VRocker

Now my server is up (UK300) i thought its best to start a topic to report the cheaters from it. I am updating the bans, createvehicle and scripts.txt on a dialy basis to try and keep the server cheat free :) Just had our first cheater caught by battleye for a script restriction. His name was Frost, the funny thing was me and the other 2 admins almost ran him over in our V3S so i guess he tried to hide. Heres the log: Timestamps are in GMT-8. I will be modifying this topic as cheaters get caught :)

Silly question but how would i submit them to there? Would i need to create my own branch which somebody would then merge into the master? I'm not a big fan of git since its a bit too confusing... more of an subversion guy myself. I'm probably overlooking something simple, i always tend to overcomplicate things :(

So i noticed today that my server shows it has a ping of 2500 in the server list instead of its actual ping. I have looked around and seems it can be caused by not having the correct ports open in the firewall. Which ports should i open? My server runs on port 9001 and i have opened 9001, 9002, 9003, 9004 and unblocked ICMP. Netstat shows the server is only listening on ports 9001 and 9003 as well as a battleye port which tends to change every time it starts. If anybody wants to see if they're getting the same issue look for UK300 in the list.

Ah i wondered why my signature from raptr doesn't work :( Any chance of whitelisting sites such as raptr and xfire for some nice gamer sigs? :) Also whitelisting gametracker.com would be nice for some sigs about server statuses :)

So... yesterday i finally set up my server on the hive and spent about 8 hours nolifing it until i went to bed. Me and a few friends found a Ural Civilian, a motorbike, and a bus plus a load of equipment so we were happy. The server is set to restart every day at 8am GMT so it had restarted since we last played, i have just joined it though and the Ural Civilian has gone and a bicycle has been put in its place! The motorbike hasn't been touched and i assume the bus hasn't either (crashed it near camp without a wheel). There has been a few players join since we quit so i'm thinking, is a cheater trolling us? Did they steal our truck and replace it or is it just a bug on the hive? I don't think anybody would stumble across our camp since its a long way from any town and very well hidden so unless you know where it is, you'd have to locate the vehicles using a cheat and find it that way. Me and my friends are a bit pissed since that truck was pretty much fully loaded with some decent stuff, now we need to go find it all again :(

So i had a deep look into this and have figured it out, don't know if anybody else has but thought i'd mention it incase the devs are scratching their heads why the bug is random (works on some servers and not others) Its all down to the ObjectID which is obtained from the Hive. The ObjectID is a unique identifier for the object and unique to the hive and server (i'm assuming). The problem is primarily down to the ARMA2 scripting system, since it handles all numbers as floating point numbers. If you're a programmer you will know floats are numbers which have a decimal point (such as 1.234). Now floats can be useful in some situations but they have a downside, if you try to put a large whole number (known as an integer) into a float, such as the number 1234567 then it will convert it to a float but not as you'd expect. Instead of becoming 1234567.0 it will be something like 1.23456e7 or similar. Now this is where the problem lies, the DayZ hive contains millions of objects for all the servers connected to it, so that unique object ID can be over 2 million depending on the server. When the DayZ server asks the hive for a list of objects it gets passed an ID in number form, which the script then treats as a float and does that funky conversion on it. The result? the script thinks object 2017623 actually has the is 2.01762e3. Now the script uses this ID to tell the hive what object has been changed when you fix/move/refuel/add items so the hive can update its database, so when this ID is incorrect it can't update the right entry in the hive. The problem is the dll doesn't translate this float back into a usable integer, even if it did it wouldn't get the right ID due to rounding errors. Fortunately its a simple fix (if you have the source the hive dll *looks at the devs*), the object ID would just need to be sent to the script as a string. I also wish to point out that this is different from the inventory bug since that's an error in the script as there's an if checking a number against a string as somebody else has posted. Hope this helps the devs out and sorry if i ramble/dont make much sense, its 3am and i've been playing DayZ for 6 hours straight :P

K so it seems it wasn't a cheater. One of my friends told me we had a bicycle stored at camp anyway so it was just the ural that vanish (not transformed). This lead us to another discovery though, that if a vehicle isn't fully repaired then its position, inventory and repair state gets reset on server restart. Is this known/supposed to be like that? Rather annoying that the engine was damaged but everything else was fine but it respawned in its original position :(

Good to see some feedback on why its been taking a while :) I'm one of the lucky ones that isn't paying for my server (using spare processing power and network bandwidth on a friends server) but if i was paying monthly for a host i would be pissed that it takes 2 weeks to get approval. At least with this explanation people should be happier :) We do understand that you all have other things to do an cant dedicate as much time as you'd want to approving servers but couldn't you take on a few more people that have a lot of time on their hands? Personally i'd be happy to help out in any way and i'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way, although finding trusty people that would approve servers properly would be the main issue i guess, since you wouldn't want somebody approving a dodgy home connecting in the middle of nowhere :P Looking forward to being hived by next week anyway :)

A 'tracking dart' could be useful imo. Could make it like the tracer dart from BF:BC2 which could make things very interesting since you could either tag a player and look for the big flashing beacon while you follow him back to camp or you could be a tit and put one on your friend so everybody can see him :P (used to do this in BF:BC2 all the time :D) It would pretty much be the same as putting a road flare in somebodies pocket and would be quite fun. Although if it was made so the tagged player could see it (which he really should do) then it would be useless when trying to follow somebody back to camp so it'd be nice to have an IR version of the dart too :) I think a version where you'd be able to track them on your map (such as a GPS tracker) would ruin the game, at least if it was a visual one then you'd have to keep line of sight and the tagged player would be able to hide to some extent, maybe by diving in a dense forest or a closed off warehouse.

I would love a buddy system and steam integration into the standalone, but some of your ideas are a tad flawed. Firstly, spawning on buddies would ruin the game. Half the fun is spawning around nobody else and having to fend for yourself until a friend comes to the rescue. I would suggest that with a buddy system that you spawn in the same area as your friend, such as the same town or a town away. This way it fits it with the game and you don't have to travel across half the map to find your friend. Could do a few things with a buddy system, such as 'friend-only chat' with both voice and text, which would be useful but might not fit in with the 'realism' the game tries to project. Could also have identifiable markers on the player skins to identify friends, such as a red armband. This would be a nice way of seeing if the guy running towards you is your friend without trying to find his nametag on regular servers without breaking the game mechanics like some other suggestions of making them glow or marking them on the map would. Speaking of maps, you could also add the ability to mark things on the map which are only shared with your friends, such as which supermarket to loot. This would be very useful So yeah, friend system - yes please :)

Unfortunately you cannot run a native linux server at this time without using WINE (which imo, sucks) I posted a thread about my investigation on why there cannot be one yet here http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/74723-linux-server/#entry710312, as you can see its the ARMA2 servers fault for not allowing extensions yet. We should all gang up and give the arma2 devs a giant poke to implement them :)

I am also still awaiting my Instance ID. I applied for one on the 14th and have heard nothing since. I too was looking forward to running my server, currently i've resorted to running it in a 'private' mode using some files I found online, keeps me and a few of us happy until we're hived :) Wish whoever deals with approvals would speed up though :(

So it seems that the linux arma2 server doesn't load .so files :( After some investigation i found the callExtension function in the script files does nothing. I'm assuming the module load stuff is wrapped in #ifdef _WIN32 tags but with no alternative for linux. If it wasnt for the dll and lack of loading for .so DayZ would work fine on linux it seems, as it does everything it should until it needs data from the hive. I think its time for the DayZ team to slap the ARMA2 dev team to add extensions to linux! The calls required are already half there such as dlopen, dlsym etc as its used in battleye so it shouldn't be too hard to plonk in the script stuff :)

I was thinking more without using WINE since its not an ideal solution. I'm currently working on something to see if dayz servers will run on linux with a .so that mimics the hiveext.dll to see if it will work. I will let you know my findings :)