Discussion on the "Hide body" option

[liquidsnake 275]

Game is supposed to be realistic when it comes to ingame mechanics, what I do with them is on me. Drag bodies together and set them on fire is probably something I would do (even IRL, though, for complete different reasons).

 

P.S: btw the yelling idea is something I posted time ago. You should have 2 channels, normal and yelling. Yelling has a bigger radius than normal, lets put around 200m (and In the middle of nowhere w/o traffic and the sound of busy people it would be posible to yell even farther). And, ofc, same way people can hear you zombies can too, also for normal chat (if I recall correctly it was already like this back in the mod).

 

All mechanics should have a proper use. It makes no sense to add something that is plain stupid and pointless, just because it's possible to IRL. By that logic, options like dancing and singing in the middle of Cherno should be added, because it's possible IRL. There just is no point in doing it. Not only is it pointless, it's also suicidal. Things that profit nobody in any way or don't fit the behaviour of a survivor should be omitted from the game. Burning bodies is pointless, benefits virtually no one and definitely isn't something a survivor would do after a firefight, or at any time for that matter. Thus, it shouldn't be a feature 

 

Btw, I remember that topic and I actually posted the same thing about the two channels. In my post I meant pointless, meaningless screams. 

[p4triot 207]

All mechanics should have a proper use. It makes no sense to add something that is plain stupid and pointless, just because it's possible to IRL. By that logic, options like dancing and singing in the middle of Cherno should be added, because it's possible IRL. There just is no point in doing it. Not only is it pointless, it's also suicidal. Things that profit nobody in any way or don't fit the behaviour of a survivor should be omitted from the game. Burning bodies is pointless, benefits virtually no one and definitely isn't something a survivor would do after a firefight, or at any time for that matter. Thus, it shouldn't be a feature 

 

Btw, I remember that topic and I actually posted the same thing about the two channels. In my post I meant pointless, meaningless screams. 

 

I would LOVE dancing to be ingame xD And singing is already ingame since you have mic.

 

And I keep defending burning bodies has its purpose. And I would like to be able to hang them also (from a tree or smth). So If someone attacks my place, I kill him, burn him, and then hang him in the entrance as a warning for everyone else.

 

May be not something a survivor would do, but for sure something a bandit would do.

[Bororm 1156]

I believe if you kill some one, you've gained the right to all their loot.  Or for that matter, if some one dies the next person upon their body has the right to all their loot.  For that reason I think hiding bodies is perfectly acceptable, although often times frowned upon as a subject of "honor."  I personally avoid doing it usually, unless I'm in a fight where people are constantly coming back.  Generally I just pull mags out of guns and toss them away.  It's usually beneficial to leave a body, in case you, yourself, die.  I do find myself hiding them more often in the SA than I did in the mod though, probably as a result of the current state of SA being a bit more deathmatchy with a higher concentration of spawns in a smaller area.

 

That said, I feel it's a little bit too easy to hide bodies.  Burning them or requiring some other tool (shovel? pickaxe?) would be nice, at the very least requiring an animation would be a good addition.

Edited May 8, 2014 by Bororm

[gibonez 3633]

Burning bodies would be great.

 

Another use for some of the items in game + it is more immersive to run across a burned body with no useful gear instead of a body magically melting into the ground.

[liquidsnake 275]

I would LOVE dancing to be ingame xD And singing is already ingame since you have mic.

 

And I keep defending burning bodies has its purpose. And I would like to be able to hang them also (from a tree or smth). So If someone attacks my place, I kill him, burn him, and then hang him in the entrance as a warning for everyone else.

 

May be not something a survivor would do, but for sure something a bandit would do.

That's an entirely different thing. We're talking about burning bodies with the intent of destroying gear. No rational survivor/bandit would do this. Dragging them to your camp and hanging them would be awesome, to scare people away. Definitely something a bandit would do. Nobody burns a body to scare people away, they hang or mutilate them.

[gwartham 13]

You people need to be REASONABLE.

 

The hide body feature is a computer game fix for a real type situation that would be pretty darn hard to code.

 

The reality is you kill a person, you pick up the body and hide it, throw it in a room, under a tree covered with leaves what not.

 

The hide corpse option solves a game issue efficiently.

 

Its bad enough the bambi can come right back and try and punch you out, but I dont want them to come back and get there guns. We won the fight, go gear up and come back at us.

 

You want realism so badly then fine....You buy the game, you get 1 life, and when you die, the games over, you do not get the gift of resurrection.

 

There better?

[Bororm 1156]

You people need to be REASONABLE.

 

The hide body feature is a computer game fix for a real type situation that would be pretty darn hard to code.

 

The reality is you kill a person, you pick up the body and hide it, throw it in a room, under a tree covered with leaves what not.

 

The hide corpse option solves a game issue efficiently.

 

Its bad enough the bambi can come right back and try and punch you out, but I dont want them to come back and get there guns. We won the fight, go gear up and come back at us.

 

You want realism so badly then fine....You buy the game, you get 1 life, and when you die, the games over, you do not get the gift of resurrection.

 

There better?

 

Eh I mostly agree but think they could take it a step further, which burning or an animation would do nicely.  As it stands it's a magical pixie wave of the hands and it's gone.  At least some sort of animation would add a slight inconvenience to the process.  Burning would be nice because it would not really require a lot of work either, just some flame animations and everything disappears or whatever.

 

They've said that dragging bodies is coming when they add ragdolls, so it will be interesting to see if that plays any role along the lines of hiding them.  Might actually be cool if hiding bodies was taken out entirely, and you had to drag them into some bushes or whatever to conceal them manually.

Edited May 9, 2014 by Bororm

[qww 287]

Hello, i was wondering what the general public thinks about the hide body option you have on slain people ?

 

Me and my friend died in a gunfight against a team of several people, and one of them survived. I respawned close by and ran immediately to where we died.

And when i found the dead bodies, none of them were lootable, so we basicly lost everything, and had to start from scratch, instead of being able to salvage some of our lost items.

 

As of this, i dont really feel that it's a good thing that you can deny others reclaiming some of their items, you already have item durability to counter this, and i might think that the hide body option is a bit over the top ?

sometimes i will run to my body if i spawn close enough, but i dotn think players shoudl have a "right" to their lost items at all

 

players who wana keep  items shoudl stay alive. hide body is fine.

as a new character why would you know where to run to anyway?  the game is surviving, you can enjoy finding new. not sprinting back to pick up your lost items

[DaveAzoicer (DayZ) 135]

It is perfectly fine.

Though I would prefer it if we needed a shovel.

[zeroy 240]

so we basicly lost everything, and had to start from scratch, instead of being able to salvage some of our lost items.

 

Awesome. Welcome to Dayz SA - it is, for me, the main selling point of the game - called Perma-death. :)

[zeroy 240]

You press a button and a body magically fades away??? wot da fuq???

 

It has occurred to you that those body would include yours - and you could be looking at it, at you like ?! Wot da fuq? It would actually make a lot more sense to have the dead bodies going even quicker imo, and have the gear dropped to the ground and stay until server restart.

[Lady Kyrah 1110]

dead bodies have to go regardless, do you prefer that the game spend processing time tracking live or dead players. Add to this the loot spawn mechanics, thats easily tens(hundreds?) of thousand objects that have to be tracked at some point. If anything, bodies should go by themselve in 5 minutes or less.

 

Considering that the game spawn loot all the friggin time, that bodies disappear with all their gear is a good thing. Helps to keep the gear inflation under control.

[gibonez 3633]

dead bodies have to go regardless, do you prefer that the game spend processing time tracking live or dead players. Add to this the loot spawn mechanics, thats easily tens(hundreds?) of thousand objects that have to be tracked at some point. If anything, bodies should go by themselve in 5 minutes or less.

 

Considering that the game spawn loot all the friggin time, that bodies disappear with all their gear is a good thing. Helps to keep the gear inflation under control.

 

Dead bodies add to the immersion.

 

I highly doubt dead bodies staying around until server restart would be a problem if they punished player suicides .

 

If they can somehow manage to stop people from killing themselves every 2 seconds to get a better spawn I doubt having long lasting player dead bodies will be a problem.

[LortFengerN 0]

 

TL;DR if you for whatever reason don't want others to find the gear, take the damn gear (keep it, hide it, who cares). Finding bodies adds a great deal to gameplay. Moreover, burning/burying the body is a waste of time and leaves yourself exposed, thus it's the ridiculously unrealistic thing to do for anyone outside of the world of tactical dimwits. 

Exactly my thoughts

 

i simply just find hide body cheap and i dont ask for a complete removal, its just that i would love a mechanic to physically hide, rather than destroy

Edited May 9, 2014 by LortFengerN

[ZomboWTF 527]

I'm afraid realism and burying bodies don't go well together.

well, respawning at the coast (after you died, of course) and magically knowing where a geared dead person lies isn't, either

Edited May 9, 2014 by Zombo

[p4triot 207]

That's an entirely different thing. We're talking about burning bodies with the intent of destroying gear. No rational survivor/bandit would do this. Dragging them to your camp and hanging them would be awesome, to scare people away. Definitely something a bandit would do. Nobody burns a body to scare people away, they hang or mutilate them.

 

No body burns a body to scare people? Since when?

 

dead bodies have to go regardless, do you prefer that the game spend processing time tracking live or dead players. Add to this the loot spawn mechanics, thats easily tens(hundreds?) of thousand objects that have to be tracked at some point. If anything, bodies should go by themselve in 5 minutes or less.

 

Considering that the game spawn loot all the friggin time, that bodies disappear with all their gear is a good thing. Helps to keep the gear inflation under control.

 

A dead body is not a player anymore and does not have that much CPU consumption. Taking in count the server alreadys has to track 200.000 spawned objects (wasn't that what Dean said?) I dont know if adding an extra thousand bodies would add that much...

 

Except for the point that it would, since the engine is awful. But if the programmers actually knew how to do their jobs, a dead body would just be the same as a can of beans in terms of CPU usage.

[Lady Kyrah 1110]

No body burns a body to scare people? Since when?

 

 

A dead body is not a player anymore and does not have that much CPU consumption. Taking in count the server alreadys has to track 200.000 spawned objects (wasn't that what Dean said?) I dont know if adding an extra thousand bodies would add that much...

 

Except for the point that it would, since the engine is awful. But if the programmers actually knew how to do their jobs, a dead body would just be the same as a can of beans in terms of CPU usage.

Bodies have an inventory, clothes, ,Bodies have a position, a rotation, a pose, collide with bullets and are interactive. In most engine that's considered an "active" object and DOES use a valid amount of CPU and bandwidth.

Game engines do not consider every objects as unique little snow flakes, there is a tree of objects with more or less functionalities and bodies do not fit in the same category as trees or houses for obvious reasons.

 

If i take the example of the torque engine, which is the one i'm familiar with familiar with:

 

A player character would be:

>SimObject (object is part of the simulation)

>> NetObject (object is synchronised on the network)

>>> SceneObject (object exist in the 3D world)

>>>> GameBase (object can process ticks and has modifiable parameters)

>>>>> ShapeBase (object has a visual, 3D shape)

>>>>>> Player (object can be controlled by a client)

 

A zombie would be:

>SimObject (object is part of the simulation)

>> NetObject (object is synchronised on the network)

>>> SceneObject (object exist in the 3D world)

>>>> GameBase (object can process ticks and has modifiable parameters)

>>>>> ShapeBase (object has a visual, 3D shape)

>>>>>> Player (object can be controlled by a client)

>>>>>>> AIPlayer (object controlled by an AI engine)

 

We can see here, that, in this example, a zombie is an object that is potentially as resource intensive as a player (it has all the features of a player and some more, i believe the RV engine use the same system)

 

Now here is for example an item that you can pick up on the ground:

>SimObject (object is part of the simulation)

>> NetObject (object is synchronised on the network)

>>> SceneObject (object exist in the 3D world)

>>>> GameBase (object can process ticks and has modifiable parameters)

>>>>> ShapeBase (object has a visual, 3D shape)

>>>>>> Item (object can be interacted with by players, usually a pickup)

 

We can see that while an item may not move at all, it still inherit many properties that are not entirely necessary because you do not build a unique class per object (which result in horrible snowflake code), so even if we don't strictly need it, an item can still process ticks (useful to make it decay) and could technically "move".

 

What about things like trees and rocks and everything that represent our static world you ask?

Torque (for example) has a special resource friendly class for this:

>SimObject (object is part of the simulation)

>> NetObject (object is synchronised on the network)

>>> SceneObject (object exist in the 3D world)

>>>> TSStatic (object has a shape and can be collided with)

 

That is much shorter right? well here TSStatic is one of the most hated class on torque because of how messy it is (it has it's own code for a lot of things just so it wouldn't inherit of the features in GameBase/ShapeBase)

The specificities of TSStatic is that it cannot move, it is barely networked (it's position is never updated on the clients, therefore it CANNOT move). While this is by far the most efficient object you can have in the game world it lacks many many features to be useable for anything but decoration.

 

What does any of this has to do with DayZ?

I don't know much about the RV engine, i'm sure that like torque it has it's shortcomings, no engine is perfect, but a lot of engines are very simmilar and have a lot of "look alike" features. THere are many ways to write an engine but only a few are reasonable and logical.

 

 In the case of torque, the most logical way of handling lootable dead bodies would be to detach the player from his body, effectively turning it into a "soul-less corpse" unable to do anything, and then set it in a death pose. It has the advantage that it's inventory will be intact and it's just a matter of letting looting players access it.

 

The way DayZ bodies work is most likely very close to this. What's important here is that those objects are STILL player objects with all their attached features. So like zombies, they are a non trivial resource drain.

[cuddly_rabbit 102]

Have you ever tried to hide a body? (I hope not in reality).

To roleplay a proper funeral in a live action roleplay (a character we liked had died), we once dug a proper grave. It took about an hour, with 3 people. So that cannot be what "hide body" means.

If "hiding" means, that you drag it around the corner, the body and loot should not be "gone". 

If "hiding" means throwing a few bushes and branches onto it, it still takes 10 minutes to do. And it should be possible to find it still.

Hiding a body like it is done now is:

> hideously unrealistic
> a perfect grieving tool ("Haha. I don't give a f about your loot, I do not need it, so I just hide it. I play for lulz and pvp!!!!111"
> a cheap-ass move

 

Consequently: Remove the feature.
Hiding a body is not possible the way it is done here.

[Jex 1104]

I'm afraid realism and burying bodies don't go well together.

 

It's not realistic, it's authentic.

[liquidsnake 275]

well, respawning at the coast (after you died, of course) and magically knowing where a geared dead person lies isn't, either

Respawning at the coast and magically knowing where a geared body lies can't be fixed by anything besides a memory eraser. They can't stop this from happening, nor can they 'fix' it by having bodies disappear. Does it make sense to counter an unrealistic part of the game by adding another even less realistic feature? It doesn't, especially if your goal is to create a realistic game. If the response to one unrealistic aspect is to add another, does it not make the game even less realistic than it already was? It almost sounds like balancing, on par with CoD's alterations of gun stats, which the devs loathe. Furthermore, the added feature of finding the aftermath of a bloody firefight more than compensates for that minor unrealistic factor. (disclaimer: I have never done a corpse run in SA)

 

 

 

No body burns a body to scare people? Since when?

 

 

A dead body is not a player anymore and does not have that much CPU consumption. Taking in count the server alreadys has to track 200.000 spawned objects (wasn't that what Dean said?) I dont know if adding an extra thousand bodies would add that much...

 

Except for the point that it would, since the engine is awful. But if the programmers actually knew how to do their jobs, a dead body would just be the same as a can of beans in terms of CPU usage.

A burned body is undoubtedly a horrifying thing to see. However, typically, bodies are used to scare when mutilated, hanged, have severed bodyparts on display, have the skeleton on display, and more. Burned bodies on display, with the intent of scaring others is a rarity.

Edited May 9, 2014 by The End.

[cuddly_rabbit 102]

@Using bodies for "decoration":

 

Bodies do not burn easily, contrary to belief.
Nor do clothes. Your TV lies when it comes to disposing remains.
Without petrol or some other easily inflamable substances, a real pyre and a lot of time you'll get nowhere or at least not far.

And... again:

 

In my opinion, we should not want to make this game more of a psychopaths' / sociopaths' playground like Apocalypse Now. 
There is no need for "decorating" your badass base with mutilated bodies and heads on spikes, etc.

[Phoenix777 43]

Eh I mostly agree but think they could take it a step further, which burning or an animation would do nicely. As it stands it's a magical pixie wave of the hands and it's gone. At least some sort of animation would add a slight inconvenience to the process.

Kind of off topic, but this reminds me. I checked out the dayZ mod recently, and one thing I found really annoying was how you had to crouch down every time you opened your inventory, checked items, picked something up, you couldn't run with your inventory open,etc. I wonder if they're planning putting that level of inconvenience back in.... Maybe for hardcore mode. Edited May 9, 2014 by Phoenix777

[liquidsnake 275]

Good. It's called permadeath for a reason.

 

The hiding of bodies should actually be dragging corpses so you have to put it in a bush where no one can see it. Then I could make a pile of bodies inside a house in Berezino for some poor new spawn to find.

I'm all for this. Corpse runs don't belong in DayZ, but finding bodies most definitely does. Dragging is the answer IMO.

[Whyherro123 2283]

A fast way to hide a body should be through gasoline and a match. 

Have you ever cooked meat before? Hell, cooking a steak takes a while, and it isn't the whole body.

Bodies are WET. They contain WATER (and water-based liquids). Water impedes FIRE.

Not even including the fact that gasoline is only an accelerant, it won't fuel the fire on its own. In order to burn a body, you would need a fire already burning hot. Pouring gasoline on something and striking a match would just singe the clothing and burn off the hair.

I disagree with the current hiding of bodies mechanic. Want to hide a body, and its associated gear? Drag it into a bush or the woods, and cover it with leaves. You aren't going to be digging any holes or building any fires when the wrath of the infected comes down upon you like a wave of death.

[Bororm 1156]

Kind of off topic, but this reminds me. I checked out the dayZ mod recently, and one thing I found really annoying was how you had to crouch down every time you opened your inventory, checked items, picked something up, you couldn't run with your inventory open,etc. I wonder if they're planning putting that level of inconvenience back in.... Maybe for hardcore mode.

 

It's sorta one of the things I worried about going into the SA, before it was actually released.  They talked a lot about stream lining the inventory and stuff and I was a bit skeptical.  I think it's easy to overlook how much little quirks like that add to the tension of the game.  Being in a fight, or even just with zombies, and having to put up with "clunkiness" really makes you get into that "come the fuck on, hurry up and bandage god damnit. fuuuck, just pick up the item already for fucks sake" kinda frustration that makes these encounters.  If everything ran perfectly smooth it would become trivial.

 

That said I think it's worked out fine so far, I think Rocket has a good eye for balance in that regard.  I'd say overall the SA is quite a bite more streamlined and I'd dare say a bit more action orientated, but I think so far they've managed to include enough "inconvenience" as well to keep things interesting.