Death Map!

[Hardplace 3]

     Hey guys!

 

     I'm rather new to the DayZ scene, have been playing alpha for the past month or two, and haven't tried out the mod, so please excuse my lack of experience.

 

     I've been having a lot of fun in DayZ due to the emotional consequences to the RP aspect of the game.  Dying specifically adds gravity to the rest of your actions while you're alive.  There is a certain finality to a black screen with "You are dead" written across it, be it from eating bad food, getting shot by a bandit, or in a heated exchange of firefight with another survivor.

 

     My suggestion is to add a map, that shows up after the "You are dead." screen but before you respawn.  This map would only be viewable while your character is dead - and would show a line moving from where your character started his life span (With an X marker (possibly black) where you started) all along the path you took throughout Chernarus until you died, which would be marked with another X marker possibly in red), as well as a life timer (IE//..  You survived for 6 hours 3 minutes!  Or... You survived 2 weeks 3 days 2 hours and 4 minutes!)

 

     I personally feel this would have the dual benefit of adding a certain gravity to your actions by allowing you to view where you have gone, and make decisions based on your previous deaths allowing people to learn (but not where you are at the moment so as to not ruin immersion), and also increase immersion in that it'll give people a goal to increase their time survived.  I personally feel that this would have an added benefit of encouraging players to explore the map more, and make players aware if they are only camping in a certain area, without limiting their ability to chose to do so.

 

     In the end I feel this will encourage a play style that lets player access more of the map - however it will not give them any more tools to access more of the map as they do it, so as to not make the game any easier.

 

     Any thoughts or responses would be appreciated!

[KarmaCoin 72]

Tracking a players path throughout their existence would be a tough technical challenge because some players live for hundreds of hours. I don't think that part of you're suggestion would be worth the effort required.

 

Just displaying how long your character survived would be much easier and is something I'd love to see as well.

[Hardplace 3]

Tracking a players path throughout their existence would be a tough technical challenge because some players live for hundreds of hours. I don't think that part of you're suggestion would be worth the effort required.

 

Just displaying how long your character survived would be much easier and is something I'd love to see as well.

 

     Thanks Karma.  :)

 

      It may be very difficult, I could see that.  it is certainly a LOT of information to keep track of when you account for 40 players each living up to 200 hours or something crazy like that.  But... better to set our sights high and try to achieve it.  

 

    Either way though, I believe in the community and our ability to think outside of the box.  I'd be glad even if it just showed 2 points 'spawn' and 'death' even if it didn't connect the dots, infact that may actually be better and leave a little mystery to the path you took to get there. Also that'd be a million times easier for the servers, and it could still include the timer.

 

     Any other suggestions on how we could make this successful?

[Statik (DayZ) 2695]

I think showing you how long you actually survived would be quite easy, and cool.

 

However, like stated above, showing a map of where you traveled would be extremely difficult. I'm no dev, but creating a system that tracks your movements and records them over multiple play sessions would be a royal bitch (if even possible).

 

For instance, in the earlier days of the mod, I survived for 40+ days (actually playing), for the game to track all that, and record it across multiple months, servers, and playsessions would be impossible, (even if it was possible, would it be worth all the work so you can look at it for 20 seconds before you respawn?).

[Timmymachine109 (DayZ) 235]

Showing your stats at the end would be a nice touch (Time alive, kills, food eaten, times bandaged etc). But agree that tracking your movement on a map would take up a lot of resources if you lived for more than a few days. Also the map could become a massive mess!

[Monkfish (DayZ) 339]

I don't think we'll ever see that. The technicalities of it make it difficult enough to implement and that's before thinking about immersion or anything like that.

 

Related;

http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2013/07/19/new-dayz-player-activity-map-shows-where-newbies-wont-survive/

[Hardplace 3]

I don't think we'll ever see that. The technicalities of it make it difficult enough to implement and that's before thinking about immersion or anything like that.

 

Related;

http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2013/07/19/new-dayz-player-activity-map-shows-where-newbies-wont-survive/

 

 

I understand what you're saying, it seems everyone is saying it would be too difficult to implement a tracking map, and I can certainly understand why!  Keeping track of a 6 digit number of co-ords for each player, even if it's as innacurate as once every 15 minutes, is still going to end up with a list of 800 Co-ords to track in the situation that a character survives for 200 hours.

 

   Simply placing a start - and death marker should be easy to track if they wanted to bypass this, meaning each character would only need to record 2 co-ords, and shouldn't be too much work for the servers to keep track of, but it would still take a lot of work to build into the existing interface.

 

    I like the idea suggested earlier of other relevant stats, or even just in it's most  basic form - A clock, showing your survival time, which should be again, should be pretty easy to implement in the grande scheme of things.

 

    Any other outside of the box suggestions on this?  Clearly people do not see it as viable to track a character's progress everywhere they go on the map, I don't have any experience in computer game design so I'm clearly not capable of making that judgement.

[CookieJar 19]

Umm... Have you guys realized there is a movement "heat map" of the mod? Even if it wasn't tracked yet, i guess you'd only need a bit of code that tracks (client side) some x and y coordinates while playing the game, and then save it. I don't realize why this would be such black magic. Just could take hours to display your road / would be a total clutter if you survived some time.

Edited February 27, 2014 by CookieJar

[KarmaCoin 72]

Umm... Have you guys realized there is a movement "heat map" of the mod?

 

I did not. Can you explain what this is? Looks cool, I'm just not sure what it is showing me. Is it the time spent in each location?

 

Still don't think it is really worth the effort. I do like the idea of displaying the easy to track things like time alive, food eaten, zeds killed, etc. I don't think those things would be that hard to add and I would love to see them at the end of a characters life.

Edited February 28, 2014 by KarmaCoin

[Hardplace 3]

I did not. Can you explain what this is? Looks cool, I'm just not sure what it is showing me. Is it the time spent in each location?

 

Still don't think it is really worth the effort. I do like the idea of displaying the easy to track things like time alive, food eaten, zeds killed, etc. I don't think those things would be that hard to add and I would love to see them at the end of a characters life.

 

 

      That's basically exactly my goal.  It doesn't need to be public.  It doesn't need to ruin immersion by trying to encourage people to boost those stats with some kind of competition in mind, because survival is really the only goal.  But it would be a neat way to reflect upon your own journey, and it would likely increase immersion for me by helping me to recap my existance in that life, and reminding me of my past experiences that life.  

 

     In short - I don't need to be compared to other people to feel successful.  However, having the ability to compare to myself would be a nice feature to the game that would help to drive me to succeed, and keep my interest high.

[PJSleaze 111]

I posted something similar a few days ago too. Think of the end of Civ, when you see your borders and cities grow on the map, right?

I realize it won't be interesting to people who spawn, run to Elektro, die and repeat. I've enjoyed the exploration aspect of the game and have been all over with this one character over the last 10 days or so. He will die eventually, everyone does. It would be cool to see where I went with him though when he's done.

[Hardplace 3]

I posted something similar a few days ago too. Think of the end of Civ, when you see your borders and cities grow on the map, right?

I realize it won't be interesting to people who spawn, run to Elektro, die and repeat. I've enjoyed the exploration aspect of the game and have been all over with this one character over the last 10 days or so. He will die eventually, everyone does. It would be cool to see where I went with him though when he's done.

 

 

     That's what I'm saying.  I'm about 150 hours into the game, and about 50 hours into this character.  I've been all over the map, done all sorts of crazy things.  Been in conflict about a dozen times and made it out alive either through running, killing, bartering, or talking my way out.  I've helped lots of people on the coast, I've shot people because I was starving and I needed food... and surviving was more important than morality.  I've been shot and knocked unconscious for 10 minutes, and I've knocked people out and looted them.

 

     A play by play like at the end of civ would be rad - but I'm setting my sights much... much lower than that, as it seems many in the community feel this isn't realistic.  Admittedly, civ was the inspiring factor in this. ;)  

 

     Thanks for the support PJSleaze!  The more support we can get for an idea like this, the more likely we are to get recognized.  :)

 

     Also, in regards to previous comments, if you read the article it is indicating that the heat shown is death locations I believe.  It's a very very neat idea though, and even if there was just a heat map like that for a server it could be pretty awesome, but I admittedly think that may be a little out of our reach currently, the mod had years to work this stuff out from what I gather.

[PJSleaze 111]

I'm at about a similar spot- 50 hours on one guy, about 130 for the game total. I've had some interesting confrontations too, (about half as many as you've had) and I've had whole sessions in some places where no one goes- literally getting lost and trying to get back to something recognizable. It would be fun to see where I really was during that time.

[toasted duckie 156]

*disclaimer* Did not read through the entire thread.

Am I the only one who thinks it would not be that difficult to keep track of players? It's not technically challenging.. The server has to keep track of where everyone is anyone. Only difference is that now every so often this data (it's a very short string of numbers, like coordinates in the game-world) has to be written to a textfile. Lets say every 15 minutes. Upon death this file can be called and markers can be placed at the locations, creating a path..

I like the idea, it could be nice if implemented properly, however I don't think this has any real priority .. :)

[Hardplace 3]

I like the idea, it could be nice if implemented properly, however I don't think this has any real priority .. :)

 

 

Agreed, it's not a high priority.  It's a Nice to have not a NEED to have.  But it would be a great selling feature for the game.  Which is why I wanted to make sure it was in the suggestion forums.  There is CERTAINLY a lot more pressing things that should be addressed first.  But - as stated in multiple other threads, conveniently the dev's are pretty good at prioritizing AND multitasking.  I'll leave the business decisions of 'when' to the developers.  Just wanted to gather some support for the idea in the mean time and see if we can work towards it.