Some feedback and questions

[Derleth 1357]

Hello there, I wanted to provide some feedback and ask a couple of questions. Since Martin said so, I'm tagging @ImpulZ and @Baty Alquawen , sorry! Here goes:

STAMINA
I'm not a hater, quite the opposite. Stamina has definitely added a new dimension to the gameplay and I do not want to play without it. That said, I am active on a RP server (Tribez) that decided on infinite stamina after a poll with the server population came up with that result. So I have noticed that since with infinite stamina you never get out of breath, you also have no increased weapon sway after prolonged sprinting. You can literally sprint for minutes, then just raise your weapon, ADS, and have regular sway. In 0.62 you would have violent weapon sway for quite some time until you caught your breath.

This needs to come back. Maybe infinite sprinting as a possible toggle available to the server owner could be a thing? Basically the toggle should make it so drained stamina does not block sprinting while any other action related to stamina is unaffected. That way you can have unlimited sprinting but still be out of breath and need a moment’s rest before the weapon sway settles down.

Another thing I find a bit off with the stamina system is how the penalty for weight carried has no gradients. Maximum stamina is reduced by weight carried and if you carry too much you're blocked from sprinting/jumping/holding breath. So far so good. What I find odd is that as long as you don't cross that magical limit of weight carried, you can run around and jump just as freely as a player not carrying any gear at all (I know there's a slight penalty for double carrying). It would make more sense if sprinting speed and distance jumped were gradually decreased until no longer possible at all. Is this anything you have thought of?

NIGHTS

I wrote on twitter a few days ago about this. First of all – I love the dark nights and want them to stay! However, in reality night is not always that dark, not even in remote areas with little or no light pollution. When the sky is clear with moon and stars providing some light, you can see enough to move around easily without bumping into things. Currently in-game the moon is just too weak,  the ground is not illuminated at all, and stars are downright feeble. It is as if a light reducing filter is over everything. Here is the twitter thread, with some comparative screenshots and explanations:

So, my question is - will you be taking a look at the ambient light provided by moon and stars at night?

Again, I have no problem at all with it being pitch black in the middle of night with thick cloud cover, but when the moon is out night really needs to be brighter than it is now.

Also, I saw a post on the forum where some claim the night is darker on some systems than others. I remember from 0.63 alpha that the game was brighter on screen when I was playing than how screenshots turned out. That could be related, no?

INFECTED

They have improved immensely with the last few updates. They are almost perfect now – they just need to be able to break down doors (yeah I am serious) and they will be a downright menace. And please make them eat players they have killed! I know you have (had) the animations for it already. Proof: here and here 😉

COOKING

At the moment there is little or no reason to cook meat at all since you can eat it raw without any risk of getting sick. There was food poisoning during 0.63 so why did it disappear at 1.0? Anyway cooking really needs some love, for example by combining different ingredients to make actual dishes. There is already a mod where you can make a stew, this needs to be made baseline and be the best form of food (by far) when it comes to nutrients and energy provided. And, really, a person would need to be beyond desperate to eat raw rice out of the bag... We should be able to boil the rice, and mix powdered milk with water to make milk – and eat with cereal.

And coffee! By the heavens we need coffee! 

Edited February 14, 2019 by Derleth

[rickyriot 1009]

3 hours ago, Derleth said:

INFECTED

They have improved immensely with the last few updates. They are almost perfect now – they just need to be able to break down doors (yeah I am serious) and they will be a downright menace. And please make them eat players they have killed! I know you have (had) the animations for it already. Proof: here and here 😉

"They are almost perfect now"

[ImpulZ 2491]

Hi and thank you for your feedback/suggestions,

I will try to give some details on our stance on those, as most have them have already been discussed internally.

1. Stamina: The issue is caused by modders implementing infinite stamina. Meaning we would have to do major changes to the stamina system to make this work. Currently, this is not a priority, as we still have many features/content to implement for the base game, before being able to provide advanced assistance for better mods.

Gradually decreased walking speed is not easily doable with the current animation implementation, as we would require again way more sets of different animations to fit different walking/jogging/sprinting speeds.

2. Nights: This light configs are still being looked into, but I can't give any details on how it will be balanced in the future. It is true, that the night sky and moon should provide a certain amount of additional lighting.

3. Infected: While them breaking down doors might be part of a later implementation, the feeding on dead bodies is more of an optical design decision. We forwarded it to Peter.

4. Food poisoning will return in a certain form eventually. However, an advanced cooking system was not promised so far from our side. Meaning it would be an additional commitment to pursue on top of our already quite extensive backlog of features and content that needs to be brought into the game. So do not expect something like this to be in our focus anytime soon, as much as it fits the setting.

[Weyland Yutani (DayZ) 1159]

3 hours ago, ImpulZ said:

2. Nights: This light configs are still being looked into, but I can't give any details on how it will be balanced in the future. It is true, that the night sky and moon should provide a certain amount of additional lighting.

I can solve this problem.

Back in the first months of SA each town had a single street light on and the Pipsi soda machines lit up. I knew y'all were considering it otherwise there would have been no street light on at all anywhere. This could be an opt-in/opt-out feature for server admins.

In a discussion about authenticity, Hicks once said you need to make concessions for the overall gameplay to be fun...gameplay can be boring if the systems become too realistic.

I posed the street lights question to HIcks during a Q&A at some gaming convention and he said something about tripod lights (blegh) and that street lights will be an avenue for modders. A really good modder Danny Dog tried making a street lights mod but wasn't able to get it working without massive performance hits after 10 lights being on or something similar. If a top modder can't get it working, modders won't be able to get it working at all.

Before you completely dismiss street lights, just listen to this idea...

For those players that are far outside of cities/towns/villages, sorry...its going to be dark and players can use flashlights, glow sticks, campfires, etc.

Players that are within eyeshot of a town, they will see street lights off in the distance lighting their way...very helpful for navigation. Once players get into cities, the cone shaped light from the lamp would spill perfectly on the street giving you barely enough light to loot by. I'm more interested in ambiance, not complete visibility. Maybe add some flickering or make 2 out of 5 lamps on the street actually work. In my experience, this makes infected super scary because you can hear them but the cover of darkness with small light to navigate by makes it so you're not really sure where they're at.

Y'all could go two ways with this.

1. Make street lights an opt-in/opt-out feature so admins have a choice. Choice is important right?
2. Make the power grid stations fixable by adding some small assets players need to get along with some tools (current or additional) to fix a power station. Once fixed, the power station will light the area its in. What this does is lower the impact on server performance because the entire server isn't lit up all the time. Especially area's of the map that don't get much action, just sections. Pushing forward, lets say you get Elektro up and running, maybe that effects Msta or maybe players have to daisy-chain power grids to light up additional area's at once. Make it fun and players will jump on it.

I know y'all put in those staging lights on the tripods, but I always knew it would be an unrealistic hassle to use them to light up anything more than a small camp. Its a cool idea, but people aren't using them much.

Thank you.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Weyland Yutani (DayZ)

[Carey Brown 4]

I am absolutely in favor of this. There are a lot of street lights, power lines, and buildings in the game. Right now, our light sources are limited to flashlights, construction lights , Christmas lights, torches, and a gas lamp. It devalues generators greatly if all they can do is run a strand of Christmas lights on a tent, or a construction light. Being able to tie a generator into existing street lights means having a much more capable base, adds significant value to generators, and would really drive home the importance/desire to build a base/homestead, all the while emphasize the importance of defending it from Zeds.

[Tim Keyes 21]

I second what Carey has said. DayZ devs have clearly already done hard work making a generator item and implementing it into the game, but it has very low value. Running some Christmas lights, or a nearby construction lamp, is a terrible ROI for both the work done to create the generator on BI's part, and for the work done by players to get and set up and fuel and connect a generator. Being able to, say, connect that generator to a power grid (even if it's just a few street lights on an intact line) or the light posts commonly found on farms and industrial sites, is a much larger return. This would be very popular with players like myself, as long term game content, once there is no more gear to find and collect for yourself.

Getting power generation systems working would also be fun, and would give some actual use for things like the Electrical Repair Kit. Although things like downed or damaged power lines or other issues might prevent large scale repair, players would *love* to have more ways to affect and change the game world.

PS, I don't play at night unless I have no choice for some reason. I can't see what I'm doing and that's not fun for a game.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Tim Keyes

[Weyland Yutani (DayZ) 1159]

29 minutes ago, Carey Brown said:

I am absolutely in favor of this. There are a lot of street lights, power lines, and buildings in the game. Right now, our light sources are limited to flashlights, construction lights , Christmas lights, torches, and a gas lamp. It devalues generators greatly if all they can do is run a strand of Christmas lights on a tent, or a construction light. Being able to tie a generator into existing street lights means having a much more capable base, adds significant value to generators, and would really drive home the importance/desire to build a base/homestead, all the while emphasize the importance of defending it from Zeds.

 

5 minutes ago, Tim Keyes said:

I second what Carey has said. DayZ devs have clearly already done hard work making a generator item and implementing it into the game, but it has very low value. Running some Christmas lights, or a nearby construction lamp, is a terrible ROI for both the work done to create the generator on BI's part, and for the work done by players to get and set up and fuel and connect a generator. Being able to, say, connect that generator to a power grid (even if it's just a few street lights on an intact line) or the light posts commonly found on farms and industrial sites, is a much larger return. This would be very popular with players like myself, as long term game content, once there is no more gear to find and collect for yourself.

Getting power generation systems working would also be fun, and would give some actual use for things like the Electrical Repair Kit. Although things like downed or damaged power lines or other issues might prevent large scale repair, players would *love* to have more ways to affect and change the game world.

Not sure if you guys have seen what's in the COM (Community Offline Mode) but there are pretty big generators that are the size of a truck. Not sure if that would end up beig too much work for players as there is a tipping point. Either way, we need street lights.

[Guy Smiley 534]

Lol, I love it.  I really applaud you guys and your creativity but please, go run a power station all by yourself to get some lights working and tell me how that goes

[BCBasher 2465]

I think getting the power plant up and running would be cool if ti was  community effort type thing, good luck with the average player-base's cooperation level, they appear to be coal or LNG running turbines and should require, electrical and steam system repair plus someone to make sure the boilers are fueled somehow.

The only thing the bulk of players seem to be able to do cooperatively is hoarding mil equipment for quick respawn to killing turnaround like the lemmings they are.

A more realistic game play model would be using the generator to back feed a towns grid from the utility building or something?

As far as attempts at just lighting the streetlights through code, light sources look pretty good but seem super intensive on the current client in my experience, 5-10 FPS turning my truck lights on, I do believe they're still in the realm of legacy systems and new modules fighting each other and being worked on, fingers crossed.

[swampthing_42 0]

Just wanted to say that I love the work you guys have done and appreciate the time and effort you put into the game. Just wanted to say that I'm a big fan of the night mode in the game. Adds a sense of realism to the game adding a sense of urgency when that sun starts to go down. Tactics have to be adjusted to be successful in dealing with infected and hostile players during night play Love the night, hope it stays in our game DayZ.

[Tim Keyes 21]

6 minutes ago, Guy Smiley said:

Lol, I love it.  I really applaud you guys and your creativity but please, go run a power station all by yourself to get some lights working and tell me how that goes

The game assumes every survivor is a superhuman that can rebuild and then drive/fly cars and helicopters, administer an IV, is Gordon Freeman when it comes to guns, and is amazingly resilient to damage. I'm willing to suspend a little disbelief for some electricity with work.

[Guy Smiley 534]

Just now, Tim Keyes said:

The game assumes every survivor is a superhuman that can rebuild and then drive/fly cars and helicopters, administer an IV, is Gordon Freeman when it comes to guns, and is amazingly resilient to damage. I'm willing to suspend a little disbelief for some electricity with work.

Speaking of superhuman.  Apparently we also have night vision and can see clearly in the dark according to some forum posters

[Tim Keyes 21]

6 minutes ago, Guy Smiley said:

Speaking of superhuman.  Apparently we also have night vision and can see clearly in the dark according to some forum posters

Fair point.  I'd still like to see the additional end game content getting electricity (on a small scale) going would provide.  Since there isn't much left to do once you are geared and have build a base.

[BCBasher 2465]

1 minute ago, Guy Smiley said:

Speaking of superhuman.  Apparently we also have night vision and can see clearly in the dark according to some forum posters

That's contentious, I live in the country, it actually looks lot like Chenarus I spend a fair bit of time outdoors at night when the weather is nice. As a teen I used to cross farm fields and wooded thickets getting from my house to visit my GF and the last thing you want to do is wave a flashlight around and get shot by a farmer's salt gun, not a lot different form how I'd loot in an apocalypse. My eyes adjust real quick and I can see in the "dark" as long as there's stars out and really well if even a sliver of the moon out, in the exact same situation my wife who grew up in the city and always uses the light on her phone is blind as a bat even after the average half hour to adjust. 

There's a genetic/environmental factor there that even if implemented, no one would make their character have shit night vision because they do in real life, just need some middle ground.

Like they need more on their plate but a softskill from playing at night no lights and avoiding daytime play or religiously wearing sunglasses in the daytime would be a neat mechanic, similar to how they trained WW2 pilots eyes for night operations before NVGs. 

[Weyland Yutani (DayZ) 1159]

Some people just want to hate their way through DayZ and this is exactly why I have the ignore function on blast. Unfortunately, quotes still come through. Maybe the web dev here can fix that?

Moving forward, lets try something that actually worked instead? VAST VAST minority think night is ok. Thats fine, you can OPT-IN or OPT-OUT with my suggestion.

If you don't like it, beat the street and opt-out...not sure how I can type that in a simpler form. If you don't like it, find a server you do like. I'm sick and tired of 24/7 day and when the lights go off the server pop drops 95%. This has been going on since the dang mod. 

NVG's are wack and the idea should be canned. Worst idea DayZ ever thought of actually. I think Dean wanted them globally rare anyway. It turns the game into a mil-sim and who the hell wants to run around looking at a green screen? Man that is scary to see green innit?

[BCBasher 2465]

1 hour ago, Weyland Yutani (DayZ) said:

*snip*

NVG's are wack and the idea should be canned. Worst idea DayZ ever thought of actually. I think Dean wanted them globally rare anyway. It turns the game into a mil-sim and who the hell wants to run around looking at a green screen? Man that is scary to see green innit?

NVGs are in the types.xml file already but disabled.

I have not enabled them in my testing to see if they're complete, my guess is they will be eventually.

[Menno 0]

This is an amazing idea! One of the biggest strengths of this game is that it allows players (who want to) to create their own narrative. Over the years in dayZ I've seen so many amazing examples this, and judging by how many RP servers there are out there, many others feel the same way I do. Just having the option of turning on streetlights/power lines would be fantastic. Sure, most people in RL don't know the first thing about doing it, but if most of the population turned undead, getting lights at night would be high on the list and we'd figure it out pretty quick. :)

[Guy Smiley 534]

6 hours ago, Weyland Yutani (DayZ) said:

Some people just want to hate their way through DayZ and this is exactly why I have the ignore function on blast. Unfortunately, quotes still come through. Maybe the web dev here can fix that?

Moving forward, lets try something that actually worked instead? VAST VAST minority think night is ok. Thats fine, you can OPT-IN or OPT-OUT with my suggestion.

If you don't like it, beat the street and opt-out...not sure how I can type that in a simpler form. If you don't like it, find a server you do like. I'm sick and tired of 24/7 day and when the lights go off the server pop drops 95%. This has been going on since the dang mod. 

NVG's are wack and the idea should be canned. Worst idea DayZ ever thought of actually. I think Dean wanted them globally rare anyway. It turns the game into a mil-sim and who the hell wants to run around looking at a green screen? Man that is scary to see green innit?

I got a better idea.  Instead of being ignorant and telling people to play your way or hit the highway, play a modded server and leave the vanilla alone.

[ImpulZ 2491]

Hello guys,

just a quick reminder that we are watching. Please try to keep personal attacks out of this discussion and stay with the topic (the suggestions made by OP). There are several ways to play DayZ and both the Vanilla and modded versions still have a lot of iteration ahead of them, to unfold their true direction and potential. Stay civilised and respect each others preferences/suggestions.

[Derleth 1357]

21 hours ago, ImpulZ said:

Hi and thank you for your feedback/suggestions,

I will try to give some details on our stance on those, as most have them have already been discussed internally.

1. Stamina: The issue is caused by modders implementing infinite stamina. Meaning we would have to do major changes to the stamina system to make this work. Currently, this is not a priority, as we still have many features/content to implement for the base game, before being able to provide advanced assistance for better mods.

Gradually decreased walking speed is not easily doable with the current animation implementation, as we would require again way more sets of different animations to fit different walking/jogging/sprinting speeds.

2. Nights: This light configs are still being looked into, but I can't give any details on how it will be balanced in the future. It is true, that the night sky and moon should provide a certain amount of additional lighting.

3. Infected: While them breaking down doors might be part of a later implementation, the feeding on dead bodies is more of an optical design decision. We forwarded it to Peter.

4. Food poisoning will return in a certain form eventually. However, an advanced cooking system was not promised so far from our side. Meaning it would be an additional commitment to pursue on top of our already quite extensive backlog of features and content that needs to be brought into the game. So do not expect something like this to be in our focus anytime soon, as much as it fits the setting.

Thanks for your answer ImpulZ!

1. Okay, I hear you. My thought with the toggle was that it could potentially be an easy (from a user perspective anyway, I know jack all about coding, sorry...) way to allow the obviously popular infinite sprinting to be implemented, without making the game go full arcade which is what you get with the current way server owners do it. 

2. Allright, thanks, good to know it is still being worked on. Again really do I appreciate the way dark nights change the way you approach the game, less running and gunning and more survival. It's just that clear nights should be brighter, right now it feels like I'm wearing shades at night.

Oh and guys, I love the suggestions above about streetlights. Having streetlights magically working without power source is not something that would fit DayZ, but being able to connect a generator to get the nearest lights working would be awesome.

3. Thanks again. Oh yeah - in the latest stable patch I've had a few cases of infected seemingly pushing each other through walls. Just this morning I aggroed the better part of Gorka's population and had to lock myself in the police station with them milling about outside. Two were pushed inside and jumped me... It only seems to happen when there are a lot of infected locked on to the player inside the building.

4. Fair enough. Since there's at least one mod now where you can make a stew by boiling meat and veggies together, I'll be hoping for more mods like that appearing. But please add coffee!

[Derleth 1357]

22 hours ago, rickyriot said:

"They are almost perfect now"

 

Well okay, perfect was maybe too strong a wrong word still, but yeah I love the way infected can be a real threat if you don't take them seriously. The other day when I respawned after a server wipe I aggroed every infected I could find around Solnichniy and led them (around 10-15, I didn't have time to count...) on a chase around the town to see how they behaved. They were hopping over fences and following me around obstacles without getting stuck, stuttering or glitching as they have been in the past. When I ran into houses they followed, when I jumped into the ocean they stood screaming at the edge but then came running for the beach where I climbed out of the water.

Infected behaviour and pathfinding really is in much better shape now. I just want them to knock down doors and feed on corpses too. Oh yeah, a little more of them by default and dynamic horde events wouldn't hurt either..

[AXEL777 2]

you need feedback? read this:

 

[Gobbokirk 546]

On 2/14/2019 at 1:23 PM, Derleth said:

And coffee! By the heavens we need coffee! 

Got to have our wake up juice 😄
We have boars, we have chickens, egg & bacon breakfast should be up there as well 🙂

[cirkular 178]

@ImpulZ Thanks for getting more involved into forum discussions in the last period, ImpulZ

First concerning daylight and lighting in general, will the interiors lighting be looked into any soon?

Second, about night lighting, you already gave some answer here and I'm glad that it's being looked into. But I'm giving my opinion and a question here, TLDR joining with other people complaining about pitch-black night lighting.

I'm not the one for quitting when the night falls. I liked playing the game when the night falls. But somewhere from 1.0 to the patch prior to last one, the nights are really unplayable to me without increasing in-game brightness a click. I'm playing with really dim light on in the room. I didn't change my graphic drivers or settings and I really don't want to have to fool around with monitor settings etc. or make my room pich black just to be able to play. Meaning when roaming around, I can't really see terrain, fences or buildings edges without increasing this in-game setting. But of course, the way the anti-gamma exploit works now is making it all bland and grey. Which is fine to exist, but I'd say it's somewhat playable and ugly for me.

Now, I really don't know what's the current mechanic and how simple is this to do. I was playing yesterday a bit on a daylight time server, it was around noon I think, the sun was really high up. I climbed the top of the apartment buildings in Cherno and looked around with binoculars. I was looking into the apartments which are on the non-sunlit side of the building opposite of me. After I lowered the binos, I could notice that the gamma/brightness actually went up a bit, then scaled down again to normal after a second. Which means the game has this kind of natural changes to simulate the player character's eyes getting used to different lighting.

Is it difficult to make an increase in this direction during nights? Meaning that as it gets darker and darker, we get this increase and our "eyes" get used to dark. Again, I assume there is something like that already in the game during nights. Using light or looking at it should get you blinded for a moment and cancel this "effect" thus bringing back the levels to normal. We could at least discern some of these details I mentioned like terrain/buildings/fence edges so we can move around a bit more at ease without manipulating stuff in our settings. I'm a city boy but country side or non-urban light during nights is not unknown to me. I'm sure you've seen the screenshots of other people already and the game is really pitch black outdoors.

[Weyland Yutani (DayZ) 1159]

20 hours ago, BCBasher said:

NVGs are in the types.xml file already but disabled.

I have not enabled them in my testing to see if they're complete, my guess is they will be eventually.

That's just the headstrap.