Feedback on mouse input, grass, mousewheel system + much more.

[toopok4k3 0]

Hello,

This post is my personal take on the most impostant problems that ARMA 2 and dayz has. There are some problems that come from ARMA2 itself. They are important and should get on the TODO list no matter wether or not dayz will become a standalone game or stay as a mod. Let's start with the most annoying bugs of ARMA2.

Terriblest mouse input of all games.

Whoever designed this has no clue how a game input should be made. You should take him behind a barn and shoot him with a tactical nuke, just to make sure he learns his lesson. Many of my friends who come from competive/casual shooters outright refuse to try dayz. This because of how shitty the mouse input is in this game. A good mouse input is the most important aspect in every first person shooter. (I found this bug report that is related to what I'm talking about https://dev-heaven.net/issues/27127 looks like it's assigned, how is the fix coming?)

So what's actually wrong with the mouse input? Mouse acceleration is what is wrong with it. It totally screws up your aim. If I move my mouse too slowly, my aim ain't moving at all. If I move my mouse faster, the aim goes way too fast. If I do a quick flick on my mouse. BOOM! My aim moves nowhere. I mean, WTF?! And don't give me that realism BS as an answer. I know how to move my arms in real life. Don't try to limit it artificially in a GAME. My arms move exactly how I wish them to move.

My mouse movement should go one-to-one with my ingame aim. The current way it is... It's just terrible no matter how you look at it.

So how do you fix it? You make the acceleration flat so the use case is following. If I move (the speed/time at what I do this movement does not matter) my mouse 5cm to right in real life, my aim moves 45 degrees to right in game(Actual numerical values should be based on mouse speed configuration value, commonly known as "sensitivity" value). Now if I move my mouse 10cm to right, my aim moves 90 degrees to right in game. If I flick my mouse 40cm in 10 milliseconds. my ingame aim moves 360 degrees in 10 milliseconds. Simple as fuck and perfect. Like it should be in any FPS.

Now another problem with the mouse is the smoo... I mean LAG. Smoothness really means pure lag for your mouse input! There should be no lag in mouse input, ever. When you combine the terrible mouse acceleration and mouse lag. You get something so terrible that it makes you want to cut your own balls off. It's 2012. How the fuck can this be a problem? Games didn't have laggy input in the 80's. There is no excuse to have a laggy input. Now I don't know how bad this really is as it's impossible to test or observe the mouse movement in any sane way without getting brain damage. Nonetheless this mouse lag should also be fixed alongside the acceleration.

Okay, that's for ARMA2 mouse input. There's a graphical feature that causes problems in multiplayer.

Grass makes no sense as it is now for mp. You can't use it as cover, yet it is there in your face. It might make sense in singleplayer or coop when you don't have other players as your enemy. But it's an unfair gimmick in dayz when trying to hide from others. You think you are safe in the long grass but the grass is not drawn for the guy who's looking at you from 200 meters. He sees you as a bright spot on smudged background. This while you are having problem seeing through the grass yourself.

I have had cases where I'm in a spot on top of a hill watching to a lower ground. I can't be in a spot right behind the grassy hill, where only a small amount of my head would be shown. Grass would be in my way so you have to go more forward over the hill. This makes me highly visible from longer range.

Grass only seems to be a graphical gimmick that gets in the way of gameplay and tactics. Get rid of it or make it actually work as a gameplay element. The way it works now is just "unfair" for multiplayer game. (Don't tell me about 3rd person as a fix for this. Its even more unfair as you can see over fences and houses without being spotted.)

Random toughts on the way items are used, stored, and looted.

Enough about arma2 gimmicks. Let's roll to the other Dayz input/usability problems. The following feedback is made with the fact in mind that perhaps dayz would become its own game and we could ignore arma2 engine limitations. So ignore the obvious technical difficulties of bringing some of these suggestions to current ARMA2+Dayz platform. Take these as some "if we can make things better, how should it be done?" points.

The mousewheel based interface. Ugh. It's both slow and hard to use. On top of that it's hard as hell to find the right spots to use something. Why can't I just press 6 on my keyboard to choose morphine or bandage to my hand from some sort of a quickslot. I'd have a visible bandage on my own hand and I could use it by simply pressing my mouse1, either looking down to myself or my buddy to get the target. Same with any item. You should just be able to take any item to your own hand as a visible object, and use it with your m1. Fixing a car? Pick up some engine parts to your hands and aim at the car then press m1. Need to fill a water bottle? Take the water bottle to your hand, aim at well/water, press m1 to fill. etc.

Everything should happen by pressing a button while aiming at something. Not by going through GUI elements. Toolbelt+Inventory items could be even shown 247 on the hud with 1-9 or function keys as hotkeys to every slot, want to take hatchet to your hands? Fiddling with the backback should be slower. But even then there needs to be more sane gui or system to do it. More reasons to make Dayz as a standalone game with new systems. Those who are able to fiddle fast with items should not be punished by a slow invetory system.

So what about looting stuff? Current way is painful and slow. Fuck dem stacks of items. Every item should be its own entity or object in the game which you could directly interact with. Just like in other engines. Aim at something and press key to loot it like you can do in Skyrim.

So we get to stacks of items. I hate them. Why every lootable item has be on the ground on some silly stack of things? (yeah yeah arma2 engine and whatnot..) They should be in bookshelfs and chests. Again, like stuff is in Skyrim.

More on loot. I hate how random the loot is in dayz. It shouldn't be that random. And it should be more plentiful. An army barrack should have racks full of weapons. A market should be full of food and drinks. Perhaps some general goods as maps or compasses. Hunting weapons on some hunter cabins. So much loot that you really have to make choices what to take!

Master server or standalone servers?

Finally, I'll give my take on the whole "servers with their own player states or shared player state between servers" discussion.

I have played this game, a lot. During my time playing. I haven't had a single moment when I thought that having a shared player state for all servers is a good thing or beneficial to me. However, I can safely say that I have had many moments when I have thought that the sustained state between servers made the game worse. I'll give you some examples.

There was an instance when me and my buddy found a boat on the coast of berezino. We had seen the same boat earlier near the coastal factory with three people. They were getting some gas in a nearby gas station. We decided to camp the boat and wait for the guys to come back to light them up and steal their boat.

Time passed, we started to hear gunshots. Finally we saw two guys crouching far away. A bit later we no longer see anyone. There were some buildings so they might have been behind them. Anyway, I take my binoculars and take a closer look. I see something that might have resembled a cap behind of a small hill. First thing I think is "Fuck, did they spot us and is that a guy looking just behind that hill at me?" I can't see the other guys anywhere. There was plenty of zombies that way so it was odd that there was no more shots fired. Then I realized "What if two of them swapped servers to get behind us, if they actually spotted us waiting!?". We didn't want to lose our stuff so we had to leave that situation before getting owned from behind.

That fear of server hopping would have never crossed my mind if every server had their own game state. Just the fact that something like that could happen, thanks to the shared master hive, makes me feel uncomfortable. You can't do shit if someone server hops behind you. It breaks gameplay and you can't really fix this with a timer based solution, as these tense flanking/camping situations can sometimes take tens of minutes or hours.

Add to the fact that, the most valuable items, vehicles, are specific to servers. Same with tents. Shared state has had very little purpose to me and my buddy as we stick to the same server. It gives us nothing yet it causes problems. (Okay, it will make server swap easier as our HC server suddenly had 3rd person with nametags on. Those settings just ruin servers. Too bad we can't take the vehicles with.)

Today we were driving towards cherno when we saw a message telling the server will be restarted in 5 mins. We had to stop and save the vehicle and start camping it to do things the safe way. Server restarts. We get back to the game. Our UAZ(Thanks Slyder!) was nowhere to be seen. We were a long distance away from our base, on foot. Basicly our whole cherno looting mission got disturbed. Because something bullshit happened with the server+hive?! And we couldn't even secure the vehicle unless we were willing to wait for the server to reboot. Keeping the game state locally would make technical problems like this more rare. (My friend was persistent and kept playing, server restarted again and our vehicle was in the spot we left it, yay!)

Also, I'd love the possibility to play with more than two groups of friends on different servers without the actions I do on the other server screwing up the stuff I'd do with my other group of friends. I can't do that with the shared state system.

Short version of my feedback:

-Fix mouse acceleration in arma2.

-Fix mouse lag in arma2.

-Grass creates unfair situations, Either get rid of it or make it as a proper gameplay element.

-ARMA2 sucks and limits DAYZ in way too many ways. Start making standalone Dayz.

-Mousewheel action system sucks.

-Inventory system sucks.

-"Aim and press a button" styled usage of items.

-Loot stacks sucks.

-Random loot sucks. Make it less random.

-More loot, more hard decisions what to keep.

-More cars(I think i deleted this part from above text, cba to write reasonings)

-Screw master hive and shared player state between servers. Too many problems, no gains.

-Fuck 3rd person, nametags and crosshairs. None of them support dayz gameplay. Why EU is full of these servers is beyong me (the server we played today suddenly turned all this shit on today, looks like we need to find a new home with my buddy so I'm raging).

In conclusion I have come up with an amazing revolution. Start working on a standalone game for dayz. Don't keep this as a mod. Its playable, but it could be much more amazing with it's own engine without all the arma stuff. Make it more like a game, less like a simulator with shitty usability. Screw the shared state stuff. As it stands right now there's not a single reason for me, as a player to keep it. At least for the way I myself play Dayz.

Thanks for reading this way too long post. I hope this feedback is useful.

btw. Goofy pls.

PS. i hope this text survived copy-paste from my text editor!