@Rocket - Some things...

[semipr0 402]

Wanted to drop a few things your direction but Twitter hardly means diddle these days when its busy.

As a indy designer myself who hammered a persistent database driven gaming experience into a live environment that had no inherent advanced gaming functionality in it, I can definitely appreciate what you've achieved here with this mod. But there are a few things from a design perspective that I thought I'd share my thoughts on.

agent_proximity_trigger (or whatever you're using) for zombie spawn control has its advantages from a server perspective in regards to performance. The less AI assets active, the better, but from a player perspective it turns pretty much all areas that a player must enter into a zombie theme park, rather than a realistic environment.

Some may say that its less challenging if there are no AI hazards in relation to every place a player must enter to make any notable progress, but the simple facts are its a zombie apocalypse and lots of zombies have been killed, proximity triggers are good management for AI assets in play on a server that are in direct relation to player activity in proximity of trigger zones, but the proximity trigger should have a percentage tier chance of Maximum/Average/Minimal/None in regards to the AI trigger spawn.

Trigger spawns also could use a unix timestamp with a randomly assigned timer value for when the next spawn of AI assets can be populated to the trigger zone. Lets be honest, if someone just killed 25 zombies, they probably deserve a breather to patch up and it would also probably take a little time for more zombies to crawl out of whatever theoretical hell of creation they come from.

In plain English the current AI asset spawn system is too basic to be a realistic experience, and while at times challenging, the challenge it presents is artificial, and brutally attempting to make up for its non-complexity with overwhelming numbers. And I'm not saying that people don't prefer things difficult, but if you're wanting a realistic simulated environment, these are things I think you should take into consideration,

Far as your player side system goes, its been pretty well thought out. I'll forgive you the allowance for Coke and Pepsi as sources of hydration since canteens aren't exactly abundant and water sources are pretty hard to get to for the average new player. But there is a facet of the player dynamics that falls into a level of very basic reality that I also think needs consideration.

Food healing blood loss is all well and good but thats not how the body really works. Total blood volume is replaced, after hemorrhage, with both food and fluid intake, and its also a process that occurs over time. Having food just have a base effect of Eat = Health, is a very basic game play mechanic that could take the greater step of using a percentile modifier based off both food and drink intake...and also requires the player deal with the "healing effect" over time, based on how much blood they've actually lost.

Effectively food and drink, must be used in combination to create a slow HoT effect. This forces people to retreat and recover from their wounds, or be given advanced medical attention by another player, rather than allowing a solo player to wolf down four pieces of cooked meat and be ready to roll in in the time it takes to do so.

If a combined nutrition approach to recovering from blood loss is too complex, then a simple bottleneck on how much food per game hour can be consumed is also something to consider. Because to be honest if I was suffering from a major blood volume loss in real life, the least I'd be able to do is eat four huge pieces of meat.

In total, recovery is a slow process and should be treated as such, but with that comes something of a negative observance......death is already so commonly expected in DayZ that no one really cares if they die anyways. Perma-death, as such, gives no real consequences for failure or success. You're just done....have a nice day starting over. So in that respect while I feel the considerations for healing I've made are good considerations, I'm not entirely sure they're necessary because the game style itself lends itself towards a distinct callous disregard for ones own safety. This is something I don't currently have an answer for and to be honest if I was to even suggest an answer for it I'd probably be bending your game vision to my own concepts of it and I get enough of that with my own game from my players so I won't tell you how to handle your primary game systems dynamics.

Also just one thing, the proliferation of military hardware is something of a balance issue, a couple guys with NVG, a couple of good military grade weapons, and teamspeak can more or less keep anyone entering the Stary Sobor area back on the beach....its really not that hard, I played with my old clan the other day on the Seattle server and we spent most of our time split between the ridge and the tree line north of town picking off people as they tried to get into the area. Its just too easy to cut it off, and the other military grade loot spawns are no where near the quality of stuff you can find at Stary and the NW Airfield...and having two central bottlenecks for high end gear turns DayZ more or less, in its final product, into a death match game. Sure you can hunt and scrounge and survive in the wilderness and all that, but the primary rewards for surviving are gear, and the best gear shows up very predictably at the same two places, whereas the military grade spawns in Cherno/Elektro/Balota/Berezino and the Krasnostav airfield are so variably random that you're lucky if you find a gun, much less the ammunition to use it.

In the end, great alpha, I mean seriously, super great alpha. Probably one of the best things made in a long time....and I wish you all the success in the world with the project, glad to see someone else taking the sandbox simulation game seriously.

I don't expect Rocket to respond to this post personally, I'm just sharing it in hopes that he reads it and adds it to the pile of things other people think. You don't need to tell me how wrong you think I am, unless you're Rocket, cause all opinions are subjective and you're just as right to believe what you believe as I am. In the end, if you feel the need to troll the post, take the high road and just let the post sink to the bottom of the post list entirely, its far more effective than starting a flame war just because you disagree with one sentence in a post full of paragraphs. Thanks all, and have fun!

[ZedsDeadBaby 2287]

I'm fairly certain rocket has already acknowledge the spawn mechanics are not ideal but are the best he can manage with the existing engine without sinking performance. He's experimenting with other methods (if you played the experimental 1.7.2.1 patch you would notice zombies don't despawn anymore), but I think for the foreseeable future we have what we have for a good reason.

I expect ARMA 3 DayZ will have a different system altogether.

As for the military loot, you're actually far better off hunting for helicopters than you are spamming Stary, so I don't really think your critique is accurate. There is no loot bottleneck. My team and I never loot the NWAF or Stary and we have a backlog of SAWs and sniper rifles to last us a month (until 1722 probably wipes us all of course). If you do want to go to Stary for the "easy way out" without actually searching the fields or using fuel to hunt for choppers, then I say you deserve to face whatever military-grade combatants await your arrival. It's a natural trade-off between quick & dirty and slow and methodical.

But here, again, I don't think Chernarus is the planned final map for DayZ so quibbling over specific spawn locations and spawn rates/balancing is not really appropriate at this juncture, apart from acknowledging the pro's and con's of limiting high-value loot to a small number of loot piles (there are pro's no doubt).

Edited July 13, 2012 by ZedsDeadBaby