What is the difference between a trigger and a dynamic event?

[Weyland Yutani (DayZ) 1159]

Both are related to character positioning in an area. Can somebody explain to me the differences?

 

[Gobbokirk 546]

Trigger based on character presence and dynamic is going on whether we're there or not?
Just a guess though, so don't conclude based on my guessing :)

[Sqeezorz 839]

The apple tree is the trigger. You are the thing that triggers the trigger. The dynamic will decide if the tree was pregnant or not ... if so, you will find an apple, if not then look for another tree ... that had previously visited bees.

Happy dynamic-trigger-bee.

(ö_ö)}}}}>

[gorvi 189]

4 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

The apple tree is the trigger. You are the thing that triggers the trigger. The dynamic will decide if the tree was pregnant or not ... if so, you will find an apple, if not then look for another tree ... that had previously visited bees.

Happy dynamic-trigger-bee.

(ö_ö)}}}}>

I never realized how much DayZ needs beehives and collectable honey until now.

[Just Caused 423]

I might be wrong but from what I'd say it's like old zombie spawn. Whenever you get in range of around 800 meters, you trigger their spawn, therefore the name trigger event. Of course, this system has been recently changed. For dynamic events I'd choose heli spawns. You don't know where they are, they will spawn whetever you are near them or not. They will spawn on their own and they change locations.

[chambersenator 106]

6 hours ago, gorvi said:

I never realized how much DayZ needs beehives and collectable honey until now.

I agree that having bees and hives you can harvest honey from would be a really cool thing to have in DayZ.

The fact that it would be tasty and provide some energy from all the sucrose and glucose it contains is far less important to me than its potential 'improvised' medical applications. Honey has at least some level of antibiotic properties, and could be used directly on wounds and dressings to reduce the chances of infection (which as time goes on, and the medical system is expanded to include more complex wound infection mechanics,  could make honey quite a helpful thing to have around).

While the bees themselves should only spawn around the hives in warmer months, making hives much easier to detect, but also trickier to harvest. In colder months, the hives would still be there, just a lot harder to find. As for the harvesting process itself, you could have the option of doing it the 'smart' way or the 'painful' way. The smart way would be to use a smoke grenade or torch that's had something to increase the amount of smoke it makes (hot lard maybe? oil? similar to how you can make torches last longer with pine resin right now) to make the bees calm down (it's not exactly how you do it IRL, but its close enough for DayZ). The painful way would be to just start cutting and harvesting, and deal with the angry bees, and the amount of damage/pain you get from the stings per 'harvest honey' action would depend on how much clothing covers your skin (perhaps using whatever system will be put in to handle 'biological' player damage when that is fully added to the game).

It's certainly not a high-priority thing, but would be one of those nice 'finishing touches' to the game to see added in one day. 

Oh, and the other nice thing is, the models for the bees themselves already exist in ArmA 3, they'd just have to be ported over rather than made from scratch

[-Gews- 7443]

"A trigger is an abstract game entity that will wait until it's condition block returns true, then carry out the On Activation string."

e.g., Condition: Player is within 300 m, On Activation: Spawn zombies.

A dynamic event can be something like helicopter flying overhead and crashing. So it could be activated via trigger. Or it can be something like the regulated spawns of the police cars, heli crashes, etc.

 

[gorvi 189]

My main question is regarding how infected are going to operate.

Will there be some sort of system which virtually tracts their movements and life cycles?  At this time they would be despawned from the map until a player comes into range.  Once the infected are within range they will spawn physically into the world and continue to follow their life cycle and normal PvE behavior until no players are within range at which point they would be despawned again.

 

This would allow for a more natural feel to the infected.  You could leave an area and then return to find the same infected as before rather than a bunch of random spawns.

[chambersenator 106]

9 hours ago, gorvi said:

Will there be some sort of system which virtually tracts their movements and life cycles? 

Infected "age/life cycles" is something the did some work on quite a while ago, and the devs have some soild concepts about how they want that aspect to work. You have to go back quite a while in the Status Reports to find them, but they have talked about it a good bit. 

It's quite possible that the reason it's not fully implemented is that at some point, they realized that to do it efficiently and properly, other parts of the code would need to be updated first, so it was put aside until later (like an improved handler for AI behavior, better ways to manage and track AI, etc).

IIRC, there can be a 'middle' state for AI that is in between 'despawned' and 'spawned' that is a 'simulated' state (which has been in ArmA for a long time). This means their positions and status are saved, but they are not fully rendered into the game until they are needed. It's a far more efficient way of handling large numbers of AI on a map, without having to devote server resources to managing AI that are miles away from any players. That simulated state might have to be a bit more complex than the one in ArmA, so that it can save their state upon despawning, and when spawned again, their age/life cycle is adjusted accordingly (and adjust that depending on the time acceleration of the server, too).

However, there are other challenges to this that need to be considered. If you only use the above system, you're stuck with a set infected population that might be huge when the server starts, but after a couple hours can end up with most of the infected removed from the server. So to balance this out, you have to add in a system that is adding in new infected, but do so in a way that doesn't end up making the 'age/lifespan' thing barely noticeable after a couple hours.

So I think we'll be seeing pretty much what you describe down the road, but there may be other new aspects with infected put in the game before that is in that may significantly change/influence it. 

 

 

  

[gorvi 189]

1 hour ago, chambersenator said:

However, there are other challenges to this that need to be considered. If you only use the above system, you're stuck with a set infected population that might be huge when the server starts, but after a couple hours can end up with most of the infected removed from the server. So to balance this out, you have to add in a system that is adding in new infected, but do so in a way that doesn't end up making the 'age/lifespan' thing barely noticeable after a couple hours.

Regarding fresh infected spawns, I wonder if it could be part of their migration cycles.  In example.  Theres a lot of cities to the west of Chernarus which are inaccessible to the player.  It would be safe to assume most would migrate from west to east seeing that infected are drawn to light and the sun rise in the east.  Once in Chernarus, infected will begin to randomly travel until they stumble upon cities, light sources, herds, or noises such as generators where they start to settle and gather.  This could also be subject to cites which haven't been visited by a player for a long time.  The tracking system would know if player proximity to a city is less then 24 hours, and if the number of current infected under certain amount it would virtually spawn more infected.

 

One issue some players have with the map is how the North and West boarders are going to work.  I think it would be a good idea to have it filled in with very thick woods instead of some sort of invisible wall.  The deeper the player gets, the more fresh infected or predator animals are spawned which are programmed to automatically target the player(s) until they return to the map.

[chambersenator 106]

1 minute ago, gorvi said:

One issue some players have with the map is how the North and West boarders are going to work.  I think it would be a good idea to have it filled in with very thick woods instead of some sort of invisible wall.  The deeper the player gets, the more fresh infected or predator animals are spawned which are programmed to automatically target the player(s) until they return to the map.

Unfortunately, do to the way the map system works, it's not possible to expand to the north and west in any practical way. Everything on the map uses the NW corner as a reference point - loot, buildings, trees, rocks, water... everything, and the position handling code has a huge problem with stuff outside the map borders (as it's a negative value, and that causes no end of issues). 

You might then ask "well, why don't they just move the reference point?" Unfortunately, that ends up forcing you to pretty much re-make the map from scratch, then adjust every single script and line of code  that involves, references, or calculates, position data accordingly. It makes the work needed to make a winter version of Chernarus look as easy as making one of those "hand turkeys" kids make in elementary school by drawing an outline of their hand and coloring it in, and maybe gluing some macaroni to it as well

 

 

 

[gorvi 189]

12 minutes ago, chambersenator said:

Unfortunately, do to the way the map system works, it's not possible to expand to the north and west in any practical way.

I'm aware of this.  I'm not talking about expanding the map, rather making the North and West edges very thick with trees and using other natural barriers such as cliffs and stuff

Edited February 6, 2018 by gorvi

[Sqeezorz 839]

On experimental you see your position.

X0;Y0 are on the west/sud corner.

The map datazone are defined to ~15300m..  all on outside this range are Debugzone... its not possible to make a aktion from serverside...  i think its not possible to activate a deadzone... its debugzone... and or "Neverland".

And moving the grid is not possible, which means the only possibility is that this spawn / edge zone must still be on the current map. But that would make sense, the border would have to be provided with a wall that has holes where all the spawns come from ... and the wall would have to contaminate everything with a sick guy that nobody survived ("Brain Flu" ^^.)

This raises the question: do we want something like that?

[gorvi 189]

12 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

On experimental you see your position.

X0;Y0 are on the west/sud corner.

The map datazone are defined to ~15300m..  all on outside this range are Debugzone... its not possible to make a aktion from serverside...  i think its not possible to activate a deadzone... its debugzone... and or "Neverland".

And moving the grid is not possible, which means the only possibility is that this spawn / edge zone must still be on the current map. But that would make sense, the border would have to be provided with a wall that has holes where all the spawns come from ... and the wall would have to contaminate everything with a sick guy that nobody survived ("Brain Flu" ^^.)

This raises the question: do we want something like that?

I dont need an actual wall or anything.  Rather, I would like to see some sort of game mechanic or gameplay which deters players from venturing that far to the maps edge.  Increasing infected or predator spawns coupled with natural or biological barriers would be a great way to achieve this.

[chambersenator 106]

1 hour ago, gorvi said:

I'm aware of this.  I'm not talking about expanding the map, rather making the North and West edges very thick with trees and using other natural barriers such as cliffs and stuff

Ah, I see what you mean. That is an option. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but to me that solution feels more artificial than going with something like making the areas outside the map cause you to take damage in some form, and just call it a kind of extreme 'contaminated zone'

 

23 minutes ago, Sqeezorz said:

On experimental you see your position.X0;Y0 are on the west/sud corner.

Whoops, I guess I got my SW and SE corners mixed up. 6 years of this game and ArmA, and I still mix those up. In any case, the devs have said many times over the years that expanding north and west just aren't possible.

Quote

 i think its not possible to activate a deadzone... its debugzone... and or "Neverland".

 You're not wrong about the limitations about triggers outside the map borders, but I'm almost positive there IS a way to do create a forbidden/contaminated zone for the areas outside the map, and I think there was even an A2 mod that had it.

Of course, the devs would be able to approach this differently, but if I was making a DayZ SA mod, I might do it this way:

If I understand this right, you can do it in two steps. First, you place a long, thin trigger area a few feet wide all along the map edge, and set the action to start progressively hurting you when you enter that area. So as soon as you cross that line, the damage starts and doesn't start.

Second, you create another, wider trigger area on the inside edge of the first one. That second trigger area checks to see if you are taking that 'outside the map' damage, and if so triggers a stop command for the damage. 

So it would kind of look like

 

- - - - -  map edge - - - - - - - - - -

trigger 1 (start taking damage)

- - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - -   -- 

trigger 2 (check if you are taking damage, if so, stop killing you)

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - -

 

It probably could be done with a single trigger, but I suspect having them separate would be a more reliable, fault-tolerant method to make sure everything works as intended.

It's admittedly a hasty, slap-dash modder solution, but it is fairly straightforward and simple. 

Edited February 6, 2018 by chambersenator

[chambersenator 106]

9 minutes ago, gorvi said:

I dont need an actual wall or anything.  Rather, I would like to see some sort of game mechanic or gameplay which deters players from venturing that far to the maps edge.  Increasing infected or predator spawns coupled with natural or biological barriers would be a great way to achieve this.

Alas, the AI can't cross the map edge as far as I know. I've seen people take advantage of that to escape wolf packs up near Tisy. I almost didn't want to mention it at all, as I see that as unsportsmanlike at best, and exploiting at worst, but knowing about it and using that knowledge to your advantage are separate things.    

[gorvi 189]

6 minutes ago, chambersenator said:

Alas, the AI can't cross the map edge as far as I know

The AI doesn't have to cross the edge of the map.  Just spawn in the woods which boarder it.

 

Using AI to the players advantage, assuming your not glitching, should always be encouraged within DayZ

[chambersenator 106]

Just now, gorvi said:

The AI doesn't have to cross the edge of the map.  Just spawn in the woods which boarder it.

Yeah, but then you still can just hop outside the map border and be in total safety. Of course, you could put in that 'contaminated zone' thing, but then what's the point of having the infected on the border? 

Using the border to escape AI is one of those things that people can be against in general, but eventually a situation will come up where it starts to feel like "It's ok, just this one time. I've got so much invested in this. Who's ever going to know?" I don't know, it just feels like a solution that ends up being more of a problem than it solves. 

I'd much prefer a solution that does not accentuate a limitation of an unrelated part of the game. It's better have a solution that doesn't include a tempting option to exploit such limitations (the AI border limit) as sort of compromise in order to prevent a more serious exploitation (using the off-map areas for safe travelling in general). 

 

 

 

 

 

[gorvi 189]

1 hour ago, chambersenator said:

Of course, you could put in that 'contaminated zone' thing, but then what's the point of having the infected on the border? 

Yes.  This is the idea behind natural or biological barriers.  The infected having increased spawns and/or their life cycles begin there will deter players from wanting to hang around the very edge of the map when most gameplay should be focused away from it.

1 hour ago, chambersenator said:

doesn't include a tempting option to exploit such limitations

This is the whole idea.  To stop players from exploiting the map boarder either by pinning players against an arbitrary game mechanic such as invisible walls or by camping near the boarder.  A never ending stream of infected coming in from the rest of the region coupled with predators, biohazards, and naturally blocking terrain would make a great way to counter this.

Edited February 6, 2018 by gorvi

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

@chambersenator @gorvi You guys should make a separate thread for your discussion. c:

I'm going to lock this thread since the question was answered and it's completely derailed.

[Dancing.Russian.Man 1631]

@chambersenator @gorvi You guys should make a separate thread for your discussion. c:

I'm going to lock this thread since the question was answered and it's completely derailed.