jaws4096

I like the concept of fear or conditioning, but it may be frustrating to some people to have physical player conditions that are totally beyond their control.

Great post, slonlo. I think you're right - with good equipment, plenty of practice shots, and some competent training, fairly novice shooters can hit range targets well past 500 meters. Based on my own shooting experience, so long as you have some basic breathing and trigger control techniques down, you can just fire a group, observe where your shots land, and adjust the sights... repeating this cycle until you're consistently hitting the target. The next time you come to the range, when conditions are different, you'll have to go through the same process, though it will hopefully go faster. My question is, could the same novices that learn to hit long-range targets using the process above, also take a deer in the field past 500 meters? With a single shot (i.d. not "walking the fire" into the target)? With a rifle they'd never fired? With scavenged ammunition? On a windy day? Using an improvised rest? While starving / cold / wounded / terrified?

What percentage of high-end items do you think are hacked-in, on a typical server?

Can anyone else comment on the mechanic for not rendering players who are prone in grass or other cover? My experience has been that players render at all distances, regardless of stance or surrounding terrain.

I think that realism goes out the window when it comes to player spawns, so a text indicator is okay.

Zombo, can you go into a little more detail about how concealment works? I had no idea this mechanic existed.

Thanks for all the comments guys - I love the variety of opinions, and the fact that everyone seems to really be putting some thought behind their opinions. A lot of people are pointing out that making sniping too complex will decrease the enjoyment of the game for more casual players. I think 00dlez made this point really well when he wrote the following: Learning to use mil dots and calculate/estiamte range is about as complex as shooting should be (aside from realising that sprinting for 5 minutes then trying to fire a .50 calibur rifle, unbraced, while standing is going to be less accurate than firing that same rifle from the prone position with a bipod) Anything that 95% of players can't readily grasp during gameplay is overly complex. The specifics don't matter as much as the concepts, so long as players can understand and adjust is all that matters. GOOD: "Huh, my rounds keep falling short, I guess if I aim 2 dots higher I can hit that guy..." Player doesn't realise explicitly that each dot is used for 100m beynd the zeroed in scope range, but the concept is easily grasped, even through trial and error. BAD: "ZOMGWTFBBQQQQ! I had that bandit dead in my properly zoomed crosshairs just standing still and I missed high and right by 10 meters!?!! BS!" Player doesn't realize that he was firing across a East-West Valley and the strong wind carried his round off target and the warm air in the sunny valley kept his bullet more aloft than normal, nor would he be able to conceptualize these things easily to figure it out through reasonable trial and error. Well said, but when it comes to the physics of shooting, I always vote for modeling more complexity rather than less, whenever possible. If a player sees trees and grass blowing around wildly, he should know that long-range shots will be affected, and that hitting anything beyond a few hundred meters will be next to impossible. He'll either need to wait for better conditions, or get closer. That's realistic, and easily grasped by novice players. Things like atmospheric pressure, spin drift, and other minor influences on a bullet's flight path really only become significant factors at very long ranges, and can safely be ignored by most people. If that means that novice players can't make 1,000 meter shots, that's fine by me. Shooting someone 1,000 meters away at a practice range is really, really hard for professional snipers, who do little else but train for just such a shot, and have the very best equipment available. Dayz is a game about beat-up survivalists, near starvation, using scavenged equipment to fend off the undead monsters and unfriendly humans that are constantly hunting them. Precision marksmanship would be extremely rare in that situation. I'm not saying sniping should be impossible, but making it realistically hard would push people to behave more like they would in an actual Dayz world... and that's a good thing.

I recently learned that this is already an option for admins. A "private hive". Actions on these servers don't affect your master hive character at all, and some people seem to really enjoy playing on these servers. Hacking seems to be much less frequent, apparently.

Good point!

Several friends reading this post have privately commented that increased aim drift would be adequate for solving the "point and click" sniping issue, and that the other modifiers, like wind, are superfluous. I believe that sniping is far too easy and game-breakingly overpowered, which is why I advocate modeling most of the real-world complexity of long-range shooting, wherever possible. Players who want to shoot people at ranges of 100-200m could ignore these complexities. However, just as in real life, those who wish to take out targets beyond 400-500 meters will need to have quite a lot of knowledge and experience to be effective. Another way of putting this is that in a real-life survival situation, I wouldn't constantly be worried about someone 600 meters or more away head-shooting me as I moved around a small town looking for beans. It simply wouldn't happen with the frequency it does in Dayz, and there are good reasons for that - reasons that can be accurately modeled in the Arma II engine.

Karon and OOdlez, Thanks for the thoughtful posts! Some great points there.

Hi everyone. I updated the post to fix the screwy formatting, made a bunch of edits, and added some new content. There is also a PDF file attached for easier reading offline.

One thing I meant to include but didn't - ammunition and clip management. The Stalker Redux 2.0 magazine system is pretty much perfect. Check out a video here: . Arma 2 can't do this by default, so it will take some tinkering. But this would be great.

Kolten, those are excellent points. I agree with everything you've said and would love to see different types ammunition. The idea that someone could load their M24 with any old round and headshoot someone at 500 meters is nuts, and this is an area I didn't really explore in my suggestions above. Ballistics and bullet construction will have other important game effects aside from trajectory, as well - especially if body armor is implemented. Please criticize all you want! Thanks for contributing positively to the discussion.

Hi guys, thanks for the positive comments. I can't take credit for mushrooms / berries... that was MrTwo. Sorry about the formatting. I typed this up in Word, and even using the Word transposer included with the forum, the formatting didn't work well. I attached the original file for anyone interested.

Hi Nahaz, Would you mind posting your system specs and typical FPS in cities / woods? I noticed you're running Eyefinity resolutions on high detail, which is incredible! I have a fairly high-end system and I'm getting around 20FPS in town, with frequent (sometimes as often as every 5 seconds or so) periods of under 10 FPS. Here are my specs, for reference: Running Combined Operations from Steam, patched with Dayz Commander to latest version. Dual Radeon 7970's 3GB overclocked to max stock settings - rock solid in other games (Crysis is ~100FPS at full detail) Intel i7 Ivy Bridge 6-core processor with liquid cooling, overclocked to 4.5Ghz 32GB RAM, running a 1GB RAMDISK with all Dayz mod files Sound Blaster Fatality Sound Card Thanks, Jaws

Ruarz, this is an outstanding post. Lots of really thoughtful, excellent suggestions. My advice would be to ignore the trolls who offer nothing but criticism and have no suggestions of their own. Don't even reply to their posts - it just feeds the impression that even though they lack the ability to converse intelligently, their opinions have value... when of course, they don't. I also think that now, in alpha, is the perfect time to make detailed suggestions. I don't understand the critics who suggest waiting to offer these kinds of suggestions until we know more about the standalone version, since the standalone version will in large part be based upon suggestions in this forum! Finally, the wall of text is fine. When an poster's suggestions are this thoroughly thought-out, and explained so well, I want to have them all in one place! This post should be a sticky in my opinion. Thank you!

I'm 32, live in Atlanta, and I'm looking for a server to join that is hacker-free. I'm here to have fun, and understand that alpha builds break a lot and I'm liable to lose all my stuff on a regular basis. I generally play at random times from 8am-4pm on weekdays and on the weekends. I only have around 20 hours experience and don't currently have a well-equipped build. I have a monster system (6-core i7, dual 7970's, 32GB RAM). Please let me know if you're interested in having a new guy join, and please feel free to use this thread for other "server wanted" posts.

I've read about 20 posts related to framerate issues, and I've tried several tricks. Here's my setup: Running Combined Operations from Steam, patched with Dayz Commander to latest version. Dual Radeon 7970's 3GB overclocked to max stock settings - rock solid in other games (Crysis is ~100FPS at full detail) Intel i7 Ivy Bridge 6-core processor with liquid cooling, overclocked to 4.5Ghz 32GB RAM, running a 1GB RAMDISK with all Dayz mod files Sound Blaster Fatality Sound Card Windows 7 fully updated I was hoping that with a PC this high-end, I'd be able to run Dayz at full detail at 60FPS or better... but that isn't happening. With graphics on low / normal I'm getting 40FPS in the country and 20FPS in the city, with occasional drops below 10FPS. Here are things I've tried: I'm running my mod off of RAMDISK I set the renderahead parameters to 1 I set scenecomplexity to 100000 I disabled all AA and postprocessing Newest drivers / version for sound, video, windows, arma, and dayz mod Set 6 cores and 7 threads in the launch parameters I still find that my framerate will randomly drop to 3-10FPS. It usually stays there around 10 seconds, and then pops back up to around 50. This change happens even though I'm standing in one spot and nothing is changing. That makes me think that the slowdown is server-related, but it's happened on about a dozen servers in a row. Anyone have suggestions?

I was walking down the beach near Kamyshovo and found 6 or 8 crates. Inside, they had just about every item in the game, plus 20 clips of every type of ammo. I took a silenced M16 with a red dot sight, a silenced M9 pistol, and a 50 cal rifle. Also got a Ghili suit, NV goggles, drugs, food, etc. Later I shot down a helicopter with 5 shots from the .50 cal. So... I'm guessing the server I was on was hacked or something? Anyone else had this experience? Surely these boxes aren't actually supposed to exist.