seepra

I think humanity would only be reduced by actions that cause yourself to get jaded over time, or rewarded that get you closer to a personal revelation about moral and ethics, to put it in big words. For instance running a red light might increase your humanity if you feel ashamed afterwards that you were stupid enough to do it in the rush hour in a situation you damn well knew could cause danger. Your personal cautiousness and matureness towards small decisions would rise, changing your perspective bit by bit, which would in the long run sum up as a good increase in humanity. Likewise, while doing warez might not hurt anyone visibly, if it changed your mentality on stealing over some far-fetched brain gymnastics and it was caused by your tendency to justify small illegalities like doing warez to yourself quietly, you'd lose a small amount of humanity over time. What I'm trying to say is that humanity would not as much be your history typed out like a log with pluses and minuses, but the sum what you currently are as a person, and how you'd react to different situations. I don't think trolls will be that accurate on varying distances, or defenders so prone to return fire if you're uncovered and can run (unless they fart a rainbow and go 'YAY RESPONSIBILITY-FREE KILL'). The net result is a very little quantity of milliTrolls. Also to counter that, I proposed that maybe the humanity penalty should just be reduced instead of removed, otherwise everyone would look like saints in a few weeks of playtime. Sorry for the OT

Common problem with neutral players who engage hostile players (who first fired at you, but missed a shot) and kill them. You didn't start the fight, but you get a +1 murder and lose a ton of humanity. Not cool! My solution is based on the assumption DayZ and ArmA II engine uses hitboxes for damage modeling. If Rocket and the boys customized the player models to include a new big 3x3x3 meter hitbox originating from the center of the player model that would take 0 damage, but register as a player hit in the system, you would essentially have received fire from getting a bullet in your general direction. This would allow a player to engage hostile targets, with system acknowledging the hostile party "started it", and as such are lesser penalty for the defender to kill. (I personally shoot very little at other players, but I'm under the impression that shooting at players who hit you first doesn't cause a humanity penalty. If it does, I think it should do so less, so that basically pacifist players have over time the most humanity by average, then neutral self-defenders, then opportunists, and bandits obviously would have the least humanity) I don't know would it be possible to make bullets pass through the hitbox too, or would the hitbox swallow them, causing less ricochets and reduced realism, but of course that might be a problem with the proposed solution.

Well that's your personal issue then, AFAIK humanity is going to stay even though it'll be improved in longer run, says Rocket. Thanks for the bumps though!

I understand your mentality, but it completely ignores the built-in mechanic which currently exists: ie: killing bandits doesn't reduce humanity, or people who have HIT you (ie. shot at you, but the game doesn't register and realize attempted assaults if they don't hit you, and you obviously don't want to take a hit before you kill them just to make it a just murder), and that's the issue this hitbox modification is trying to counter. What you're proposing is a change in the existing system, I'm just looking to improve it and make function "properly", the way I'm imagining the team actually meant it to work. In real life where people are stuck to one server and one hive 24/7 with forced direct chat and no forums or clans or skype to fragment the intel, rumors about other characters spread a lot more efficiently. To compensate for this on multiple servers, separate hives and people who don't communicate in-game or in forums at all that all make information about player's deeds a lot less coherent, humanity is an excellent idea. As such, a kill in "self defense" should not lower your humanity as much as a murder does, or at all. I don't look to change that because I think it works, just want to make it work in a more common sense way when it comes to counting humanity. I don't look to add or take anything away from the current thing on top of that.

Is that present in Battlefield 3 multiplayer? I never tried it. Sounds like a good mechanism, although I'm sure many will disagree since it adds a factor into firefights that is debatable (ie. "hurr durr I wouldn't be scared at all if someone shot at me my aim would be perfect with a 360 noscope bitch"). What I'm proposing here, though, is the internal mechanic of the game which would then trigger whatever it triggers, and my initial proposition would just be to fix the issue concerning ambush-and-return-fire type situations which give the defending player an unjust murder. Anything else is extra, I'd just want this thing sorted, and with my limited knowledge adding one extra hitbox would sound like an easy and efficient solution.

Great idea Enforcer! The only problem with yours is, that if you open fire towards Z's or an animal, and someone decides to shoot you because of that, it would count as a legit kill, not a murder. That would be abused by snipers a lot. But the idea of making a hitbox-shooter free-to-kill for anyone would be a great addition and seems logical! On a further notice, the execution of my idea requires no additional coding, only an extra hitbox with no damage multiplier or effect, so I would assume mine would be simpler if we get down to detail :P They could have their completely own area-of-effect in addition to real damage, that would reach all players within a bit further distance than damage. That would mean that any grenade thrown anywhere towards a player would be considered a hostile attempt, same goes for triggered satchel charges. I'm not completely sure of the logistics of this one because I don't think the grenades function with the same ballistics as bullets, but I'm sure it could be implemented, just needs a bit more effort. (Or just make throwing grenades always mark players as "free-to-kill", but again I bet it would be abused, but no real reason to throw grenades otherwise in this game than attacking so might be a moot point, haha)

Yes you can, but unfortunately both AMD desktop and mobile processors have been for generations slower than Intel, clock-for-clock. They're viable options yes, I just had difficulty finding the recent A8 and A6-series quadcore APUs that would NOT rely solely on the APU for graphics (besides the CPU clock speeds are very slow and under the 2GHz mark, making CPU intensive games crawl). If you can find one with a decent separate mobile GPU, then of course, especially if it's for a good price, but as far as CPU "torque" goes, i5 and i7 are faster, and ArmA II is a very CPU intensive engine, and as such I'm going to recommend it (we can start flinging benchmark links at each other if you'd like). And hey, my desktop has an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T, overclocks like a champ and ain't gonna bottleneck in a good while, yet I would not get myself an AMD CPU laptop for gaming, unless it was considerably cheaper than an Intel/AMD or Intel/NVIDIA solution. (Furthermore, I have grown a strong distaste towards AMD for their latest fuckup called Bulldozer/FX-series. However they RnD'd a faster clockspeed octocore in the 2012 with less performance than a 2008 quadcore, I don't know. I sure as hell don't feel like finding out either.) Size matters jack, it's the resolution which can be set to anything other than the actual physical resolution of the screen. Seeing that the E-450 barely runs Source games at high@1920x1080, I would not hold my breath to hear the settings she's running the games at. I tend to be an asswipe about hardware admittedly, but I'm being conservative because I don't want a fellow gamer to end up with a barely-running game, it's better to actually invest some to be able to play most games for a while. And I always direct people to notebookcheck and review sites to make their own minds about performance/price, in the end, not according to my own opinions.

Holy fuck how immature and ungrateful some people are.

While the i3 CPU would run the game okay, your laptop needs a mobile GPU, the CPU/mainboard integrated HD4000 won't do it. From NVIDIA Geforce-series, GTS 360M, GT 450M, 550M, 630M 640M, 650M, GTX 460M, 560M, 660M and the such will run it acceptably with varying settings. The mobile Radeon naming scheme isn't as simple and I haven't looked into them, but parallel within 10% of 3D Mark Vantage performance to GT 650M's performance would be the Radeon HD 6850M, 6870M, 6720G2, 6755G2, 6740G2, 7730M, 7770M... The older Radeon HD5000/6000 and Geforce 400/500 series might be found on discount laptops, but some of the 600-series are quite affordable too.. It's going to run you some $700-900 anyway, I believe but don't quote me on it. Just make sure you've got an i3, preferably i5/i7 CPU, and check the GPU from notebookcheck.net. If it runs Metro 2033 or Crysis at mid-quality graphics it's going to run ArmA II with middle/high easily too. The AMD mobile CPUs are slightly sluggish in comparison to newer Intel's, hence why I don't mention them, but if there's a good discount and good GPU in them, why not (just stay away from C-50, C-60, E-350, E-450 and other "APU" solutions)

bobstefanio, T3400 is a mobile CPU, it's a laptop. Even though your CPU clock-speed/core count is "enough" by the specs, your CPU is very slow, it's the architecture and can't be helped, sorry. That GPU is also integrated into it, not an efficient dedicated mobile or desktop GPU, and as such it's mostly meant for rendering 2D graphics or very simple 3D stuff (even if the specs say it would run this and this, it can TRY, but it's way too slow to do it properly. To put it briefly, you're boned. I can recommend you some new laptops if you'd like, or you can do research based on CPU/GPU combinations at notebookcheck.net

I think just weapon attachments like screw-on suppressors to weapons that already have a screw- or bayonet-mount and sights would make the weapons diverse enough, especially if you can mess around with magazines and bullet types.. I don't think a Minecraft-esque "craft a fuckton of stuff" would really suit the game.

Nonononono absolutely not. What's the point if every third box of ammo you found fits your weapon? It's supposed to be about survival and scarce resources in the first place. Besides, being able to swap munitions between magazines of same caliber meant for different weapons would effectively do what you said to some degree, without ruining the realism.

People whining about what's ruining the game are ruining the game. I would expect a lot less carebears than there are now, if DayZ was real.

Has the BattlEye managed to update now? I noticed some people saying that the BattlEye update might take a while, so if you can sit in the lobby of a server before connecting, that way it'll have the time to install it before kicking you off the game for not having it, at least (although I'm not sure if that is connected to your ping/de-sync issue). Othen than that I've no idea what's going on, sorry D:

Very odd.. I thought my computer was croaking and should buy a new one (exactly like yours). Currently I'm running: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T @ 2,8GHz GTX 460 1GB OC (Gigabyte's factory OC) 12GB DDR3 RAM Running at 1920x1080, default .cfg files with 2x AA, FXAA at high, and everything at high (except post-processing disabled because I find it annoying) and depending on the server I get a constant fps in the lows or acceptable meds (15-45). Changing to lower settings has very little effect on framerate (good servers might get 60-70fps on ultrasuperlow at VGA resolution but I'd expect more..). When I get home from the ranch I'll try all the tricks in this thread with FPS measurements on some stable server. Seems like hardware updating is not going to save me from bad FPS :D Thanks, this thread just saved me $2000

Could you people experiencing this try some separate hive servers just to confirm it a bit further?

That CPU is definitely enough for ArmA II/DayZ, and GPU is good to go too. As advised above, you might want an SSD drive for your Windows 7 installation, or at least a separate hard drive for the video stream FRAPS is going to be saving constantly. If the game and FRAPS are going to be reading/writing off the same HDD, it might bog it down a bit. But framerate-wise I'm quite sure that should work provided you have a freshly restarted server, or server running off powerful hardware. Slow server will slow your FPS down in many cases no matter how good CPU/GPU or connection you have (my GTX460 runs very high and very low at same FPS on weak servers). I'm sure you would be able to do least 720p gaming/recording resolution, and very high graphics. I personally wouldn't shoot at 1080p because YouTube seems to compress it an awful lot no matter what codec and bitrate you use, but I might be wrong, and that rig most likely would do it at 1080p anyway, but for reliability and constant framerate without drops I'd personally do 720p, and save on space/editing/rendering time too! :P

The flickering equipment and different ambient music would be great, but further than that would be sort of too much. I wouldn't mind a certain sense of 'creepyness' be added to some specific places. And the whole idea of maybe making different ambient music for when you're alone is actually quite good, as some sort of an Area of Effect-type code, but unfortunately it might not be a sustainable idea because it could help you predict when other players are nearby.

Even though DayZ is not gritting-it's-teeth level realism, M4 chambered in .50 Beowulf is very rare, even for military environments (and AFAIK it's effective range is reported at 200 yards = 150 meters or so) I'd like to see popular plinkers like Henry .22 lever action and Ruger 10/22 and AR-15 in different calibers, they're way more likely to be found anyway.

I think OP might be inspired by the video where a guy in ghillie suit chases a newbie player, screaming at him in direct communication with a raspy voice. Also, if your voice echoes you have the Listen-button activated in MorphVOX. The Pro version comes with more adjustments, other than that I only know of VST plugins that change sounds but they're both expensive to buy and require some previous knowledge about the host programs.

MorphVOX Pro is one of them, and MorphVOX Junior is the free alternative. Or if you have two mic-inputs and a 5.1 soundcard that you don't utilize rear speaker output of, you could set Ableton Live or any other sound sequencer to take mic-input from mic-input 2, output it through rear speaker out to mic-input 1 as an edited version of the signal with some VST effects (auto-tune, radio-like distortion, bit crushing, reverbs, exciters etc..). I've done that earlier because there were some specific VST plugins I wanted to run, but for most people MorphVOX does the drill perfectly :3

If there's as simple of a solution to latency issues and FPS drops as restarting the server more often (that only takes like 5 minutes), then there is no valid reason not to do it. I too have noticed that servers that restart every 4-5 hours are by far the fastest, and offer smoothest FPS, and I don't even play on the slower servers anymore. On the contrary, servers that reboot only after 12 hours or so are VERY slow on their other half no matter what specifications/settings are you running, and sometimes it gets really unenjoyable to play on them. I think it's a good idea to at least advise administrators that they should be restarting their servers more often than 12 hours, as some might not even know why people prefer other servers, and this could just be one of the main reasons.

I think some people should chillax a bit, I'm a medic and have never shot a player but I find this hilarious.