No I don't, but I went to art college with somebody who does. Does that count? ;)

I don't visit the forum much anymore, but as a professional digital artist I thought I had to put in my 2 cents on the subject of graphics and functionality. To say visuals in games aren't important as long as there is good gameplay is to say cinematography in movies isn't important as long as there is a good story. Dumb. Visuals are a key PART of a WHOLE, and like audio or storyline or animation or any other part of the production, graphics are an essential link in a chain that if weak, will cause the chain to break. The concept of the game is solid. The ideas are revolutionary. The coding is moving along great. There may be one or two artists at your disposal, BUT... there is no competent art direction that I can see, and that will be horribly noticeable to those who will be looking for a polished, professional product when it goes to market, and which is already becoming sadly obvious in screenshots and developer comments. Lets face it, coders can't design worth shit. Artists can't code worth shit. Coders are about as visually minded as artists are syntax minded. It's hard to see the good each other does when we are so wrapped up in the benefits of our own skills but to understand the importance of our different disciplines and to work together to implement them equally is paramount to success. Right now Dean the functionality is fine, but steering a project with code just makes it look like your artists simply aren't competent enough to pass off your game as a professional looking product. Too many amateurish mistakes are being made. It isn't the font itself, or the dark underexposed levels that look like our monitors are on energy-saving, or the unrefined UI, it's the fact that having to implement these things in the first place to fit in with code limitations just make the artists look childish and incompetent. The process desperately needs some direction in there to work artists and coders together so it DOES work, BOTH WAYS. In this day and age when expensive graphics cards are pumping out gorgeous frames by the bucket load in Crysis 3, Arma 3 and Metro Last Light, it IS possible to have the full package. Even Minecraft with its Sonic Ether shaders looks amazing now and plays well. So Kind of begs the question: what are people buying top dollar graphics cards for if graphics really aren't important? In the end, compromising visuals because they don't scale well with the coding is never a reason, any more than restricting functionality in favour of pretty pictures. Make it all work together and you have a winner.

+1

Nice post, and interesting to speculate. Personally I like this kind of old avatar doll that you can dress and equip, and preferably view in real-time third person - for me this makes 3rd person view in the game unnecessary as you can see your character in full detail anyway in this inventory screen. Of course you don't get to see your female avatar's ass as you run ( which i'm sure is the ONLY reason most 3rd person players play like that anyway ;) ), but it's the best compromise in my opinion. I also love the idea by Cinnabuns about using foliage to make your own camo gear. Beans, good sir/madam.

You actually believe games are created to your personal requirements? Let the professionals work and then decide to like or hate the result. If you hate it, don't buy it, or buy it and mod it to suit yourself, but don't assume you or anyone else here is influential enough to dictate the direction to professional developers by stamping your little iddy biddy feets.

Looking AWESOM-O. Loving the sky, wrecks and building interiors. Can't wait to see what you guys are going to do with upping the Zed threat, that will be the main point of interest for me. But man am I going to have to push that gamma slider right up if it stays that dim... not a big deal for most people but when you have retinal occlusion like I have, dim screens are very hard to see, like wearing sunglasses at night.

I applaud the deeper survival aspect but feel I have to nitpick this decision also. As this is becoming as close to 'realistic' as a survival game can be, deciding that rabbits yield the most nutrition is a bad idea as any soldier / survival expert will tell you that rabbit meat offers the LEAST calories of all meat, and you can in fact starve to death eating rabbit meat. I can see a flood of armchair survivalists pouncing on this glaring error considering most of the game is based on factual accuracy...

Nice job guys, looking great - might finally login again after a few months away to try this out. It's all going in the right direction, I love the heavy survival aspect now. No more periphery dots = WIN Edit: Matt the changelog is really hard to read with my eye condition, any chance you can repost as list? nevermind I like this one best: [FIXED] - Variable spelling mistakes hsould be corrected now.

That photo was taken using the wrong shutterspeed and / or aperture setting and as a result is underexposed. Even the Histogram you are showing is a classic example of underexposed levels. A correct histogram would show peaks across the full gamut and not just towards the darker half of the scale. Basing your example on something that is stupidly wrong to begin with means your brain is invalid.

Coming along great, i'm loving the gameplay improvements. but Sorry to be negative about the lighting. I loved the stark reality of Arma 2 lighting, it was (and is) much more realistic than most other fps's, but in these latest screens the levels are turned way down towards the dark end of the scale, with such a lack of contrast it all looks far too flat now to be realistic... is this just a case of badly exported screenshots? or is it really how the lighting is rendered ingame? Mario, please sort those levels out!

I have a couple of questions for the dev team: Is the development of the standalone going to be community driven like we have seen in this update, or will it be developed purely by Rocket and Co.? If the latter, is there a danger (or benefit, depending on how you look at it) of the two versions of DayZ going in completely different directions?

It's going to release as an alpha, not a polished finished product, therefore it WILL be full of bugs. Expect it and accept it, because that is the way it is. The mod has merely become a first draft prototype and is by no means the alpha build of the standalone. Hoping for a perfect release will only damage your experience of the game, which is going to be ( in the actual words of jebus ) 'kick ass'.

oops if true. Personally, since I started playing DayZ a few months ago, i've only seen 2 hackers face to face and survived both attacks. I play only on public servers, ideally veteran, with no 3rd person / CH / nameplates - hackers don't seem to like playing in 1st person i've noticed. Don't want to be hacked? play vet. This also applies to alt-f4ers, very few on the harder servers where people tend to want to play hard and not pussy out all the time. I like the new mod features and fixes but needs much more zombie focus to move gameplay away from deathmatch. MOAR.

If DayZ turns into a Team Deathmatch I will instagib myself.

Can't wait to try the new fixes, well done community and dev team - hold that shit together and this may become the new games development standard. Long live the PC. I am. So by your logic, I get more than you do, and your argument blows out like a candle in a hurricane. Puff.

Play alone always. Camo clothing, axe, food, drink, meds and tools. Nothing else. Having a weapon is just a bullet magnet. Whenever I see somebody close up it never turns into a firefight, guess maybe because i'm unarmed, but the other night I ran into a bandit with a M4A1 Holo in the forest. We ran around a tree several times like in scooby doo, changed direction, ran around some more, changed direction, then stopped eventually and just looked at each other. No talking, no nothing. I lowered my axe and backed away slowly behind the tree again, I waited, and waited... when I went around the tree he had logged out. I had to go outside for a run to get rid of the adrenaline after that little encounter.

If people bothered to think for more than a few seconds before instantly getting defensive and yelling RACIST, they might realise the guy is talking about the juxtaposition between skins, and the false choice players have when it comes to choosing their playstyle once they cross that line into banditry, inadvertantly or not - once you become a towelhead, it is almost impossible to break away from it and become a hero as you are a constant target and must defend yourself by killing the heroes who are out for your blood, thus making you more of a bandit. Survival then becomes more important to what skin you are wearing, as it is an uphill struggle to build up humanity again, which is why there will always be more bandits in the game. Conversely, when playing as a hero, it is a piece of cake to change to a bandit if you choose to. The system is unbalanced as it stands at the moment and favours bandits. Maybe it will change, maybe it won't. Whatever it does, race is irrelevant to this thread as the OP is merely observing that choice of playstyle is a false option. Most racists are the ones who shout 'racist' the most.

There is your answer. Hackers are bored and have dispersed. When the standalone is released, they will be back in force, we will have to wait and see if there is a solid anti-hack system in place when that happens.

Nice overpaint sir.

Looking great. Starting to get a STALKER vibe from these new shots, if the standalone can capture anywhere near the amount of atmosphere and immersion as that game (which it looks very close to doing already even at this stage), it will be a PC gaming phenomenon. Volumetric lighting..? pretty please..?

Dude you don't have TIME to decide. Your actions will be decided by fight or flight instinct alone. No other game does this to a player, it's unique to DayZ. Welcome to CARDIOGAMING™

Yes that's correct, it is impossible for a helicopter to crash in an open field. Experienced pilots ALWAYS steer towards obstacles such as forests, rocks, buildings and large flocks of birds that will almost certainly kill everyone on board rather than try to ditch in the clear. Scientists can't explain it, and have even tried attaching upside-down cats to the rotor blades of hovering helicopters above open fields, but even that doesn't work - the helicopter JUST FLOATS THERE UPSIDE DOWN I for one welcome our new solar federation overlords.

Nice work team. Who are the artists? /curious

Agreed, this is a good thing imo. Although they look realistic and have that wow factor, all the cutting edge engines look too... CG and plastic. They are an Uncanny Valley version of realism. Having left Dayz for a few weeks to re-play other stuff like Skyrim, GTA 4 (Icenhanced and modded to shit etc), I kept getting this weird feeling that what I was playing was kind of ugly and superficial compared to Dayz, despite it's age. Watching a couple of sacriel vids got me playing Dayz again, which for me, looks more like reality than any other game engine around. It has a cold, hard sense of isolation and threat to it that no other engine (except STALKERs x-ray) can give. I would love to see rain affected wet surface shaders and volumetric lighting, but even without the dx10 / 11 features of X-ray it is the perfect engine for sheer atmosphere. Anything that can be added for the standalone will be a bonus, can't wait.

A good encounter. And kudos for not killing him, that woulda sucked. Reminds me of a time I was solo raiding a crash site near Stary, and as I was prone under the tail of the chopper looking through loot, I didn't hear a guy approaching. When I looked round he was standing practically on top of me. Scared the shit outta me. He was called Curt or Kurt or Curtis or something, he was German by the sound of his accent. He had a rifle and there were guns all over the ground, including a thermal - but he just stood there looking at me, asking me to kill him in a tired, resigned voice. He had a hero skin. I was too startled to react for a while, my mic was unplugged so I couldn't talk to him. He just kept begging me to kill him. After a good half minute of hesitation I obliged him. It took a while as I was holding a Bizon, but eventually he went down unconscious. I felt bad and considered reviving and healing him, but he insisted I kill him. That day I saved a haul of 3 good sniper weapons from the crash site because of that guy. I never got to thank him for not killing me when he so easily could have. I lost nearly all my humanity, but not my life. I never found out why he wanted to die. He only had 1 bizon. The new guy arrived with his own Bizon, the French guy was offering to give him water, from what I could see. It's easy to be suspicious but there ARE good people out there. Unlike hackers and bandits, they are the ones who stay in your memory because they win your respect.