Loot spawn suggestion

[Dek 1]

I have a suggestion for loot spawning, which may or may not be viable, but here it is:

 

Have you considered loot zones? For example, coding each unique building as a "loot zone", so that when anything is looted from a spawn point within a zone, after a time interval (set or variable), all of the loot for that "loot zone" resets.  This would eliminate low value loot from piling up (chemlights, books, gas stoves, etc) due to players not looting them, and allow for correct loot dispersion upon loot zone respawn that can be highly controlled.

 

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Below is a example scenario of what I'm experiencing on experimental.  Loot tables and spawn points are for illustrative purposes only, and are not to be interpreted as the actual loot tables, but I think you'll get the idea.

 

Example building: House, 3 loot spawns

Example loot table: Baseball cap, chemlight, apple, gas stove, canned food, purple hard hat, book, can opener.

 

Initial spawn:

1. Baseball cap (looted)

2. Chemlight (not looted)

3. Apple (looted)

 

Next spawn:

1. Chemlight (not looted)

2. Chemlight (not looted - leftover from previous spawn)

3. Tactical Bacon (player looted)

 

Next spawn(ad infinium):

1. Chemlight (not looted - leftover from previous spawn)

2. Chemlight (not looted - leftover from previous spawn)

3. Book (not looted, and likely never will be)

 

Next spawn - No new spawns occur, since all spawned loot is still in place.

 

Since chemlights and books are rarely looted, these typically remain in place and no fresh loot seems to spawn, leading to what we're seeing right now -- towns without food and buildings full of worthless/low value items.  On occasion we see loot spawning on top of loot, but that seems to be rare and obviously not intended.

 

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Example of loot zones, again for illustrative purposes.  This example sets the entire house set as a loot zone:

 

Example building: House, 3 loot spawns

Example loot table: Baseball cap, chemlight, apple, gas stove, canned food, purple hard hat, book, can opener.

 

Initial spawn:

1. Baseball cap (looted)

2. Chemlight (not looted)

3. Apple (looted)

 

Next spawn(loot zone resets):

1. Gas Stove (not looted)

2. Canned Peaches (looted)

3. Tactical Bacon (looted)

 

Next spawn(loot zone resets, ad infinium):

1. Purple Hard Hat (not looted)

2. Book (not looted)

3. Can opener (looted)

 

Ideally the respawn timers for loot zones would be randomized within a range (example: 30-120 minutes) to prevent building camping and make the respawn process a bit more organic.  Each unique building model would have its own loot zone, almost like a nav mesh layer, and since there are a set number of unique buildings in DayZ, this might be fairly easy to accomplish and later tweak and adjust settings. From a processing standpoint, I envision it would be easier for servers to process and track a smaller number of loot zones as opposed to what is probably tens of thousands of individual loot spawns.

 

I'm sure there are issues and limitations with coding that I'm not taking into account, but I thought I would share my ideas. Also, i apologize if this idea has already been brought up, but I didn't see anything similar to this with a quick forum search.

 

Best,
Dek

 

[Nesuma (DayZ) 108]

I guess if it's not like this it will be like this one day. With almost never restarting servers loot has to respawn and therefore old loot has to vanish. If I remember right it worked like this back in the mod.... sometimes. But it was faster to respawn if you took all the loot, dropped it outside and then waited.

Edited October 27, 2014 by Nesuma

[ColonelBurton 145]

I'm afraid that this is not an exact representation of the experimental loot system.

I've seen tons of loot spawn at the same loot-spot. Like inside each other, or creating piles of loot. So, new loot spawns, but it is crap loot mostly.

Then, I've been to rooms where 11 medkits have spawned inside each other. All floating in mid-air in one room. There were only five visible when I got in, but when I picked them up and dropped them again there were 11

I did notice that "moved loot" disappears at least after a certain number of server resets. But I somehow doubt that "unmoved loot" causes to avoid new loot spawning in.

[snwh 24]

hmmm, I think the whole persistence thing was partially to make loot carry over. If you found a Mosin, in a house somewhere, but you already have a gun you like. Then you die two resets later. You can go back to that house and find that mosin.

 

But I agree something needs to be done about the loot that's getting left behind. I would say something like, individual timers for loot. The longer an item is left there, the more likely it is to despawn. But to keep persistence working in the way I described, the more rare an item is, the less likely it is to despawn. Guns, by default would probably be counted as rare. It also means that things like gas masks and skull Balaclavas wouldn't despawn on you either. Which is pretty important. If rare items like those are constantly despawning, then your chance of finding one goes down dramatically.

 

However chemlights, books, hard hats, these would all have relatively short despawn timers.

[Dek 1]

hmmm, I think the whole persistence thing was partially to make loot carry over. If you found a Mosin, in a house somewhere, but you already have a gun you like. Then you die two resets later. You can go back to that house and find that mosin.

 

But I agree something needs to be done about the loot that's getting left behind. I would say something like, individual timers for loot. The longer an item is left there, the more likely it is to despawn. But to keep persistence working in the way I described, the more rare an item is, the less likely it is to despawn. Guns, by default would probably be counted as rare. It also means that things like gas masks and skull Balaclavas wouldn't despawn on you either. Which is pretty important. If rare items like those are constantly despawning, then your chance of finding one goes down dramatically.

 

However chemlights, books, hard hats, these would all have relatively short despawn timers.

I like the idea of individual item timers, although at some point I thought they were having performance issues with that.  Maybe they have a way of handling this, but individual timers on each loot spawn along with timers on items based on rarity would be a ton of data to manage and process.  I can't even imagine how many items there would be across the entire world, and the load this would put on the servers.  If they can find a way to do it... that would be awesome.  

 

However, my ideas for handling loot spawning might not be more efficient either.  Anymore, I'm just an armchair programmer and I am not at all familiar with this engine, so I'm in no position to argue.  Just here to kick around ideas. :)

Edited October 27, 2014 by Dek

[Dek 1]

I'm afraid that this is not an exact representation of the experimental loot system.

I've seen tons of loot spawn at the same loot-spot. Like inside each other, or creating piles of loot. So, new loot spawns, but it is crap loot mostly.

Then, I've been to rooms where 11 medkits have spawned inside each other. All floating in mid-air in one room. There were only five visible when I got in, but when I picked them up and dropped them again there were 11

I did notice that "moved loot" disappears at least after a certain number of server resets. But I somehow doubt that "unmoved loot" causes to avoid new loot spawning in.

 

I did address this briefly in my OP, but I didn't elaborate because this appears to be a bug, rather than by design.

[snwh 24]

I like the idea of individual item timers, although at some point I thought they were having performance issues with that.  Maybe they have a way of handling this, but individual timers on each loot spawn along with timers on items based on rarity would be a ton of data to manage and process.  I can't even imagine how many items there would be across the entire world, and the load this would put on the servers.  If they can find a way to do it... that would be awesome.  

 

However, my ideas for handling loot spawning might not be more efficient either.  Anymore, I'm just an armchair programmer and I am not at all familiar with this engine, so I'm in no position to argue.  Just here to kick around ideas. :)

I hear you, and I'm doing mostly the same thing. Just pushing out ideas.

 

I only program a little, so I'm not terribly sure what kind of a load either of these ideas would cause. If I remember correctly though... I think I read the server checks an entire quadrant of the map at a time to see how much loot there is, and if its low, it spawns some in. I think. 

 

SO I wonder if its only counting despawned(looted) items or if its counting all items. If it was the former, it wouldn't be much more load to check its time created versus current server time. But I guess we shouldn't be doing the devs job for them xD

[Rags! 1966]

The problem that you can see for yourself is how bus stops and book shelves become miniature versions of the Great Library of Alexandria. 

[star-lord252 83]

Nice hope they try this.