Rigor Mortis (DayZ)

Helicopter Hunter, I know you're using reductio ad absurdum to make pee/poo breaks sound ridiculous since breathing is quite obviously an involuntary function of your body, but the fact is that this sim _does_ take breathing into account... if you run hard or far then your guy can't aim properly and breathes hard (making noise, giving away your position). You obviously don't need to do anything to pump your heart or force yourself to breathe, but it effects the game as it should for a realistic sim. As for bio-breaks, if you are in a combat environment, you are going to have to pee and/or poo sometimes and that action puts you in a very precarious situation. Anyone who was in the Army or Marines will happily tell you that you need to empty your tank _before_ you get into the thick of battle... one of the not-so-publicized side effects of getting shot and/or shot at is shitting yourself. Just think about this from this game's standpoint... say you enter a city nice and quiet, trying to avoid pissing off every zombie for miles, and realize about 5 minutes into your hospital raid mission that you need to take a leak. What do you do? Most likely you're going to have to get a friend to cover you while you find a good spot to relieve yourself (somewhere that won't make very loud spattering sounds like concrete will). Even worse would be if you let your poo situation get too far advanced and end up needed to take a combat dump... then you're in real trouble. A lot of people want to over-complicate this mechanic, but I would like to recommend a simple system. Your pee/poo meters would fill slowly, faster the more you eat, and once they reach the halfway full mark you can void your waste. If you are running long distances or exerting yourself a lot, your water gets burned through sweat so your pee would fill slower, and eating certain things might delay or hasten the requirement for a bowel movement. If you happen to let things get too far advanced, your AI character will take over for you and take a leak or dump right where he is, no matter what's going on around him.... if you gotta go, you gotta go! Also, for everyone that recommends drinking their own urine... yes, you CAN do this, urine is sterile, but it will NOT save your life in a survival situation. Here's a nice link for you to read on the matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urophagia#Sodium_content_and_dehydration and if the wiki isn't a good enough source for you, try the Army field manual: http://www.ar15.com/content/manuals/FM21-76_SurvivalManual.pdf Page 176.

I was a radio repair specialist for the Air Force for many years working on tactical ground and ground-to-air radio systems and I completely agree that DayZ needs radios, but I would want them to be very simplified for a few reasons. 1) Radio Frequency propagation theory is incredibly complex and I wouldn't want the game engine trying to figure out if and/or how far you could transmit a radio signal. 2) Radios can operate an a nearly infinite number of frequencies, so finding someone else on a channel would be very unlikely unless you knew the emergency channels and they were using them. 3) Not all radios can talk to one another - they use different types of modulation, different bands, and some even use repeaters, computers, or satellites to extend their range. My suggestion for introducing radios to DayZ would be very, very simple. When you pick up a radio, it would enable a new text and voice chat channel called "Radio channel" that would allow you to talk to anyone else on the map, no matter how far they are, as long as they have a radio also. This would build on the existing "direct chat" function, and could eliminate the need for people to run teamspeak, ventrilo, or some other voice chat program in conjunction with this game. If the server can handle additional voice channels it would be nice to have several voice channels available such as 'Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta' so people can avoid talking over one another. This would even add a new element to PvP since bandits could listen in on the radios and find out what people are doing from their radio chatter. I guess if the devs wanted to get really in depth, they could add an 'encryption' option so several people could encrypt their radios and only talk to one another with no worries of being listened to. Radios should have a good chance of spawning on the air fields, in/near broken military vehicles, and in the hospitals. They could also have a small chance to spawn in other locations, but these are where I figured they were most likely to show up (at least the type you could carry on you).

I've gotta post my smell-bar idea here too... I just love it so much. I definitely think smelling bad should agro zoms... I mean, a quote directly from the dayzmod.com site reads "These once human creatures will act and behave as if they have a heighten[ed] sense of hearing and smell but less sight." I also think that a bar of icons at the bottom of the screen showing what you can smell currently would be awesome. As a few examples: Running through the woods you have a strong 'pine' icon and suddenly get a weak 'rotting meat' icon... looks like zombies or even a dead player are nearby. As it gets stronger you know you're getting closer to the source. You could also run through a cloud of BO (yeah, funny, but plausible) and know that someone is out here with you. What about smelling gasoline near Jerry cans? I don't think you need to complicate this with wind direction or anything... just have a range for each smell (i.e. a person leaves a trail of BO 50m behind them) and zombies produce a rotting meat smell in a radius (perhaps 100m or 200m? Dead things STINK!). Anyways, just thought I'd share.

I like the idea of zombies coming to eat a fresh corpse, assuming it wasn't killed by zombies. If it was, I would expect it to reanimate (pref. with some small percentage of the original gear) and attack anyone who comes to loot (or at least wander the area for a while). I _really_ like the idea of smells being incorporated, but I think most ppl don't give that idea the credit it deserves. I mentioned in another post the idea for a 'smell bar' at the bottom of the screen. Imagine the scenario: You are running through the woods and your scent meter just has a pine tree indicator in it, fairly solid (i.e. strong) and suddenly you notice a second icon appear in the smell bar, faint but visible. Just as your guy in game would notice a new smell, you can glance down and see that you can now smell rotting meat. Is that a rotting player corpse or a group of zombies nearby? What about if you're running and you see the BO symbol appear? Kind of humorous, but an obvious indicator that a very alive and active player is nearby. You could also smell propane/gasoline when near fuel tanks.... I can think of dozens of applications of this. I know this game isn't real life, but it's a sim and it seems to me that to simulate survival in this scenario (zombie apocalypse with bandits) a sense of smell would help more than ppl think... and since they're making this game into a stand alone, I think this would be a great feature to include.

In fact I do... I am a programmer and have done my fair share of 3d rendering, not to mention game design. If you look in my original post you will see "obviously not all at once since the game can't handle 20,000 instances of zombie models" Perhaps I wasn't clear... I meant that the town would have a population of 1 million, but they would not all exist at the same time in game... if you killed or led away 10, then the population would _permanently_ decrease by that amount. Eventually you could get a town to zero and it would be empty. Is that less ridiculous to you?

I really hope that the stand-alone game really improves the zombie spawns. I like that zombies seem to come out of the woodwork in a town, but having them spawn magically right in front of you, especially inside buildings, is ridiculous. I would personally like to see a system where the number of zombies in/around an area is tracked by the server and realistically updates... for example, if a town had a human population of 20,000, then it would have 20,000 zombies that could spawn (obviously not all at once since the game can't handle 20,000 instances of zombie models). If 10 agro on someone and follow them out of town, then those 10 should be dropped off the town's population and added to that section of forest's spawn population. Also, if someone gets in a very loud gun battle at, say, the hospital, then zombies from all over the town would congregate to the hospital and leave other areas more sparsely populated. From the game developer standpoint I think this would be fairly easily done with a map overlay using grayscales for zombie population. As zombies move from one area to another, the old area's byte of grayscale is decreased by one shade and the next area is increased a shade, showing that zombies moved... I could explain in more detail if anyone cares lol. Over time the zombie population would decrease, but also it would spread out a bit. I think it would be interesting to see how the population centers spread out. Thinking of this, you could even have a new item that lets you get a satellite image of the area that shows where the zombies are most heavily populated a that moment. btw, 20k would be a small town, probably 1mil for a huge place like cherno or elektro. I also think there should be roving bands of zombies, wandering through the woods looking for food, but that's a different post.

I completely agree with Cysquatch. Becoming a zombie that you control is silly and against everything we know about zombies...I mean, the whole point is that they can no longer control themselves and must sate their hunger via their basest instincts (ie by grabbing nearby tasty people and munching on them). Not to mention that this game is really about survival. If you want a zombie vs human pvp, play left 4 dead.

How about this: if you are killed by zombies then you reanimate and roam that area as a Walker for a while with a percentage of your gear still on you. This would avoid players looting their own bodies, but it would allow others to kill a freshly animated player and take their stuff, which I think is rather realistic.

I think the 'smell meter' is a brilliant idea, and honestly I think it's necessary for a zombie survival game. @Terrorviktor, dogs don't follow the scent of blood on you, they follow the trail of skin cells and hair you slough off as you move, and you can't wash off a smell to avoid blood hounds. Check out the Mythbuster episode on it -- I found it very interesting. As for zombies, I think they should be able to smell people who are nearby, even if they have washed recently. Although we can't smell eachother on a normal basis, humans _do_ have a smell and we would smell quite different from rotting corpses. They say that zombies have reduced eyesight but improved sense of smell and hearing... I for one would like to see that reflected in DayZ. As for PvP, I have a system that would be pretty easy to implement and would add a new dimension to the game. You could have a bar at the bottom of the screen with little pictographs of what you can currently smell... For example, as you run through the forest, your smell bar shows an icon of a pine tree, but suddenly another item flashes on there of a zombie (rotting flesh). Obviously your character could smell if a zombie was nearby (or even a dead player would make the same smell). This could be an early warning system for zombies and would add a bit of realism. Ideas for what the smell bar could possibly show: - Exhaust fumes - Gasoline - Propane/Butane - Zombies and/or rotting flesh - Body Odor - people who have been out too long without washing - Blood - Camp Fire (even recently put out fires smell) - Trees (cedar/pine) I'm sure others could come up with more, but I'm just thinking this could add to the game.