In Game Giveaway : 3 Pairs of Night vision Goggles, and 10 grenades.
We have a special giveaway this week for anyone who reads our blog. We will give away one pair of NVGs to each of the first three people who folow our blog and contact us. We will meet up with you in game on any server and deliver them to you.
So what are you waiting for?
To kill or not to kill: DayZ Friend or Foe
Why do people always ask if you are friendly in DayZ. Today I had to sneak in under the cover of darkness into Electro. While scavenging for supplies in a certain multilevel building in the middle of town I heard footsteps. I asked on direct chat, "friendly" a response came out from the darkness "friendly". Phew, I sauntered out to the hallway to pick up some loot from the stairs . As I was searching I heard a gunshot , Mr Friendly had just fired his revolver at me in the darkness and missed. I ran a level down and hid in a room . Consequently I went onto direct chat and proclaimed " you fucking asshole now I'm gonna have to kill you".
So I waited in the darkness, then I heard the unmistakeable sound of footsteps. Tension filled the air as I clicked a mag into my enfield.
After some moments I stood up and sprinted to where I had been standing when he had shot at me. Sure enough he was there crouching over the same loot. Bang one shot to the head with the rifle and he was dead. Such is the way in DayZ . No mercy for the supposed friendly player.
This whole episode highlights the issue of wether or not to shoot other players on sight or not. You actually do not have time to ask someone if they be friend or foe because you have about 2 seconds to either kill or maybe be killed. Such is life in the Z. I hear on Russian servers everyone shoots everyone on site. Hmmm.
You can't necessarily trust anyone who says they are friendly either. In the viscous fight for survival folks will usually shoot first and ask the questions later. However if you can make a true friend you are lucky. Generally speaking someone who will come onto Skype or team speak is trustworthy. And then there are the times when you must trust others with your life or to rescue you by way of morphine or blood transfusion.
So I waited in the darkness, then I heard the unmistakeable sound of footsteps. Tension filled the air as I clicked a mag into my enfield.
After some moments I stood up and sprinted to where I had been standing when he had shot at me. Sure enough he was there crouching over the same loot. Bang one shot to the head with the rifle and he was dead. Such is the way in DayZ . No mercy for the supposed friendly player.
This whole episode highlights the issue of wether or not to shoot other players on sight or not. You actually do not have time to ask someone if they be friend or foe because you have about 2 seconds to either kill or maybe be killed. Such is life in the Z. I hear on Russian servers everyone shoots everyone on site. Hmmm.
You can't necessarily trust anyone who says they are friendly either. In the viscous fight for survival folks will usually shoot first and ask the questions later. However if you can make a true friend you are lucky. Generally speaking someone who will come onto Skype or team speak is trustworthy. And then there are the times when you must trust others with your life or to rescue you by way of morphine or blood transfusion.
Day Z designer Dean "Rocket" Hall to speak at Rezzed
It's been called a lot of things already. Perhaps it's the best zombie game ever made. To others it's an increasingly rare Actual New Game. Playing it is nothing if not memorable. All this and Day Z is still in alpha.
Come along to Rezzed in a couple of weeks and you can hear from designer Dean "Rocket" Hall and Matt Lightfoot how this multiplayer mod for ArmA 2: Combined Operations has become the hottest thing in PC gaming in 2012.
Dean and Matt's Day Z developer session will take place on the second day of Rezzed, Saturday 7th July, at 2pm, and you can expect a mixture of development anecdotes and thoughts about the future. For those who haven't played it, we'll also have Day Z on the show floor so you can get your head around it.
In short though, it's a post-apocalyptic survival sim where you start on the beach of ArmA 2's massive island state of Chernarus with little to keep you going (a recent patch even removed a pistol as a spawn item). Day Z tasks you with staying alive despite the attentions of a roaming zombie population and the unpredictability of other human players.
It's the latter, combined with each character's persistent state - meaning you can log off and then the next time you log on you'll be in the same position, whichever server you choose - that makes Day Z so exciting. You may be bleeding profusely and stagger into a barn only to find a couple of other human survivors. Will they help you or will they shoot and rob you? When every inch of existence has to be fought for, and with human nature being what it is - especially on the internet - you just don't know.
Rezzed: The PC and Indie Games Show takes place on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th July at the Brighton Centre in Brighton. Tickets are available at www.rezzed.com.
We've still got a few big things to announce, but in the meantime we've already confirmed a huge range of playable blockbuster (Borderlands 2, Far Cry 3) and indie (Krater, Natural Selection 2) games, developer sessions from the likes of Gearbox Software boss Randy Pitchford and Introversion, and a huge indie arcade full of obscure curios like McPixel and QRTH-PHYL.
Oh, and everyone who attends will receive a free Dota 2 beta key after the show.
We're having a party and everything. It's going to be amazing. Come!
DayZ Novel : Bandit Romance pt1
I met her through a haze. Strong well featured. My eyes still blurry from the morphine shot she had just thrust into my chest.
High on the hill I had stayed in the mountain on the hill between Cherno and Electro. My legs broken and my blood low. I had managed to build a fire in a secluded misty cliff and cook the meat of beasts to stay alive.
And so she had appeared and brought me back to life. Her this innocent young thing. But little did she know of the life she had brought back.
But in the cruel world of an infected zombie apocalypse trapped somewhere in rural Russia anything could happen.......
We watched together below from the hills above. Down below, I with binoculars could see the corpse of the young survivor I had just shot right before the chopper had passed over early and shot me. A zombie was crouched over him eating his brains.
I showed off to her by sniping every zombie in the area quickly with my old enfield. The sound of each shot seemed to echo nearly all the way to chernigrosk.
As the sun went down I led us down to the fields below by the sea and shot a cow and a goat.
That night we hid up high on the mountain and sat round a fire having steak and beans.
Who knows what she thought? But I was surely grateful .
The moon passed away behind some cloud and the wind blew in from the sea blowing out the last of the embers.
The night was pitch black and the wind blew tormented through the trees. But still there was somthing still and peaceful about it. Far above and away from the horrors of unimaginable apocalypse and survival.
To wander alone, to live like a tiger . To kill or be killed. Welcome to the Z.
High on the hill I had stayed in the mountain on the hill between Cherno and Electro. My legs broken and my blood low. I had managed to build a fire in a secluded misty cliff and cook the meat of beasts to stay alive.
And so she had appeared and brought me back to life. Her this innocent young thing. But little did she know of the life she had brought back.
But in the cruel world of an infected zombie apocalypse trapped somewhere in rural Russia anything could happen.......
We watched together below from the hills above. Down below, I with binoculars could see the corpse of the young survivor I had just shot right before the chopper had passed over early and shot me. A zombie was crouched over him eating his brains.
I showed off to her by sniping every zombie in the area quickly with my old enfield. The sound of each shot seemed to echo nearly all the way to chernigrosk.
As the sun went down I led us down to the fields below by the sea and shot a cow and a goat.
That night we hid up high on the mountain and sat round a fire having steak and beans.
Who knows what she thought? But I was surely grateful .
The moon passed away behind some cloud and the wind blew in from the sea blowing out the last of the embers.
The night was pitch black and the wind blew tormented through the trees. But still there was somthing still and peaceful about it. Far above and away from the horrors of unimaginable apocalypse and survival.
To wander alone, to live like a tiger . To kill or be killed. Welcome to the Z.
God Fucking Bless You Mr Enfield But....
 |
| A Great Gun. But way too Noisy to Shoot if You only have 10 Mags lol. |
Yes God Bless you Mr Enfield . However as good as this gun may be for shooting Germans and zombies alike, in the Z you better watch yourself with this thing.
It doesnt take long before the uninitiated newb finds his first lee enfield. And the consequent effect of letting it off in a town or city or any place really apart from the forest. you see in the Z
shooting off one round from a Lee Enfield is to the local Zombie population like a dinner bell.
I always say if you are going to shoot off an enfeild make sure you have a whole pack full of rounds because sometimes if not most of the time, it will summon a horde of infected hungry for your brains.
Having said that, I stop short of saying the enfield is junk. I can recall serveral occasions when it served me very well in Pvp. But this was mostly in the wilds. One occasion in particular comes to mind when I managed to snipe 3 dudes from a great distance across an open field. Now thats what the Enny is for. However I must say. If you are being sniped from somewhere Dont stop running , and Do not run in a straight line.
News: DayZ creator Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall has said that listening to negative community feedback is essential for keeping the mod’s development focused, otherwise “We’ll be paying for hats and stuff”.
I’m entirely sure 4chan doesn’t receive any thanks for the hatred spewed directly from its orifices toward every other corner of the internet, so here it is: on behalf of DayZ creator Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall, thank you 4chan for your undiluted, laser-focused bile – it’s the only thing between us and in-game hat purchases.
So said Rocket on the subject of ArmA II mod DayZ’s post-release response in an interview with PC Gamer US.
“If it doesn’t stay as a community-driven project where I’m directly plugged in with the community, having real level playing field discussions, almost arguments, with the players, then it’s going to fail.
“Because I’ll never be able to maintain the tenacity, the ability to hold to those key ideals unless I’m in there with them, reading about how 4chan hates me and crying, and then hearing Reddit abuse me.
“You have to be grounded with that, otherwise it’ll just go off on some… We’ll be paying for hats and stuff,” he added.
It must be working – Rocket’s recently added melee and zombie line of sight rather than fetching headwear.
I’ve never paid for a bowler, beanie or boa in my life, and I’m glad to hear that Rocket intends to keep it that way – lest we wind up wandering the zombie apocalypse looking like modern-day Razorlight. Perish that thought.
You can track the height of Rocket’s ego, alongside other DayZ news, here at BeefJack.
Find Your Way Around DayZ With This Real, Paper Map
One of the things that makes zombie survival sim DayZ
so difficult is that players start the game without a map. Even later
on, getting hold of one can be tough. Without a map, you can't see where
you are, and if you don't know where you are, you have trouble finding
other survivors.
Sure, you can get around this by just downloading a map, but that's hardly as authentic an experience as buying a large, $15, real-world map to have sitting next to you, is it?
These were first printed up last year, but given DayZ's popularity - and its lack of map - ArmA II developers Bohemia Interactive have decided to start selling the things.
Other recommendations for a more authentic experience: drink a can of pepsi every hour, shoot the first person who knocks on your front door and don't go climbing ladders with your pistol drawn. Even in the real world.
Sure, you can get around this by just downloading a map, but that's hardly as authentic an experience as buying a large, $15, real-world map to have sitting next to you, is it?
These were first printed up last year, but given DayZ's popularity - and its lack of map - ArmA II developers Bohemia Interactive have decided to start selling the things.
Other recommendations for a more authentic experience: drink a can of pepsi every hour, shoot the first person who knocks on your front door and don't go climbing ladders with your pistol drawn. Even in the real world.
Security Breach Turns DayZ’s Servers into a Giant Botnet
In a month's time, DayZ—the zombie-survival variant of Arma II— has quickly established itself as one of the most appealing mods of a PC game in recent history, if ever. That also makes it an appealing target to malefactors.
One such person managed to get aboard the DayZ server admin team and, apparently, turn its servers into a massive botnet or give someone else the permission to do the same. As such, any server to DayZ to which the game's admins have been given remote access may be compromised.
The admins sent out an email notice yesterday have posted in the game's official forum about the breach, essentially confirming it. They're asking all server hosts who gave DayZ admins RDP access to scan for any suspicious processes. The person believed responsible has been identified and banned, and legal action is being pursued against him. Naturally, that forum thread has devolved to revenge threats, requiring the DayZ admins to demand that no one post his personal information in the thread.
One tipster sounded pretty fed up with the state of affairs, but unsurprised that things reached this point. "We've told them again and again they need to be careful who they put on the staff, they need to take things carefully, and again and again they make a mess of things," he told Kotaku.
"The language from the devteam is the same thing. We've 'donated' our servers. We should 'trust them' with root access," he continued, the disgust evident in his tone. "Meanwhile, the server hosts are paying $75 per month, bare minimum, to support the player base for this mod. And they want to commercialize it! We pay money so that they can make money, and in the meantime we get turned into a giant, powerful botnet that won't ever see a dime of the mod's commercial viability because they won't do a thing we suggest."
The forum thread is at the link below. A screenshot of the email declaring the breach can be viewed here. "Perhaps there's some delicious irony in the fact that computers that have been compromised are called zombies," said our tipster. Perhaps.
One such person managed to get aboard the DayZ server admin team and, apparently, turn its servers into a massive botnet or give someone else the permission to do the same. As such, any server to DayZ to which the game's admins have been given remote access may be compromised.
The admins sent out an email notice yesterday have posted in the game's official forum about the breach, essentially confirming it. They're asking all server hosts who gave DayZ admins RDP access to scan for any suspicious processes. The person believed responsible has been identified and banned, and legal action is being pursued against him. Naturally, that forum thread has devolved to revenge threats, requiring the DayZ admins to demand that no one post his personal information in the thread.
One tipster sounded pretty fed up with the state of affairs, but unsurprised that things reached this point. "We've told them again and again they need to be careful who they put on the staff, they need to take things carefully, and again and again they make a mess of things," he told Kotaku.
"The language from the devteam is the same thing. We've 'donated' our servers. We should 'trust them' with root access," he continued, the disgust evident in his tone. "Meanwhile, the server hosts are paying $75 per month, bare minimum, to support the player base for this mod. And they want to commercialize it! We pay money so that they can make money, and in the meantime we get turned into a giant, powerful botnet that won't ever see a dime of the mod's commercial viability because they won't do a thing we suggest."
The forum thread is at the link below. A screenshot of the email declaring the breach can be viewed here. "Perhaps there's some delicious irony in the fact that computers that have been compromised are called zombies," said our tipster. Perhaps.
Day Z + Arma 3 interview — optimization, map design, radios, porting Day Z into Arma 3
I interviewed the creators of Arma 3 and Day Z at E3. This is a continuation of that conversation (read part one of the interview over here), with discussion ranging from engine optimization and what hardware you’ll need to run Arma 3 to the possibility of baby monitors appearing in Day Z as usable radios.
PCG: Whenever we post an Arma 3 article, we get comments like, “I can hear my graphics card crying.” I noticed that you guys recently announced some revised system specs.
Jay Crowe: Yeah.
Do you feel like it was a mistake to come out a year ago and say that a Core i5 CPU was the target spec?
Crowe: I think maybe the mistake would have been just releasing target specs at the time. But on the other hand, they generated a lot of people saying, “Oh my God, I need an i5, it’s going to push the hardware…” So it got people’s expectations going. Maybe if we’d also put it alongside some min specs as well… It would have been useful.
Does the reputation of Arma being a demanding game bother you?
Ivan Buchta: Well, it’s like… The gamer with a cheap hard drive and an excellent graphics card, things like that, he may suffer from the weakest part of the hardware, which is just getting the data into the GPU…
Dean Hall:: We don’t run supercomputers. None of our computers seem particularly amazing in Brno, anyway.
Crowe: We sit on gold thrones…
What were you guys running Arma 3 on at E3?
Crowe: 580s and i7s. Not even SLI. Just one graphics card.
One 580?
Crowe: Yeah. My system that we captured the videos on, that’s a special one… I think 560 on an i7, 3.2GHz or whatever? The SSD helps. It’s all little bits of good components, overall, that make the game smoother. They are running really nice at E3. In fact I’m going to print out that DirectX config, post it up and say, “Guys, this will run smooth, we’re happy with it.”
Hall:: I mean, my personal computer isn’t anything kick-ass. If you can run Arma 2 you can run Arma 3. Everyone’s saying they’ll need to upgrade their computer—you’ll need a reasonable graphics card, but the average user doesn’t need a latest-generation graphics card.
Dslyecxi: One part of it, also, it’s so easy for people to set their settings wrong. You can have one setting be wrong and it ruins the whole thing.
“If you can run Arma 2 you can run Arma 3.”
Crowe: I could easily have broken the E3 demo just by putting view distance from three to six [kilometers]. It’s definitely giving a lot of power to the players to break their own game, and that’s true of modding as well. There’s a lot of things that can completely break the game. We really started to take on a bit more with Take On Helicopters. These guys really want to have great, great cockpit resolutions, so you’re going to have to increase their 3D resolution, but they’re going to have to sacrifice something else, because then the graphics card is working 150 percent. Turn down the view distance, maybe? The simplest thing I might do for graphics settings in Arma 3 is rename “very high” to “stupid.” And then just bump everything down. So then somebody says, “Why would I put it on stupid? Just put it on high.”Buchta: Maybe we can rename the options to “reasonably good,” “pretty okay,” “really nice,” and “insane.”
Hall:: But part of the problem is, people think, “Oh, I’ve got a moderate system, I’m going to set everything to low,” but you can actually get bad performance from doing that. Because it puts everything onto the CPU.
Crowe: Yeah, like shadows for example. If it’s on normal, it’s run by the CPU, if it’s set to high it’s on the graphics card. Even things like chunks of data, if you have very high quality, it’s a bigger chunk and it’s easier to load.
Buchta: Yeah. Video memory, it’s the most tricky thing, because you’re actually setting whether it should be somewhere completely else, you’re setting how much video memory is dedicated to the game. So in fact, to achieve good performance, you should have everything on normal, but set this to very high, so you can make sure that your video RAM is used properly. I wonder why we keep this setting, by the way, maybe for some crazy diagnostic purposes…
Crowe: And there are more video options now, we’ve got clouds, we’ve got dynamic lights that we can talk about, picture-in-picture, all these things we could ratchet up and down. Half of the challenge is going to be saying, “These are your options, this is how to use them,” and presenting it in a usable way.
What types of combat experiences am I going to have in Arma 3’s maps—<a href="“>Limnos and Stratis—that I haven’t had in Chernarus or Takistan?
Dslyecxi: What’s the name of that bamboo stuff, the giant bamboo?
Buchta: They’re reeds, actually.
Dslyecxi: That’ll be a big influence…
Buchta: We still need to work on that…
Crowe: There’s some hit bugs we need to work out…
Buchta: That’s about the densest vegetation you can find on the island. Well, Limnos, the island is pretty variegated, actually. It’s the first really flat terrain we have. We have sufficient amounts of terrain resolution to have some bumps in the otherwise flat terrain, so… I wonder how, for example, tank fights will proceed in these areas, because even those reeds, they’re a visual barrier. We had a big multiplayer…
Crowe: The multiplayer game, that was… It wasn’t so stable, but I was in a convoy, Joris [-Jan van 't Land, Senior Designer] is in front of me, somebody else is in front of that, another tank column coming up the side, real World War II stuff like that. It was a lot of fun. A lot more room to stretch your legs.
Buchta: One particularly important thing from my perspective is that the… Even the smallest village is fairly big compared to the previous versions of Arma.
Hall:: Huge! The scale is just insane.
Buchta: And the landscape structure, with the irrigation around the villages, it’s a fairly big maze surrounded by shrubs and trees and orchards, and then there’s flat land, fairly open terrain. So if we’d be introducing anything like a terrain control into multiplayer, there will have to be some really well-coordinated strikes against the defensive establishments of the enemy.
Hall:: Very complex.
“Even the smallest village is fairly big compared to the previous versions of Arma.”
Buchta: You are quite exposed when you’re attacking these places, and these places can be defended quite easily, because you’re shielded by the vegetation, and you can simply hide in the arbor and run and pretty much line up the attackers into a few kill zones. There are areas which are just impossible for vehicles, and for infantry as well. There are some natural fortresses. Or quite important barriers in the terrain. You have to go for that. The range for engagements will dramatically increase on open land and dramatically decrease in the urban areas and the farmlands.Hall:: When we were doing the VIP missions in that, we’d get really tactical and we’d be running around fighting and taking cover and… It was just so much fun. And I don’t think… If there was something that wasn’t quite nailed… A little bit with Takistan? Because it was quite open and there wasn’t necessarily a lot of cover. But with Stratis, I’ve really often felt like you’re doing bounding cover and… You could do really well score-wise if you were fighting and using the terrain well, carefully moving through the city…
Crowe: I was dominating that VIP, I was picking off all your guys…
Hall:: But the guys, some of the artists were… I was like, “What are you guys doing?” I was starting to get angry at them because they’re just running across in the middle of everywhere. Ivan, you’ve been really particular with the artists. I love that attention to detail that you’re putting into the map.
Buchta: At some point I got really pissed off with the level designers’ work on the open terrain… They simply needed to understand stuff that we’re trying to do, trying to do some compositions of stuff. Then I simply placed myself with a machine gun, removed their weapons, and said, “Okay, move from this place to here.” And I just starting hosing them down.
So you shot at your artists to help them understand how the map design needed to change.
Hall:: But it was good, that kind of brutal approach.
Buchta: We applied a similar pipeline for Limnos as we did for Chernarus, but we got more guys who are more experienced and more diligent. It’s actually finally smoother. We have compartmentalized the area, there’s always a responsible map designer who places all the objects to this terrain and such. There are some nice places… I try to read and learn about Lemnos as much as possible. And I also try to make sure that there’s good terrain for mission designers to place their work on.
Crowe: It’s really difficult from a design point of view to start making missions while the map is still in progress.
Buchta: Yeah. That’s why we’ve prioritized the areas which are likely to be used first. I do these inspections, where at some point, the guys all join me in multiplayer, and we’re driving around in cars, walking… It was like buying a property or something like that. Walking around… “Okay, you see this, and it’s nothing you would notice in the editor, but from this perspective, this is just wrong. Here we have a lack of cover. Here you get in tank range and then you place these objects, it’s just impossible.” The guys have really changed their methods. Time after time, I do a little lecture to all the map designers, to return things back… But it’s very exciting. Now we are getting to the stage where we can start really adding the fun stuff, like traffic signs, special objects. I think that the areas have some really nice terrain, some of them. Also, the graphical balancing of things, getting proper vegetation, balancing the coloration of satellite textures and stuff like that.
Hall:: The night battles are going to be crazy. I don’t think people really realize. I did a lot of testing, and the crazy battles you get, wow. I had my AI guys setting up machinegun emplacements and the tracers coming down and then vehicles exploding. And then you see all the flame effects from it. It’s always a little bit disappointing sometimes with Arma 2, you put the NVGs on and it…
The mystery goes away.
Hall:: Yeah, the mystery goes away. But man, I was just having crazy stuff happen. And a squad on open terrain… We did that, it was a little broken, when we did that one multiplayer piece…
Dslyecxi: I did that, at nighttime…
Hall:: Remember that? It was insane! We had burning wrecks everywhere, we were hunkered down by the…
Crowe: I joined in progress and kept getting shot in the head by people like him.
“The night battles are going to be crazy.”
Buchta: We won just by making a small group and taking the objective long enough to score some points.Hall:: That was good.
My friend wrote a mod about a year ago that made every bullet into a tracer. Night firefights resembled like Star Wars.
Hall:: Part of our [military] training in Thailand was a live fire exercise. I’m not even talking .50 cal, I’m just talking about 7.62, like any machine gun, going off. You feel those rounds.
Dslyecxi: That light .50 is amazing.
Hall:: Yeah. We had our jeep MG firing at a target, and when it was firing, we would go around. So you would feel the rounds go beside you, you’d feel the shock. Your balls go [Hall makes a sound that conveys the experience of groin reflex with surprising accuracy]! And it was in Thailand, it was so hot that the target actually caught fire, you know? Because of the rounds and the friction heating up the air, not even the bullet impact itself. But what I did the tracers in that way in-game. The AI guys were actually setting up, using the terrain, setting up fire positions that made sense, and then concentrating fire. It was just awesome. You’d see this tracer and hear the thud-thud-thud…
Dslyecxi: One thing that I’d like to see that I haven’t seen yet in, I think, any game, is tracers hitting something and being stopped by it and falling down but still burning for a few seconds.
Hall:: Yeah. We can actually do that because that’s what I do with the flares and the chem lights in Day Z. Their “time to live” is just ridiculously high and I just change their simulation check time so it doesn’t have to check them.
Crowe: I was looking at the [E3] showcase today, and I don’t know how I didn’t spot it before, maybe because most of the time I had NVGs on, but I was just without it on, and I saw some muzzle flashes coming from behind a bush. And that was, again, muzzle flashes look nice for the player… And then it became a tactical thing.
Hall:: Absolutely.
Crowe: These guys didn’t have the suppressors on their weapons, so I was able to see it. I was like, “Ah, that’s smart…”
Buchta: Some of the muzzle flash suppressors are going to become a really important part of Arma.
Hall:: It’s a big deal in real life. That’s why your ambush has to be timed perfectly. Yeah, the muzzle flashes in Arma 3 are like, massive big win. There are so many variations of them, you fire them, they each look different…
Buchta: But it’s actually a quite clever little thing. The muzzle brakes are usually symmetrical, so we suggested that it could use the proxy model, but rotate it in a random fashion. Every time you shoot, it’s displayed rotated randomly in steps. It looks sufficiently different every time.
Hall:: Wait a minute, is that what it is? Holy cow, I thought they were actually different models. You destroyed the magic, the magic is gone!
Buchta: Sorry. I thought you knew…
The man behind the curtain. The muzzle flash behind the curtain.
Crowe: There’s also something I haven’t shown in videos or screenshots yet, because they’re not quite done. Rockets have got new blast-back, so they’re not just this sort of square bright thing. They light up the ground with this similar sort of real flash of light. I want to get some really nice nighttime rocket fire going on.
Have you played the Crooks mod for Arma 2? We play it all the time on our server, it’s cops and robbers. There are like three robbers and 30 cops that uh, work together to protect AI prostitutes.
Hall:: I think I might have seen YouTube videos of this…
Kind of like Day Z, it has that same “needle in a haystack” feeling when you see someone. It has a similar emphasis on vision. The police eventually get access to helicopters, get in the air, and start scanning the ground for movement. It’s sort of like The Fugitive. If you find them, it’s your responsibility to just keep visual contact.
Hall:: Yeah, I like the sound of that. It sounds like City Life, but without all the dinking around…
Dslyecxi: There was something we used to play back in Flashpoint called Murder Sim, which was the same basic idea. You had four bad guys who went around trying to kill all the women in these specific cities before the cops could get on to them and stop them.
It’s a nice progression. It’s only the eastern side of Chernarus, from like Gorka down to Solnichniy and, like, Msta and Tulga, that’s the southern limit I think.
Crowe: Ivan probably doesn’t respect your pronunciation of the towns…
Yeah, sorry. This is what happens when you parrot the names to each other over two years without actually knowing how to say them. But yeah, Crooks is really special.
DH: I think with simplicity, when you get it right, you know, because you’ve nailed it. Sometimes I think with modding, people are trying to just add more s#$*, and you can’t just add more s$*&. And that’s what I like about the idea that you just described, you could describe it in 20 seconds and it makes sense. What makes a game great is what you don’t put in it.
What’s your process like, then, for adding new features to Day Z? How are you holding up, though? You’re getting bombarded with feedback and bug reports on a daily basis, partly because Day Z happened to get popular so early in its life, like Minecraft.
Hall:: It’s very easy to start losing your way. I literally had started to lose it from lack of sleep and totally focusing on it all the time. Especially when I was used to developing in secret. And because I told myself, “I’m not allowed to announce this until it’s finished. That’s your motivator. Because unless I finish this, nobody will ever hear anything about it.” And you remove ego from it because you’re just getting raw feedback from people, friends and stuff who’ve known me for like ten years. Then when you suddenly open it out, it’s really easy to lose your way initially. That’s where you need the people to pull you in.
If it doesn’t stay as a community-driven project where I’m directly plugged in with the community, having real level playing field discussions, almost arguments, with the players, then it’s going to fail. Because I’ll never be able to maintain the tenacity, the ability to hold to those key ideals unless I’m in there with them, reading about how 4chan hates me and crying, and then hearing Reddit abuse me. You have to be grounded with that, otherwise it’ll just go off on some… We’ll be paying for hats and stuff.
Some people would call that masochistic, but it seems like it’s working out. How do you prioritize new features and changes?
Hall:: I guess it’s a matter of sanity that I need to work on something new. And it’s also the players who need to see something new. And because it’s out, it’s the start of an alpha mod, it needs to be a period of adding some features. So… I guess the main thing is to pick the hard stuff, because I think you get the hard stuff out of the way now. That was why I picked the temperature one, because it’s so important. I think the game can survive without the crazy meta-game group stuff, because that’ll happen anyway even if there’s not mechanics for it. But the temperature, that connection with the environment stuff, that needs to be solved.
Buchta: I’m going to spend the next four weeks in Chernarus. Partly in the virtual one, partly in the real one. We just decided to address some obvious issues which are related to the environment, to provide Dean with a better maps.
“What makes a game great is what you don’t put in it.”
Hall:: It’s going to be amazing. Actually, do you remember our first conversation we ever had on Skype? It was about Chernarus. I wanted some advice about Chernarus, we got talking about it, you sent me pictures of around it and that… It was years ago. I think it’s almost a very underrated map, because a lot of people couldn’t really run it. I couldn’t run it on my computer when Arma 2 came out.Buchta: It was partly our fault, because optimization of course was something I’d definitely like to do… We planned a four-week sprint towards some better mapping… I’ve mentioned to our lead programmer, just some classified information, we’d like to expand the Chernarus theme in the Arma 3 engine, partly because of Dean’s zombies, partly because it’s a good map and we know it. We can get the data real cheap and we already have a working basis, so there will be more realistic terrain and new vegetation. And I’m also trying to push all those environment-related things like underground structures, bridges, better handling of water, power lines, many things which were omitted.
Is there any fundamental technical hurdle that would prevent you from porting Day Z directly into Arma 3?
Hall:: I guess the thing about Day Z, it’s actually a lot easier than what Arma 2 does. And a lot of it’s in finite state machines now. I’m slowly moving it. And those can just be compiled. They can even be compiled to the engine and run engine side, which is a lot more efficient. But it’s pretty basic stuff. And the way it’s designed is very modular. So the only thing we’d need to do is go through and configure the buildings, the spawn positions. Basically you can configure that in about an hour. It took me about an hour to do Chernarus, just going through the buildings, placing gear here and here and here. I have a little mission, I run around each building and pop the stuff and then it’s done.
Do you feel like Santa Claus when you’re doing that?
Everyone: [laughter]
Hall:: Yeah, a little bit. But I think it’s a really exciting time for BI. If we can get Day Z working and we can get some good success and some really strong sales out of it, then it can get a bit more ambitious. And then that technology can be pulled across. Because if you remove the zombies out of it, it’s a pretty basic sort of technology, and a lot of that will be applicable to do the sort of large-scale stuff that we always thought of for Arma 3. Some of it can probably fall off and maybe have some offshoot in VBS. And then other ideas that can come out of that… The cool thing is that they’re different and they’re not hurting each other. They’re mutually supporting.
Dslyecxi: If you could just take the persistency aspect of it and do it on a very low scale, single-mission basis, such that someone who crashes or disconnects or whatever can reconnect to the game and pop right back in…
Hall:: It’s done, I’ve had that for a year with the USEC system. And that’s why I want to give you that revolution system. I showed it to the guys when I started working there. It’s fairly basic, but…
Buchta: Basic is just enough, I think. Once you start altering it, then you aren’t helping in anyway.
Hall:: But there is a full logistics suite. I’ll send you the source [code], it's reasonably easy to get running.
So, you mentioned the player that decided to roleplay as a doctor in Day Z—the most dangerous and interesting “career” I can think of would be getting who gets a car, having a group of people to protect it, and starts charging for travel. Like a taxi driver.
Hall:: It's actually been done. Someone was running, with a helicopter of all things, they were running a public transport network for a while.
Were they charging for it?
Hall:: No, they were just doing it with donations. I think they were going for desperate people, sort of like a flying doctors type of situation.
A guardian angel.
Hall:: The people below were so grateful that they weren't shooting.
Buchta: That's why I would like to see the radio simulation in Day Z. It actually makes sense. Having radios with various ranges, channel access capability, then you could really be saving your battery for a hairy situation and trying to call for help... “Is anyone here, does anyone hear me, I'm somewhere near Vyshnoye...”
Hall:: And that's why, I think, if we do this amalgam of central server-oriented and peer to peer, we can do all this crazy stuff, because you can do as much stuff as you want locally. If we split things, and really ask ourselves “Do things need to be on the server or do they need to be on the client?” then we can get bigger and bigger servers that are actually doing less and less. At the moment, all a Day Z server does is all the stuff a normal Arma 2 server does, and soaking stuff up to the database. That's it. It doesn't even analyze the data. There's an application that sits between that and the database that checks to see if what it's getting makes sense, to look for hackers. But yeah, I'm just thankful that OndÅ™ej [Å panÄ›l, Lead Programmer] is interested. That's going to mean that we can enable all this peer to peer stuff that is sitting there not being used and doing some really cool stuff.
Buchta: It's not a problem of design, it's a problem of execution at the moment, because it's not terribly difficult, but it's a large problem, it's rooted in many aspects of the game, starting with players, multiplayer, ending in the AI permutations. It might well be possible. And Marek [Spanel, CEO] has been musing about this for some time as well. I think a little variety, like just commercial walkie-talkies, even like the kind a babysitter uses...
Hall:: Oh, yeah, a baby monitor, I want to see that. Cruising around Cherno with baby monitors.
Different tiers of radios?
Hall:: I can see the merchandising options of that already.
Buchta: You could even help people with it in-game...
Hall:: Oh, wow. There's some serious emergent gameplay opportunities there.
"I want to see that. Cruising around Cherno with baby monitors."
Dslyecxi: Have you played with ACRE [Advanced Combat Radio Environment, an Arma 2 mod] much?No, I've watched video with it, but I haven't, no...
Dslyecxi: Yeah, it's pretty cool. Terrain can influence it, if you're in a forest it'll cause it to show shorter ranges... If you're moving away, their radio is having more trouble reaching you, they'll actually hear you distort and break up and eventually you'll lose them entirely. So if someone really broke up, they could be saying things very slowly and deliberately for you to understand it...
Hall:: Well, we had guys from ShackTac making zombie noises to freak people out...
Dslyecxi: They have it set up where you can do re-transmission stations, have one radio that'll bounce off relays to get around.
That seems like a natural fit for Day Z; if there's a radio transmission station at the top of Green Mountain, that becomes a really valuable point, a clan wants to own that spot, they can talk to another point...
Hall:: And imagine if we start making maps bigger and connecting more worlds together to an extent, and then radios become important. You get a whole meta-game going on.
Buchta: Yeah. Even protecting this infrastructure. Suddenly you lose a connection, well, what happened to the guys? That's one of the other potential aspects which can be explored, like making safe zones. I can imagine that at some point, we may end up having no zombies, because they'll be extinct...
Hall:: At least on certain servers...
Buchta: But people will be renewing civilization. They're already trying to mimic services. Imagine with the radios, there could be radio stations...
What do you think inspires PC gamers to make their own fun in that way?
Hall:: I think persistence switches something in people's heads. Because they know that the character's going to be there later. You play differently. You see it in the way people play. They can't even help it. They just approach it differently. You watch some of the live streams where they're like, they want to go in and grief people, but they end up not doing it, because they can't help themselves. It's quite amazing.
Another Adventure in the Z - Nicked a Car, blew it up!
DayZ can be quite interesting when you stay in a single place and then proceed to warp in to different servers. Just recently I was camping up around the air base near the north West part of the map. I was low on ammo for my AK after recently having taken out a couple of banditos in a nearby castle and only just living to tell the tale. So I had been warping in and out of different servers checking the hangars and airbase for a few mags or any loot of interest. Quite to my surprise as I beamed in to one particular server I heard the distinctive sound of a car engine.
I snuck out along the tree line just in time to see a bunch of four guys parking up thier car just a little way away from the base. Now you would have thought they would have left one dude there to guard the car eh! But oh no the whole bunch sauntered off towards the airfield. I watched them disappear and then I was at it like a bull at a gate running for the car.
I turned it on and made off down the road with a hail of bullets coming in behind me. They had obviously heard the engine start up but it was too late and I was off.
About 15 minites later I clipped a tree by accident and the car kinda blew up without having had the chance to look in the trunk. woopsy Luckily I escaped with a broken leg only.
Sigh another adventure in the realm of the Z. The dudes on the chat channel were not impressed so I figured it must be time to star trek it out to another land where there wasn't 4 pissed off amigos trying to track me down. that way I could cook my rabbit and my beans in peace as the moon rose out high above the pines and the wind blew gently in from the sea.
I snuck out along the tree line just in time to see a bunch of four guys parking up thier car just a little way away from the base. Now you would have thought they would have left one dude there to guard the car eh! But oh no the whole bunch sauntered off towards the airfield. I watched them disappear and then I was at it like a bull at a gate running for the car.
I turned it on and made off down the road with a hail of bullets coming in behind me. They had obviously heard the engine start up but it was too late and I was off.
About 15 minites later I clipped a tree by accident and the car kinda blew up without having had the chance to look in the trunk. woopsy Luckily I escaped with a broken leg only.
The Future of Day Z
It's a telling sign of just how stagnant the current console gen's Autumn years have got that one of the most exciting and talked-about games in the month's leading up to E3 2012 is a PC mod.
Day Z, a DIY riff on Bohemia's PC shooter Arma 2, has built a huge following with its rich emergent gameplay that dumps players in the midst of a hugely hostile undead wasteland and leaves them to fend for themselves.
It's proved so popular that it has fired Bohemia's three-year-old game to the top of the Steam charts, and now constitutes around 20 per cent of its total lifetime sales. Considering it's only been live for a few weeks, that's a remarkable achievement.
However, as noted in our Day Z feature earlier this month, there are big problems with the game - it's only in alpha and is both hugely unstable and very difficult to install.
With that in mind, we sat down with creator Dean Hall - a New Zealand-born Bohemia contractor and former soldier - to find out how he plans to move the project forward and whether he's considering a full release some time down the road.
First up is patch 1.61 that should make the game a little easier to use. Beyond that though, Hall has more ambitious plans.
"I can't speak from Bohemia on that but I think it's the perfect engine," he replies when asked if he hopes to make it into a full retail title.
"Obviously there are subtleties and real problems with it at the minute but I think if we pull them out, polish it, tidy it up and go to the community and ask them if it's something they're interested in [then that could happen]."
However, should that be the case it will likely neither be a traditional boxed release nor a free-to-play effort.
"Maybe a Minecraft type model. I think it has very strong potential there," he muses.
"I think community involvement is very important. We can't just do a traditional studio model with this because without the players there is no Day Z experience.
"People have to be behind that which is why I'm talking a lot on the forums about how we want to fund it, what the price point should be and all that. We can't go for a pay-to-win model or a buy-hats model. That's not going to work. I think we have to follow Minecraft."
Hall also offered a few details on how he plans to flesh out the gameplay beyond its rather primitive foundations.
"I think the group dynamic is really important - that's going to give more incentive for people not to just kill everyone else on sight. That's a very important thing to tease out, and that also gives some longevity to playing," he explains.
"Right now, once you've survived those first few days it can get a little bit boring. Maybe you could have more choices - you could be a lone wolf and go off and build a cabin somewhere, or maybe there's a large group of you and you want to take over a city and you end up fighting with other groups over resources. You know, elements that provide more of a meta game. Expanding that is really important.
"The more short term stuff, which I've already started with, is the environmental stuff so you actually feel connected to the environment. How rain effects your character and stuff like that."
If all goes to plan, the game should be in a much more accessible state by "August or September".
"We should have something that's a lot better packaged by then. I think it's very important to get that sorted soon so we don't turn people away."
While he's dedicated to growing Day Z, Hall also acknowledges that bringing more players in and ironing out its various quirks might only serve to diminish the mod's cult luster.
"Half the time I am scared to death about it," he admits.
"But it would be hypocritical of me to say 'oh, we're backing off a little bit'. This was supposed to be a step into the unknown for me. Mods allow you to do much riskier things. People ask why isn't this being made into a full game but there are a lot of risks involved. For a studio to create it from scratch is a really risky proposition. You can anger players really quite easily with the mechanics. It is scary but that's what we should be doing as developers - taking these risks and doing crazy stuff."
Although Day Z has already racked up around 170,000 unique users and provided Bohemia with roughly 100,000 new ArmA 2 sales, Hall is yet to make a penny from his efforts.
"No, I haven't but obviously if I was negotiating something [for a full game release] there'd be something there for me to be looked after," he reveals.
"But I'm still pretty young. For me the big benefit out of it is hopefully being able to make a little imprint on the industry and maybe carve out a new niche. That's good for me personally. There's time to cash in on it later."
He added that a number of major publishers have approached with job offers, but he's so far turned them all down.
"I've had a lot of approaches with a lot of money offered - really quite a lot of money - in the last three weeks. I used to be a producer so I know how much it costs to make a game, and they wanted to throw a lot of money at me. But they weren't offering much creative control," he says.
"I'd like to be known for working on quality games that stay true to what they are."
DayZ Update 1.7.1.5 Released; major performance increases, zombies can’t see through terrain
Dean Hall and his team have released a new update for their amazing ArmA 2 total conversion, DayZ. This update brings major performance increases, fixes the issue where infected/zombies could see through terrain, and this time around, infected will inspect thrown items. Make no mistake everyone, this is a major update, especially if you had performance issues. You can view the complete changelog below and those interested can download it from here.
DayZ Update 1.7.1.5 Changelog:
* [NEW] Infected raycast for line-of-sight less often (improves performance)
* [FIXED] Infected can see through terrain
* [FIXED] Raycasting being taken from wrong body position (ensured it is from eye level)
* [FIXED] Infected sometimes spawn close to a player (previous check once, now up to ten times)
* [NEW] Infected bodies will despawn after 5 minutes of their death (improves performance)
* [FIXED] Sometimes infected will stand still after loosing line-of-sight ( https://dev-heaven.net/issues/33715 )
* [FIXED] Can dupe tent’s by right clicking (forgot to close the window)
* [FIXED] Poor performance caused by infected search behavior (MAJOR performance increase during closed testing)
* [FIXED] Audibility is far to high (completely rebalanced, in line with how it was in previous updates)
* [FIXED] Can dupe food during cooking if click really fast (now you cannot)
* [FIXED] Trying to pick up a hatchet would create fake ammo (now will not)
* [FIXED] Hatchet takes up too much room (can now be transferred between toolbelt and primary slot through gear action)
* [REVERT] Hatchet now collected as an Item (toolbelt) and can be equipped to primary (gear action)
* [NEW] Flashlights can now be packed to toolbelt also (gear action)
* [NEW] New players will spawn with flashlight added to their toolbelt not backpack
* [FIXED] Infected sometimes not inspecting thrown items (they will walk to the location of a noise, 20-40m away)
* [FIXED] Unlimited Infected spawning (now has a cooldown enabled so it won’t spawn too many at once)
* [FIXED] Melee weapon sounds non-existent/terrible (now has placeholder sounds)
Now playing: Arma 2 mod Day Z
"If you don’t know what DayZ is, and you’re wondering why three year-old military sim Arma 2 is currently the best-selling game on Steam, you can read all about it here. It’s a game unlike anything I’ve ever played: freeform, terrifying, and utterly infuriating. You might have spent an hour crawling through the wilderness to get that M1014 shotgun and ALICE pack, but the bandit who just sniped you from the bushes doesn’t care. He wants your beans. What’s really special about DayZ, though, is how it can create memorable moments without set-pieces or scripted events. It’s the players that create the drama."
With no map or compass, all I had to go on are the road signs and landmarks. It was midnight when I logged in, and the server has a real-time day and night cycle so the only light was the moon filtering through the high clouds. Removed of all context, I went with my instincts: I found a road and walked along it, crouching-walking and scanning left and right for signs of life. This is how you’ll spend most of Day Z: isolated and paranoid. I strolled for half-an-hour, not seeing anyone or hearing the telltale grunt of the undead before I came up on some buildings, darker squares against the grey night sky.
Decision time: buildings are more likely to have food, water, bandages, but they also spawn zombies. I was alone, I couldn’t see anything. I could feel the malevolent coldness of the world in my bones. I walked on, terrified of the unknown, but for some reason turned around to look back.
What was that? Then a noise like a twig snapping and another white flash lighting up the nearby buildings. Zombie don’t shoot guns. Someone was down there, and in a fight. Two things passed through my mind: if I rushed in I could help and make a new friend; but if I instead approached cautiously he might be killed and I could loot the corpse. I’d only been in the game for about an hour, so I let my heart rule my head and sprinted in. The flashes resumed every few seconds, and as I approached I kept to the shadows. He was Gord, and he was standing over a corpse looting it. I chose this moment, where he was a bit vulnerable, to approach. He couldn’t shoot me on sight that way. I could see he was looting a zombie and not another player, and that his outfit matched mine: kill enough players and you end up wearing a Bandit outfit. It could be in self-defense, or you might be a killer: the other player will never know. He looked up and we said hellos, keeping our guns trained on each other. A cautious alliance formed and he led me to some bandages stored in a nearby building. Then we headed out of town.
“Hurrrrr.”
Fuck. My first experience of the undead was against the red glow of the flare Gord tossed: three of the things came sprinting out of the dark, running in jagged lines. I don’t need this kind of shit at one in the morning: I crouched and rapidly fired. The last zombie fell just as my gun was making the hideous click of an empty magazine. Phew.
Just as Gord’s noise and gunfire drew my attention, our fight was noticed by Red. He asked us over the chat channel if he could join our group. Gord and I’d fought off zombies together, so we were sure we could count on one another: we agreed to wait for Red and then all three of us headed away from town.
With a solid little group, we were more confident, so when we arrived at a small city, gas towers and tall buildings dominating the sky, we ventured in. There was no sign of other players: no gunshots, no flares. Just an empty city for us to scavenge. By now all of us were low on supplies, so it was vital we brave the death trap.
We’d had a few skirmishes and lit the area up with three flares. We found a body at the bottom of one of the gas towers. “What’s an Alice pack?”, Red asked. He was looting the corpse and talking about what was inside the pack: supplies, ammo, food in the chat channel. I started to wonder how exposed we all were: we were blazing red against the pitch black in a major city. How wise were we being in a world of scare supplies and murderers?
Red’s night was coming to an end, and he offered to kill himself and let me loot his corpse, which I did as I needed ammo. Just as he left Gord crashed out. I was left alone, in a pool of light, full backpack, the occasional groan of a zombie prodding me to get the hell away.
I backed out of the city. I couldn’t see much of it the night was so pervasive, just shapes on the horizon. I turned and spotted someone at the top of the hill. There was no way he couldn’t have seen me walking up the road, but hadn’t said anything. He was just standing and watching. I got out a “Hel-” into the chat when a bullet hit me. And another. Bleeding is bad in ArmA II, and doubly so in Day Z where the game keeps track of your blood. I tried to duck, but it didn’t matter: I was dying and there was more than one of them. The figure was walking down towards my body. He walked up, calmly typed “I was the decoy” and put a bullet in my head.
Rocket Goes Full Time
He goes on to say that Rocket talked about having already ported the mod over to the Arma 3 engine, and that “it works great.” Rocket also reportedly said that DayZ has been tested internally with the new tech, and can “handle 100-200 players easily” on a server.
This qualifies as a rumour for now, as the comments are second hand, but Graham will be meeting Rocket at E3 tomorrow. We’ll have solid answers then.
Do you think its true???
IMPORTANT: Tents will be wiped in update 1.7.1.5
Just to give you guys a heads up, Rocket has decided to wipe tents during the next update, so if you’ve got stuff on UK5, UK6, or UK9 stored in tents, you better grab all the important bits.
DayZ’s Caretakers Thwart ‘Sustained and Constant’ Hacking
Rocket, of the development team behind the Arma II mod DayZ tweeted moments ago
that "due to sustained and constant hacking, the central database is
being dropped until further notice. You will not be able to connect." Kotaku has emailed Rocket for clarification and additional details.
Update: That didn't last long. All functionality was quickly restored; "Server is back online. Those identified as hackers in last weeks have received permabans. Sorry for the downtime," Tweeted rocket.
Update (Midnight EDT): Rocket clarified what happened in extend remarks to Kotaku. BattlEye Innovations, makers of ArmA II's anti-cheat protection, notified the DayZ admin team that they had permabanned—globally—"some thousands of those who had been previously detected cheating and hacking." The hacking attempts were solely to gain competitive advantage in the game; they were not attacks meant to steal user information or gain any type of administrative control over the game.
"At no time could they get control of the server itself, but they could kill other players, remove their gear, make them dance - all sorts of things," Rocket said. "But they could not, say, install files or anything.
"This is a very difficult time for the project, we have been under a sustained attack on nearly every system, both within game and in DayZ," Rocket added. "Without Bastian's help (makers of BattlEye), I am confident the project would have had to close. This, however, only represents an initial step, we will need to keep working with both BattlEye and Bohemia Interactive to achieve the results that those playing DayZ deserve. We have a long way to go to truly improve security but we're committed to that."
Update: That didn't last long. All functionality was quickly restored; "Server is back online. Those identified as hackers in last weeks have received permabans. Sorry for the downtime," Tweeted rocket.
Update (Midnight EDT): Rocket clarified what happened in extend remarks to Kotaku. BattlEye Innovations, makers of ArmA II's anti-cheat protection, notified the DayZ admin team that they had permabanned—globally—"some thousands of those who had been previously detected cheating and hacking." The hacking attempts were solely to gain competitive advantage in the game; they were not attacks meant to steal user information or gain any type of administrative control over the game.
"At no time could they get control of the server itself, but they could kill other players, remove their gear, make them dance - all sorts of things," Rocket said. "But they could not, say, install files or anything.
"This is a very difficult time for the project, we have been under a sustained attack on nearly every system, both within game and in DayZ," Rocket added. "Without Bastian's help (makers of BattlEye), I am confident the project would have had to close. This, however, only represents an initial step, we will need to keep working with both BattlEye and Bohemia Interactive to achieve the results that those playing DayZ deserve. We have a long way to go to truly improve security but we're committed to that."
DayZ weekly update: Extra cruelty, melee weapons, and giving infected the slip
It’s been an eventful few days for DayZ. The mod is constantly being tweaked and improved, so we’ll be doing one of these posts every week to keep you up to date. The 1.7.1 patch went live on June 17 and made some significant changes – not all of which were well received by the community. But since the game is at the alpha testing stage, new features aren’t necessarily permanent. “I do the hotfixes until the build is where I wanted it to be,” says lead developer Rocket on the official DayZ forums. “Then we test it. If we like it, we keep it, if not, we revert. That’s how it has worked and that is why we are here.”
Game updates
The 1.7.1 patch has made starting a new character much tougher, and has made the learning curve for new players even steeper. Here are some of the most significant changes.– The starting loadout has changed dramatically. Newly spawned characters now only get a bandage, a flashlight, and a box of painkillers – no weapon.
– Infected can no longer see through walls, but they hit harder, can see further, and have an extended attack range. They’re a whole lot more dangerous.
– But to balance it out, you can now lose them. This doesn’t work perfectly, but we have managed to shake our pursuers off by sprinting through a building and out the other side. If you get spotted and don’t have a weapon, your only option is to flee.
– If you move your crosshair over a character and they have low humanity, you’ll hear a heartbeat. The faster the heartbeat, the more people they’ve killed. This replaces the bandit skin.
Hotfixes
The 1.7.1 patch also broke a few things, so two hotfixes have since been released – one of which adds something we’ve all been waiting for…– Melee combat! Crowbars and hatchets can now be used to fight off infected. They’re no match for a gun, but work relatively well. You can see it in action here.
– You can now choose the gender of your character when you spawn. This is purely a visual thing, and doesn’t affect the gameplay in any way.
– There was a problem with food and drink spawning, and suddenly they became the rarest loot drops in the game. This has been sorted out now. The bean wars are over.
Community
Rocket has made it clear that disconnecting to avoid death is considered cheating, and will be patched out in future versions of the game. “I don’t know why, but people are assuming that I think this is part of the game. It’s not. Meta gaming is explicitly allowed, i.e. infiltrating teamspeak servers and groups, etc. But disconnecting to avoid death is an exploit.”If you spawn in a forest or field full of prone players, DON’T kill or loot from anyone. This is the debug forest, or debug hill, and spawning there usually means one of your files is out of date. “I’m here to address the issue with people killing other players when they join in the debug forest,” says DayZ team member Tonic. “This whole thing has gotten out of control so we’re going to start enforcing bans for all that are caught killing there.”
Some players are calling out for a reset of the DayZ master servers (where player profiles and inventories are stored) whenever a major update goes live, so that veteran players and newbies get to experience the changes at the same level. The argument is that long life players with NVGs and powerful weapons won’t realise just how difficult the game has become for newbies now that the starting kit has been nerfed and the zombies are stronger.
Rocket has responded to requests from server owners that they should be able to kick players to make room for their clanmates. “Originally we trialed allowing servers to kick out players who had either donated money or were clan members of the owner to allow space for someone else,” he says on the official forums. “But abuse of this became RAMPANT. If we let server owners do this, what is stopping them from kicking someone who just killed them? What is to stop them kicking people for arbitrary reasons?”
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