Learning a lesson about mouse-pad flying.

[Nekan 55]

Alright, story time.

I play on a rather bad laptop that was not made for gaming, much less ARMA2. But I get by. Playing on a laptop also means resorting to using the mouse-pad instead of an actual mouse. It can get difficult for me sometimes, but again, it's playable and the game is far too fun to just give up because of little things like framerate.

But enough about such things, on to the story! I had just respawned from a hacker teleporting the server to The Thunderdome and killing everyone, and when I spawned I had absolutely no gear in this dark, unforgiving world. Not even a flashlight! So I headed to Elektro and spotted a flashlight. It was obviously another new spawner so I ran up and teamed up with the no-mic, him giving light support while I shot the many zombies that had us cornered. After surviving that we were the best of friends, looting all of the now strangely zombie-free quiet town.

The grocery store and the church had been blown up, but the hotel alone gave us enough that we could travel North with our newest friend from the school. We pretty much played follow the leader with the chemlight all the way to NW Airfield, talking to a guy in sidechat that had actually survived the massacre of Thunderdome and was happily looting, but was stuck in by the walls around the fort. When we all finally arrived we spotted a heli that had been blown off to the side. (The hacker had been spawning mass-vehicles in the middle of thunderdome and was blowing them up on us.) It was fully fueled and repaired, so we obviously wanted it.. except for a small problem, no flight experience. Out of the four of us, not a single one of us had ever flown, with the exception of the guy that -had- done the tutorial, but said he managed to flip and die even with auto-hover on.

He was not chosen to fly, and eventually I stepped up! It was rather shaky at first, inching my way from the outside perimeter of the walls into the inside of gear central with auto-hover on, and an even sketchier landing across the blown up rustyard. But once we landed we all hopped out and grabbed pretty much everything we could to make a hasty retreat into the sky, this time actually having to turn off auto so we could go forward. A few thousand meters later and we had picked up a fifth to our happy little group, loaded him out and gave him a seat. Now's when the lesson kicks in.. We ended up at NE airfield, and after looting I stopped at 150~ meters high and checked my map so I could set a waypoint back to Cherno for more rescue missions. When I hit 'M' again, chaos.

I don't know if you've used a mousepad before or not, but sometimes it will glitch out and when you lift and re-press on it, and the cursor shoves itself to the bottom of the screen for a moment. This is what happened when I exited the map, going directly into a frontflip from a small altitude. Panic quickly settled in, but after doing a full front-flip I thought I could balance it out again, which was wrong. A fresh spawn of zombies set my FPS just low enough that I couldn't pull back up in time, sending us into -another- frontflip to which we hit the ground hard upside-down. We were still in sidechat while we yelled to our deaths, to which the entire server got their share of laughs I'm sure, and we ended up laughing at ourselves too, because the gear didn't mean all that much to us.

Needless to say I won't be flying again anytime soon, unless of course I get the proper training and an actual mouse. But as a solo player it had been one of my funnest experiences so far on DayZ, I was happy enough just to find strangers that didn't shoot me in the face on sight, so teaming up with a group for the first time was certainly worth it! (Even though I ended up killed us all, sorry again guys!)

[krihelion 175]

i couldnt imagine playing on that low of FPS much less a mouse.

[Dabaroony 86]

A crap mouse costs $20. A decent one no more than $60. Invest!

Good story, though.

[bfisher 561]

flying is easy. You just have to remember smaller movements than you might be used to in other games. I figured out how to fly in 10 minutes. Unfortunately landing is the hard part. I didn't realize I was landing on a hill (NV gives bad depth perception) and I skidded the Huey into the trees. I'm fine but I don't think the helicopter will fly again,

[Steak and Potatoes 13480]

I had the same issue flying but it wasnt my mouse, I prefer to fly while looking the opposite direction of my monitor and imagine what surviving blind would be like.