammed -- although I'm sure if I loaded my weapon that way regularly it would become easy.

For those who say there should be a 'significant benefit' to having magazines... I say the benefit is you don't have to reload after every shot. For the individual who used Breaking Bad as a reference for realistic weapon usage... using a TV drama as evidence of real world combat scenarios makes my brain hurt. The one suggestion I haven't seen on here is to make a single bullet loading animation. People are right that it takes a little longer to load a single round into a weapon, but there's no reason to require opening your backpack to do it every time. I think you should even be able to keep a handful of ammo (# depending on type) and reload quicker from that than say ammo in one of your pockets. So, to summarize: Custom animations - Loading single rounds from a pocket (character reaches into pocket, grabs round, opens bolt (if necessary) and loads a round in, closes bolt, ready to fire. - Loading single rounds from a handful of rounds you already have (character opens bolt (if necessary) and loads a round in, closes bolt, ready to fire. - Loading a revolver - press 'r' to start reload process, opens cylinder and holds it open, if rounds in hand, loads a round. If rounds in pocket, grabs rounds from pocket and loads a round. With cylinder open - each press of 'r' puts another round in - left clicking or putting last round in closes cylinder, ready to fire. On this same note, I think your left hand should have a single inventory slot separate from the hand holding your weapon... people can hold ammo, mags, flashlights, batteries... whatever AND properly handle a rifle.

Gotcha - I've read a few threads that go back and forth like that :)

I think a program could be written to instantly create a map pretty easily actually, considering that the game has to know where roads/hills/cities/etc go to render them. The problem with this idea is the 'randomly generated' part. I haven't worked with the game engine for DayZ, but I have worked with others, and they are generally pretty inflexible when it comes to a lot of things. It would likely take years to create a random map generator that would produce believable landscapes and city layouts. I think a better solution would be to have several maps to play DayZ in. Chernarus is a really cool place to visit and all, but as others have pointed out it's not so huge that you can't learn it. I mean, even after just a week or two you should know where all the major cities are as well as the best drop spots for weapons. I know it's easy to get lost in the woods, especially when the sun is rising in the South, but as soon as you find a town sign you know right where you are. I'm definitely not saying that the devs should be worrying about this now, but after the game comes out it would be nice to see a new map or two come out as DLC. Maybe one on an island like Hawaii and another in the Australian outback. Of course, if they put out a map editor and allow private 'hives' then we can just make our own.

I totally agree that climbing trees would be a cool addition to the game... but where did the rest of your post come from? Seems pretty random!

I'm ok with random spawns, but I still think a brief backstory for your character would be awesome. Just something simple like: Ex 1: You ran East from Gorka to escape the horde. Ex 2: The last thing you remember is a storm at sea before washing up on shore. Ex 3: Your boat sank just off the coast near Chernogorsk and you swam to land. Ex 4: You were heading for Svetlojarsk and got lost in the woods. The idea that everyone in Chernarus appeared with no idea where they were last is so ridiculous it makes my brain hurt. At least this way you would have some vague idea of where you are starting out, or at least a story to explain why you don't know.

That's a well thought out post Chris -- memory usage optimization is a big issue in 3d games. The cone you're describing is actually used already to determine what is rendered in realtime by the video card. It's apparent that you have some coding experience, and it seems even some game programming experience. For a 2d game witih many small textures these ideas work pretty well, but think about the 3d world and what your optimization would mean for some particular situations: Example: I'm walking out of a small city. I can only see maybe 1 building and some trees, so only those textures are loaded. I hear a zombie behind me so I spin around. As I spin around I can see dozens of building, each with many textures that need to be loaded, not to mention the zombies/players/objects/etc. This is why games like this with long view distances load a _ton_ of stuff into memory - basically anything that a player _could_ look at from a particular location is loaded before they look at it. You never know what the player will do from one moment to the next, and it takes time for those textures to load. I, for one, hate to bring up my binocs only to have to wait for the textures 600m away from me to load slowly into existence. Games like this generally reuse the same textures and models a lot to reduce memory usage. They also use multiple texture/model qualities for different ranges. There's so much optimization it's ridiculous, and it gets better all the time. Have you thought about working for a company like Bohemia? It sounds like you would enjoy this type of work. I'm actually an Electrical Engineer with a ton of 3d simulation experience, but I always liked fiddling with video game code. Interesting enough, robotics simulations and video games really aren't all that different :)

I would really love to see the military gear get spread out more... besides the fact that it gets old to have to run all the way to a military base to get good gear, it seems to me that the military would be crawling all over this place trying to contain the infection. I know they plan to give zombies loot - hopefully the military zeds will have military loot. They could also have randomly placed broken military vehicles with possible loot spawns. On that note, I think there are two good ideas they should implement: 1. Random road blocks similar to heli crash sites. They could pick a dozen or so places on the map where these could spawn and they would have decent military drops. It makes sense that the military would block major roads or even minor ones if they thought it would contain the infection to a particular town. These wouldn't even be that hard to implement.. they would just set up 2 military vehicles and a couple of tank traps in a formation and then pick a few random spawn points. 2. A quarantined city. I think it would be _phenomenal_ if the developers made one of the small towns on the map randomly be quarantined. Again it would be like the crashed helo sites, random on server reset, but there are dozens of those small cities all over the map, and it would be awesome to stumble on a town in the middle of nowhere that appears to be the starting place for the infection. I know this one would be a bit of work, but I also think it would be awesome.

tl;dr