Vehicle persistence and scarcity

[Viktor_Berg 0]

I was thinking about how the vehicle system is currently working in Day Z. As it stands, every server has a set amount of vehicles that spawn on server start, do not respawn during server operation, but reset every time the server itself is reset.

As I understand it, currently work is being done to improve vehicle persistence. This is very good news, but it raised some concerns with me. The most prominent of them being the status of vehicles on a server that has been operating for a prolonged time (we are talking days, maybe even weeks here). Assuming vehicle statuses do not reset during those days of operation, and assuming a certain level of competence of the players on the server, most vehicles will be gone from their spawn locations within a day at most.

And here comes the big problem: what of players who start playing on the server after that? It is safe to assume that experienced players will hide their vehicles in discrete locations that are very hard to scout out, which means that other players are stuck with no chance of ever gettng a vehicle, short of actually shooting someone out of a car. I'd be fine with that if it wasn't for the fact that it's not possible to detect when someone left a server for good. What if the player who hid the car will never come back to drive it again?

I'd assume that destroyed vehicles will eventually respawn, but the same cannot apply to the hidden and then abandoned ones. Which eventually brings me to the questions: how will the system handle such situations, or how would it handle them if it were up to you guys?

[vpope 28]

As of 1.5.3 if a vehicle is not interacted with between server restarts then it would despawn and respawn at its original starting location all busted up again, im not sure if this was addressed in 1.5.4 but i assume that in the event you describe where they are out of the way and abandoned that they will be found , and moved on :) you have to find them to begin with , so nothing has actually changed , if they have not been abandoned then the people that have them will not be happy about you trying to take them :)