DayZ Update 1.12

[William Sternritter 441]

26 minutes ago, DefectiveWater said:

So good change would be to limit max hydration, and make it go down a bit quicker? This would make us have to space it out a bit more instead of just chugging an entire canteen and being alright for a few hours of playtime.

I never have food or thirst issues when I'm inland and I feel like it's way too easy to stay alive inland, so any change that makes inland survival harder (food/water, not cold) is good for me.

Something like that yes, to better represent the real hydration cycle. 

Also it's not hard to stay fed or hydrated and there is no reason it should be. As soon as you can hunt animals you're usually fine and it only reveals how poorly implemented the cycle is. By making food and water go away quickly, the only effect is that you eat more, but eating more is not a problem. In my opinion just because it is a survival game that does not mean hunger and thirst must chime in every two hours otherwise you're not "surviving". It would definitely be more interesting to have longer digestion cycles as you do IRL but have less food to go around. That way, when you gather a significant amount of food it will make a real difference and it will make food a bartering commodity and a resource that you value. 

Now, you snack all the time and you must always look for the next food source but it feels like grind instead of survival. 

[DefectiveWater 491]

1 hour ago, William Sternritter said:

Also it's not hard to stay fed or hydrated and there is no reason it should be

In my opinion it should be harder to find food in towns the more inland you go, food should spawn, but it should be rarer.

Going through the most northern towns like severograd in 1.11 would literally give you full food AND you would still have full inventory of rice and jam.

Whatever makes surviving inland (except cold, I hate when we are forced to have certain types of clothes) is fine by me, because initially the first 10-15 minutes are harder than the rest of the game, and game becomes very boring after like 45 minutes to an hour and a half if you play solo. Too much food, players are nowhere to be seen, zeds are zeds and guns... well finding mosins inland isn't hard, especially deagles or magnums. I once found like 6-7 magnums in novaya petrovka in 1.11. Tossed them all inside a furnance and ruined them to force the game to respawn them someplace else.

I've done F11 multiple times playing high pop official servers because I literally had like 300 ammo of 5.56, a ton of food, full food and water, and yet I could never find anyone. Either make loot scale with player count, or something.

Edited April 22, 2021 by DefectiveWater

[McWendy 675]

If you take a look at the Day/Night cycle which is not a full 24 hours then how is it not in ratio to have to eat every hour/2 hours?

Time is accelerated, so why not Hunger/thirst?

No opinion Just food for thought.

 

Edited April 22, 2021 by McWendy

[Private Evans 1303]

Exactly this is why I am relatively happy with the hunger/food/nutrition system as ist is now. It is mabye not perfect but the ballance between having to eat constantly but finding a lot of food items is fine now, especially taking time acceleration into account. All we need now is a proper ballance between hunger and thirst mechanics..something like DefectiveWater suggested.

I agree though that it feels more of a grind mechanic and I also agree that after a while, once one has geared up completely, survival is getting too easy. But this is another story right now the absolute basic things still need tweaking..

 

Edited April 22, 2021 by Private Evans

[William Sternritter 441]

3 hours ago, McWendy said:

If you take a look at the Day/Night cycle which is not a full 24 hours then how is it not in ratio to have to eat every hour/2 hours?

Time is accelerated, so why not Hunger/thirst?

No opinion Just food for thought.

 

I thought that, but after playing on 1x server, I'm not so convinced. I think the time accelaration is just the day/night cycle and nothing else.

[DefectiveWater 491]

6 minutes ago, William Sternritter said:

I thought that, but after playing on 1x server, I'm not so convinced. I think the time accelaration is just the day/night cycle and nothing else.

This is probably true, but the default values were made with accelerated time in mind. Probably all it has to have is an additional multiplier that scales up/down said hunger/thirst values accordingly.

[McWendy 675]

4 hours ago, William Sternritter said:

I thought that, but after playing on 1x server, I'm not so convinced. I think the time accelaration is just the day/night cycle and nothing else.

I think way back in the original starting values it was something they thought of in relation to the Day/Night cycle. 

The values Just never got decent attention or scaling through the development process. 

[Tonyeh 444]

16 hours ago, Private Evans said:

That's right but if we are talking gameplay/survival mechanics then it should be clear that staying hydrated by constantly eating fruits and vegetables completely counters the thirst/hydration gameplay loop.This includes not only the need of water but also the need of finding purification tabs, canteens or plastic bottles.....so if we keep the hydration amount of food for the sake of realism but also want a proper ballance between hunger and thirst mechanics, we have to make sure the hydration level goes down a bit faster than now. I am playing now for about 9 hours with my current char and all I had on liquids was 2 or 3 cans of Kvass and Spite, seeing my thirst level never leaving the white icon.

 

It depends on what else you've been eating. Canned tuna, sardines or even dogfood will contain a lot of moisture to keep your body hydrated and eliminate the need to hydrate by actually drinking a liquid. If you were eating drier foods, your little bottle wouldn't be so white. My current toon has stuffed himself with boxes of cereal, bags rice and snacks of some sort, but my bottle was yellow despite that. Only got white when I found a water fountain.

Also, I think the temp may play a part too, but I'm not sure if it's a mechanic in the game. But every server is very cold at the moment and you lose liquid much slower in such temperatures. I think if we ever see a July server for DayZ, actually staying hydrated by drinking a liquid will become much more important.

Either way, I don't think the little water bottle thing is the worst issue with nourishment in DayZ at the moment. It's the outrageous amounts of stuffing that a player has to engage in to stop his toon from keeling over. But I agree that, in general, nourishment needs to be looked at in a better way.

[Tonyeh 444]

15 hours ago, William Sternritter said:

I would rather say that mushrooms and fruits should not give you as much hydration, if you want to change something. There was a time where you could survive on those alone because they spawned fast and kept you both fed and hydrated. However; now they are quite rare because you have to be on a location for considerable amount of time, they rot away and they may hydrate you ok but do not feed you. 

Because honestly, the speed at which you become thirsty and hungry  again it just stupid at the moment. You spawn in and immediately go to being thirsty and hungry. Heat is completely off balance, all you need is one layer that is not best insulation and you're constantly cold no matter what you do, in turn your food goes down rapidly. 

On the other hand, how many bottles of water a day do you need to drink to avoid being thirsty? Drinking 4-5 cans of liquid is definitely more than enough to keep you hydrated. It's actually quite weird that you can drink 4-5 cans one after another and your thirst meter is like ... yeah maybe I can go up now. 

On average a man does well on about 2 litres of liquid ingested AFAIK. But as I mentioned earlier, most of that will come from the food we eat. We don't actually need to guzzle down bottles of water etc. In fact, drinking a lot of water can have the negative side effect of producing more urine much quicker and end up dehydrating you. Although in the game this is not modelled.

But yeh, the hunger/thirst situation in the game is way off. It's a mad dash to not starve at the beginning and then you never have to worry about it again.

[Tonyeh 444]

15 hours ago, DefectiveWater said:

So good change would be to limit max hydration, and make it go down a bit quicker? This would make us have to space it out a bit more instead of just chugging an entire canteen and being alright for a few hours of playtime.

I never have food or thirst issues when I'm inland and I feel like it's way too easy to stay alive inland, so any change that makes inland survival harder (food/water, not cold) is good for me.

I've always thought that a toon should start off with a fuller stomach, so the crazy dash to not starve at the beginning is eliminated. BUT...food sources should be rarer throughout the entire map making your nutrition stats actually something a player needs to monitor.

As things stand, the only time a player is worried about food is at the start of a toon's life. But once you get a knife and kill and eat 500 chickens you're grand.

[Derleth 1352]

5 hours ago, Tonyeh said:

I've always thought that a toon should start off with a fuller stomach, so the crazy dash to not starve at the beginning is eliminated. BUT...food sources should be rarer throughout the entire map making your nutrition stats actually something a player needs to monitor.

As things stand, the only time a player is worried about food is at the start of a toon's life. But once you get a knife and kill and eat 500 chickens you're grand.

They added all the new foodstuffs without adjusting the existing food spawns, so the economy is overly bloated with ready-to-eat food right now, I expect that to be adjusted later. And yeah, a little more energy at first would be a good thing combined with rarer food, just look at how Sumrak himself did it with Namalsk - and that works really well. 

[DefectiveWater 491]

7 hours ago, Tonyeh said:

I've always thought that a toon should start off with a fuller stomach, so the crazy dash to not starve at the beginning is eliminated. BUT...food sources should be rarer throughout the entire map making your nutrition stats actually something a player needs to monitor.

As things stand, the only time a player is worried about food is at the start of a toon's life. But once you get a knife and kill and eat 500 chickens you're grand.

Agreed, also I don't get why your character starts with a fruit, why not just increase his starting energy.

Another thing that is questionable about vanilla, nights are so dark that they had to give you ambient light around your character... so silly.
In my opinion vanilla nights are too dark, I've been in places IRL with no lights during full moon, it's possible to see. Especially when you combine all of this with monitors that are less than ideal, or playing during day time when the light in my room drowns any detail on my screen.

People literally LEAVE the server during dark nights, pop drops by like 50-70%...

But vanilla bright night setting is just a bit too bright, a middle ground between dark nights and bright nights would be ideal, maybe slightly biased towards darker.

Edited April 23, 2021 by DefectiveWater

[Tonyeh 444]

4 hours ago, Derleth said:

They added all the new foodstuffs without adjusting the existing food spawns, so the economy is overly bloated with ready-to-eat food right now, I expect that to be adjusted later. And yeah, a little more energy at first would be a good thing combined with rarer food, just look at how Sumrak himself did it with Namalsk - and that works really well. 

Yeh. Namalsk is excellent. I cannot pimp for it any better. I'd encourage anyone who hasn't tried it to do so. Spaggies is probably the best because it has the least amount of mod stuffing going on. I tend to find that community servers go over the top with mods and basically kill the game.

Food there is tough...and into the bargain bloody frozen as well. So you have to collect it....then thaw it before you can eat it. Plus the starting areas to collect food are exceptionally dangerous places. Although, I will say that I have had some of the most friendly interaction with other players that I have ever had on Namalsk in years of playing. One guy traded water with me for some food. Something like that hasn't happened in Cherno for god knows how long. There's plenty of people shooting each other in the back though.

When you get south, canned food is almost nowhere to be found. So down there you absolutely need to either hunt or fish. Neither of which is easy to do, due to the scarcity of animals. There's times when you hoping for a wolf attack so you can get a bit of meat off them.

My current toon is pretty well geared and insulated. I found an AK too, so I'm happy out. But, my food meter is starting to go down and I've nothing to eat, which has now become my main worry.

 

But sure you know all of this already.  😁

[Tonyeh 444]

3 hours ago, DefectiveWater said:

Agreed, also I don't get why your character starts with a fruit, why not just increase his starting energy.

Another thing that is questionable about vanilla, nights are so dark that they had to give you ambient light around your character... so silly.
In my opinion vanilla nights are too dark, I've been in places IRL with no lights during full moon, it's possible to see. Especially when you combine all of this with monitors that are less than ideal, or playing during day time when the light in my room drowns any detail on my screen.

People literally LEAVE the server during dark nights, pop drops by like 50-70%...

But vanilla bright night setting is just a bit too bright, a middle ground between dark nights and bright nights would be ideal, maybe slightly biased towards darker.

I find Vanilla nights on Chernarus and Deer Island easy enough to see in and I am never going too long without the NVG for Cherno anyway. On Namalsk, though, they're so dark that most of the time I find a spot to stop, especially now with the infected buff. They're short, though (the nights that is), so it isn't that much of an ordeal. I have to admit that I've logged off myself at at times during the night, because the game becomes a bit pointless trying to run around in pitch black. And I play this on a pretty small monitor, so everything gets compounded by that as well.

As for the fruit you start with in the beginning on Chernarus, I agree. I'd rather have the increased energy instead. I end up just scoffing the fruit immediately upon starting anyway.

[DefectiveWater 491]

1 hour ago, Tonyeh said:

I find Vanilla nights on Chernarus and Deer Island easy enough to see

idk, might be my monitor. When I put it into SRGB mode, it's more visible than regular WCG (Wide color gamut) mode, and I don't want to cheese the game and increase brightness

I am talking about the dark nights with no ambient light (glow around your character), just asking if we are on the same page?

But the fact that like 50% of the people leave during night time is indicative that dark nights are maybe just a bit too dark, in my opinion at least. idk

1 hour ago, Tonyeh said:

I end up just scoffing the fruit immediately upon starting anyway.

I feel like everyone does this, except when they suicide and find their dead body and they get an extra snack.

Edited April 23, 2021 by DefectiveWater

[Tonyeh 444]

1 hour ago, DefectiveWater said:

idk, might be my monitor. When I put it into SRGB mode, it's more visible than regular WCG (Wide color gamut) mode, and I don't want to cheese the game and increase brightness

I am talking about the dark nights with no ambient light (glow around your character), just asking if we are on the same page?

 

I dunno. All I know is that on the vanilla servers for Chernarus I can see at night pretty fine, once my eyes adjust. But on Spaggies Namalsk I can't see my hand in front of my face.

[Derleth 1352]

1 hour ago, Tonyeh said:

I dunno. All I know is that on the vanilla servers for Chernarus I can see at night pretty fine, once my eyes adjust. But on Spaggies Namalsk I can't see my hand in front of my face.

Official 3PP servers have the bright night setting, while 1PP servers have the darker nights*. Namalsk has lighting settings of its own, both for hardcore and regular missions.

Sadly the game engine's limitations apparently make it impossible to have a proper interaction between weather and moon phase & position regarding the ambient brightness. The moon doesn't actually illuminate anything, all it does is paint shadows when it is visible - so when it is not visible the night is perceived as brighter, because there are no shadows from the moon. And in the dark night setting the moon is basically a dead texture in the sky since the shadows it casts are invisible (because there is no light reflection from the ground that can contrast against the shadows). You notice this when you use NVG:s and can suddenly see the shadows the moon is casting...

Ideally there would be no need for different light configs - a clear moonlit night would be bright as on 3PP official servers, while a moonless, rainy night would be the pitch black nights of 1PP servers. And everything in between.

(In the best of worlds indoor lighting would depend on outside light sources, so you could slam the door on someone and leave them in darkness if there were no windows. I hate how the ambient brightness is practically the same as outdoors.)

*) I don't know if the "personal night light" is still active by default on official hardcore servers. That was a terrible, terrible idea.

Edited April 23, 2021 by Derleth

[McWendy 675]

2 hours ago, Tonyeh said:

 But on Spaggies Namalsk I can't see my hand in front of my face.

I like this very much. Silhouets of Friends need to be kept eye on. Communication is very necessary. Light sources actually make sense to use (at your own Risk ofc)

And when you get working nvg..... Whoohoo 🙂

Edited April 23, 2021 by McWendy

[Tonyeh 444]

55 minutes ago, McWendy said:

I like this very much.

 🙂

I'm in two minds meself. On the one hand the increased darkness on Namalsk is good for ambiance. On the other, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face so getting anywhere becomes impossible...which can kill the game TBH. Unless getting to a shelter and hunkering down until morning is part of your game that is. While this is ok if your toon is relatively geared, clothing wise, it's near to impossible if you've just spawned in. Night time means a freeze in that case and I can see why people just log out until daylight comes.

Torches are also crap in the game. I used my pistol torch to try and find my way around the underground bunker in the centre of the Namalsk map (which is pitch black at all times) and it was a nightmare. It just doesn't act like a real torch which would light up a room. Instead just merely get a circle of light to find your way around. It just isn't good enough really. Somewhat atmospheric, but annoying after a while. Not going down there again until I manage to find a NVG set...which has proven impossible so far on Namalsk.

[McWendy 675]

2 hours ago, Tonyeh said:

I'm in two minds meself. On the one hand the increased darkness on Namalsk is good for ambiance. On the other, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face so getting anywhere becomes impossible...which can kill the game TBH. Unless getting to a shelter and hunkering down until morning is part of your game that is. While this is ok if your toon is relatively geared, clothing wise, it's near to impossible if you've just spawned in. Night time means a freeze in that case and I can see why people just log out until daylight comes.

Torches are also crap in the game. I used my pistol torch to try and find my way around the underground bunker in the centre of the Namalsk map (which is pitch black at all times) and it was a nightmare. It just doesn't act like a real torch which would light up a room. Instead just merely get a circle of light to find your way around. It just isn't good enough really. Somewhat atmospheric, but annoying after a while. Not going down there again until I manage to find a NVG set...which has proven impossible so far on Namalsk.

Chemlights, head torches, crafted torch, gas lamp, flashlight. 🙂

I Love that eerie bunker. 

look for nvg at the c130-mohawk and other helikopter crash sites. 

headstraps and/or assault helmets at the small military sites 😉

 

[Private Evans 1303]

Bad game design again...why not thinking of ways to make night time gameplay more interesting and also rewarding.

In the mod the infected could not see shit at night and also did not react to torchlights, so you could sneak through complete hordes, which was absolutely scary and fun. Also there were these oil barrels placed in cities which players could ignite during night time which also was immersive af.

Another cool thing would be implementing a handful of working streetlamps for the smaller towns , which could be activated by players but should of course be very unstable, flickering and working just for a small random time...

To spice things up there could be special events like heli crashes and air drops but not in the middle of nowhere but inside the major cities....

Last not least ...forget about idiots  exploiting gamma and brightness, we already had beautiful nights working !!!!

 

These are just random thoughts but everything I described above except the special events, we had working in the mod or during EA of the SA.

 

 

Edited April 24, 2021 by Private Evans

[Private Evans 1303]

Now imagine....you could get infected by the zeds during melee ( like in 28 days later) resulting not in turning into one of them but just getting a very bad infection...a cure for such an infection could be then placed in crash sites and air drops instead of more pew pew guns ...making such a vaccine working for 48 hours only could stop hoarders...

again every mechanic for such an idea is already there...

we bitterly need more diverse gameplay loops to keep the game fresh , vehicles and basebuilding alone do not work for endgame mechanics...everything else is grinding and exploiting, going north and killing players on sight which is what most of new players do these days. 

 

[DefectiveWater 491]

1 hour ago, Private Evans said:

Bad game design again...why not thinking of ways to make night time gameplay more interesting and also rewarding.

Agreed, I still don't get why zeds can so easily see me during pitch black night time, the time where visibility is non existant should be the ideal time to go looting. Zeds are humans after all, so why do they get Superman vision?

[Private Evans 1303]

The reason is, devs in charge stopped even thinking about gameplay loops back in 2016. Since then all went into the implementation of the new engine, the release of console versions and after that bringing back most of the missing content. Since Adam took over we thankfully saw big improvments to the existing and basic mechanics which I have to admit brought me back in the first place.

But nevertheless we had 5 years of completely stillstand when it comes to gameplay..except basebuilding, which I completely dislike and ignore when I play the game. I personally had prefered to see barricading instead but well....

The last patch clearly showed that with a few design changes the gameplay could feel completely different and new...so same could be done with night time gameplay....

[Tonyeh 444]

16 hours ago, McWendy said:

Chemlights, head torches, crafted torch, gas lamp, flashlight. 🙂

I Love that eerie bunker. 

look for nvg at the c130-mohawk and other helikopter crash sites. 

headstraps and/or assault helmets at the small military sites 😉

 

I'm playing without a map for the time being, so I have no idea where the choppers are. I found one on top of a snowy mountain beside a cross. But there was bugger all there except infected.

Found plenty of headstraps and helmets. But left them.