Rigor Mortis (DayZ)

One *hit* from a high velocity bullet in most modern plates will compromise the plate's structural integrity and any successive rounds will go straight through. The good part about plates is that they will stop pretty much anything (even multiple hits from slower rounds) with the wearer sustaining little to no injury. Sorry that I was only thinking of armor plates when I wrote the first post - let me address Kevlar now. A Kevlar vest will stop almost all subsonic rounds (plus supersonic .22 LR rounds), but the wearer would likely sustain serious internal injuries from each hit. The damage sustained would be very comparable to getting hit hard with a hammer at the site of impact. Supersonic rounds go right through Kevlar as though it weren't there. This is why US military members wear armor plates over vital regions while in Iraq/Afghanistan.

I like the idea of having armor available, but it should be realistic armor, not video game armor. I'm sure there will be no end of people who tell me I'm wrong, but let's just say I have first hand experience with military body armor. Most armor is designed to stop center of mass body shots from small non-armor piercing rounds. The best armor the military uses has plates on the front, in the back, and on both sides, which is pretty good, but they are far from perfect. If you get hit somewhere that doesn't have a plate, then it's basically like you aren't wearing armor. For the sake of simplicity for the game, body armor would need armor plate 'slots' for the front, back, and sides (depending on the type of armor, of course), and the plates could only take a single direct hit before being ruined by any larger rifle rounds -- they could take a few hits from handguns and a lot of .22 LR.

I like the idea of edible plants growing wild in DayZ, but I think there's a ton of stuff the developers need to worry about before this.

If I could move this to 'This isn't the game for you' and lock it I would...

Sorry I misunderstood your original post. As for improving shooting, I don't think I made any such recommendation. The ability to aim and fire would not change - reloading rate, running stamina, food requirements would all improve. It doesn't take any special skills to wait for a person and shoot them when you see them. All I am working on doing is giving people more reason to stay alive and avoid risking their lives. Some people will see this as more reason to be bandits, but I think it will also encourage survivalists.

Sounds to me like you have no interest in playing a survival game and lots of interest in testing your deathmatch skills. My goal in suggesting skills that improve over time is to add value to your character's life so you are less likely to do unrealistic/suicidal crap. I know this will be very unpopular with the KoS community... but then, is this game really made for them?

I have to agree that walls would be best, but what community has walls strong enough to hold off thousands of infected? Also, even if you had decent walls, building 'up' would add another layer of protection. https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7120/7497569180_23da8acb77_z.jpg

I started another post for this but now I realize I shouldn't have (sorry, community). I think the best place to implement these ideas is in the animation timings for the game. When I first spawn, my character is basically a worthless moron. We assume that he's never shot a gun, run a marathon, or had to survive at all. Running -- people run a LOT in DayZ, as we all know, but real people couldn't keep up that pace for that time. I know other threads discuss the stamina issue, but what about getting better at running? Every day you should get stronger, faster, and have more stamina assuming you are eating/drinking and not injured. Shooting -- we can't really make shooting any easier/harder because of how the game works... but we can change how fast a character can reload. We can change how fast a character can bring a weapon up from 'ready' to 'looking down the sights.' Practice should make these animations faster. And YES, even if someone just keeps pressing their right mouse button to bring their weapon up/down, it should improve!! That's called "practice" and it's how people really get better at that type of thing. Same for reloading... yanking your mag and throwing it back in your weapon is a great way to get better at it. Survival -- If I were to stop eating today, my stomach would be quite angry by tonight and pissed by tomorrow... but if I were to change my habits to eat once every day or two then my body would get used to it. Point is that time between getting hungry could be changed by waiting until you're very hungry and then eating, training yourself to go without food for when you really need to. I don't think characters should be able to change how long it takes to starve, but they should be able to change how long it takes to start to feel the negative effects (slowing down, blurred vision, etc) I could probably keep going all day on this lol.

Yes to storms, no to farming. I would _love_ to see seasons in the game... of course, right now I'd love it if the sun wasn't in the South...

I have read a couple of other threads on similar topics, but none that are the same... sorry if I'm reposting old ideas. I think a benefit of survival should be improved skills - specifically how long it takes you to pull off certain things. For example: when you spawn, your character can reload and fire a weapon, but they are a bit slow at taking aim (right click animation is slower) and their reloading is clunky (reload animation is slow). The more they fire their weapon and reload their weapon, the faster they get at it. The game could keep track of a particular player's 'skill' with different actions and apply that to how fast they can do those actions. This would be realistic in that people get better at things they do repeatedly, and it would improve the game by giving people more reasons to survive. ----- On a different but rather similar topic, I think it could be fun for people to start with a bit of a backstory. Not a long one or anything, but something simple when you first spawn such as "You were a mechanic in Svetlojarsk before the infection and have been hiding out on a boat just off the coast. Your boat was sunk and all you could salvage was a flashlight and a map of the area (or whatever your character starts with). This would have 2 benefits - first, you would know where you started... it's so ridiculous that you start in this game with absolutely no idea where you are. What human being doesn't at least know the nearest large city?! Second, it would give you a starting skillset. If, for example, an accountant wanted to get a car working, they would have to find someone else with mechanical knowledge - increasing player interactions. I know the biggest argument to this is that ppl would suicide until they had the starting character they wanted... to that I'd say there shouldn't be one character that is really 'better' than another... they should each have starting skills that are useful and ones that are only useful if they team up with others. I'm sure a balance could be found.

I think there should be a couple of ways to switch weapons, for example, if I'm in a firefight, I don't want to calmly put my rifle on my back when I run out of ammo and draw my pistol afterwards... I want to drop my empty weapon and rip that pisol out of the holster. In a real firefight I can switch weapons in less than a second... no reason the game should be any different. I think the solution would be to give a modifier to a weapon switch - you can hold shift and press a number to instant switch, dropping whatever is in your hands, or you can just press hte number like normal to do a normal switch. Of course the key would be programmable.

I'd love to see a modifiable terrain/destructible environment system on here, but I know it's unlikely because of the engine limitations. Damnyourdeadman: "If the world tommorow was to be filled by infected,the best shelter for humans would be underground." I have to disagree with Damnyourdeadman about underground being the best place for humans to go in a zombie apocalypse. It takes a lot of resources to dig tunnels, not to mention that the process is very dangerous... and once you have these tunnels and you seal yourselves in to keep out billions of zombies, what then? Where do you grow food, get energy etc? I think the best way to build would be to build 'up.' You can put buildings on pillars so the zombies can't get inside... in fact, you could build whole cities just 20 feet above the ground - no walls necessary and cleaning up even large hordes could be made easy by pits to trap/burn hundreds or thousands at a time. I even have designs somewhere for a 'zombie moat' that would allow a small city to have a defensive pit around the whole thing and keep a couple of exit/entrance bridges. Of course the moat/pit idea only works for smaller hordes... if the population of Los Angeles were to come to that small town it would probably get erased... but not the pillar town :) Of course, this hinges on zombies being pretty dumb and not magical like the movie 'World War Z' zombies.

I completely disagree with those that think you wouldn't know how you died... but I also don't want to know _who_ killed me or _where_ they were hiding since that's incredibly unrealistic. I just want to know _how_ I died. A simple text message is more than enough for this. You exsanguinated. You starved to death. You died of dehydration. You drowned. You burned to death. You died of severe head trauma. You died of severe chest trauma. You died from an untreated infection. None of these tells you exactly what happened, but it does tell you your method of death... so if you're walking along and you die for seemingly no reason, but it says you 'died of severe head trauma' you can assume you got shot or otherwise attacked. If it says you 'starved to death' but you know your food indicator was on 'energized' and you were eating regularly then you might want to report the bug.

I have to agree that there is too much food in the game, and adding hunting will add even more, but I also think there is a bigger problem: people starve to death FAR TOO FAST!!!! A healthy person can live for a month on water alone, and I'm not even using the longest cases as an example here. It's ridiculous that I can starve to death in less than a day on this 'realistic survival' game. Just saying that going from a full stomach to starving from 30 minutes of running is ridiculous. Make food harder to find, but also implement a weight system so you lose weight before you die... heck, people could get all fat and funny looking if they ate too much, but we all know that shouldn't happen in the zombie apocalypse.

I heartily agree that a sense of smell would be a great addition to the game, and I think implementation wouldn't be all that hard. I'm a programmer and I deal with 3d simulations all the time in both my work and my hobbies. A 'scent pool' object could be created for everything that has a strong scent. These pools would be objects with a radius, smell type, and lifetime but no physical model in the game world. The wind/rain could blow them around and even reduce their lifetime. New scent pools are generated when an object crosses out of its previously generated scent pool. The basic idea works in 2 ways - for stationary objects that smell, the wind would push the scent pool off of them creating a trail of scent pools (every time one leaves the object, a new one spawns). For moving objects, as the object moves out of the last spawned pool, it generates a new one. For the player's HUD, a bar at the bottom could have icons to indicate what they can currently smell (ie which scent pools they are currently standing in). As the smell gets stronger, the icon can either get brighter, change color, or change order (far left is smelliest thing nearby). For example, you might smell pine needles, a grass fire, and rotting flesh. This way, if you can smell rotting flesh and you notice your icon is indicating the smell is getting stronger, it means you are getting closer b/c you have moved to a 'younger' scent pool (one that has not decayed as much) and thus are likely approaching something rotting... maybe a zombie, maybe a dead person or animal, who knows?

I know you jest, but it annoys the hell out of me that plants aren't edible in this game... yes, many plants are poisonous, but people can (and have) survived on gathering fruits and vegetables. In a real survival situation, f it means the choice between being poisoned and starving to death, I'd probably start tasting everything around me. Also, why can't you eat bugs or fish? I'm guessing Rocket isn't much of a survivalist... or maybe he is and it's just hard to make a mod that does all this stuff. Hopefully the stand alone game will have a lot more survival stuff and fix a lot of the glaring bugs in the mod.

You obviously have never fired an M16 or M16 derivative rifle... if you don't clean them _thoroughly_ and _often_ they jam like crazy. Many MANY soldiers died because of this rifle's tendency to jam.

Personally, I think they shouldn't make the zombies harder to kill, but they should make it so they can grab or at least hit you when they catch up to you as you run... it's ridiculous that they sprint up to you, then stand there and do nothing, then sprint again. I would think a real zombie would tackle you to the ground once it caught you and do it's best to rip you limb from limb. Adding this one function would drastically change how people just run through towns not even worried about the 20 zombies chasing them.

I'm just curious what you mean by 'weapon degradation'? I hope you aren't telling me that you want rifles to stop functioning after X number of shots? I'm actually a little annoyed that _hatchets_ have a use limit... weapons definitely should not have limits in that sense. I would, however, like to see a system where your weapon could jam after being used without cleaning for a certain number of shots. This could add another element to the sim that is very real and necessary for those that use firearms regularly in the zombie apocalypse.

I completely agree and hope they add this functionality. I would also like to see them add boxes of ammo to the game - you could carry 50 or 100 rounds in 1 slot of your inventory by having a box of ammo, but you would have to add that ammo to a magazine to use it in your weapon which would take time and couldn't be done (easily) during combat. I know right now someone could carry 1000+ rounds with my suggestion, but if they ever add endurance/encumbrance to the game then a box of ammo would be quite heavy (although small) so no one could carry around that much ammo.

I also think it would be pretty cool to be able to use a blood bag as a zombie magnet... just throw it hard and it'll splatter somewhere, attracting the horde :D

I've definitely thought that adding a splint to the game would be fantastic... and this is a great method for doing it. I would say it should allow you to walk normally, but completely restrict running. A splint is a perfectly valid treatment for a broken bone and would work perfectly until you could get better treatment (i.e. morphine as per the game mechanic). At least you wouldn't have to crawl to the nearest town hospital to find morphine.

ABSOLUTELY. Were I to get shot, I would have no other interest than to find the source of the bullet so I don't die from a second shot. How do __I__ know which direction __I__ got shot from? Please tell me you're joking? A bullet will impart a lot of energy to you, which will result in a change of momentum - i.e. you will feel yourself move in the direction the bullet was travelling. I'm not 100% sure what the OP had in mind, but I can tell you from personal experience that there is more than just the sound of the gun firing to determine when you are being shot at. When a bullet comes close to you, you can _feel_ the shockwave from it. When a bullet hits the ground near you, you can _feel_ the thud of it hitting. I have been fortunate enough to never take a bullet in the line of duty, so I can't tell you with 100% certainty that you can pinpoint where a bullet comes from, but I imagine you could get a pretty good idea from what I mentioned above. I can, however, tell you that I can tell where a bullet shot at me comes from as long as it comes within a few feet of hitting me. I would recommend adding an instantaneous flash of red from the direction you took damage right when you take the damage... that way players have to be paying attention to catch the direction, and it's possible they spin around and become confused because they were moving right after the shot.

I completely agree, with everything above. I also think you should be able to stuff a second (empty) backpack into yours... it's just silly that you can't roll up a small backpack and jam it into an alice pack. On that same note, I think it would be nifty to be able to lose control of your primary weapon and be able to carry a backpack in one hand, basically a temporary condition so you could move a backpack without trading them, or so you can grab one to give to your gearless friend hiding in the bushes.

Then how do you suggest we make shooting require skill? If your character can hold a rifle dead steady on a target 1500m for long periods of time, you're going to be able to kill that target given a little practice with the rifle. I think a lot of people playing DayZ have never fired a real weapon and don't realize that hitting a stationary target is much more difficult than simple point and click. I'd love if you could modify a Wii controller with iron sights and use that to shoot in games... but that's definitely not something that will make it into this one :D I absolutely love the originals post - you can have my beans!