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.

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."

Most people will die from starvation, hunger, zombie-ism, or by Will Smith in an apocalypse. I died of naivety and gunshots. Day Z Mod for Arma II reworks the 225km island of Chernarus into a terrifying survivalist nightmare: you’re dropped alone, with meagre supplies, somewhere in the wilderness. There is no goal, no end-game. You just need to stay alive. There are zombie NPCs and other players. With the undead you know where you stand, but other players pose the greatest threat.
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

                                                         

The creator of DayZ and Bohemia Interactive employee, Rocket, has been instructed by Bohemia to work on the mod full-time. That’s according to an account of a fan who chatted with him at E3 earlier today, spotted by Craig over on the DayZ subreddit. The account says that Rocket believes that DayZ is “the first step towards Bohemia gearing up to make it into a full standalone game.”

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."

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?”
    

Another DayZ Vid

The Secret Behind the Success of DayZ, the Most Interesting PC “Game” of 2012

You can keep your Diablos, the most interesting thing to happen to PC gaming this year has easily been DayZ, a zombie survival mod for military shooter ArmA II.
What's even more impressive than the experience itself, though, is the fact it was created by a single man, New Zealander Dean Hall. So earlier this week we had a little chat to discuss the past, present and future of the mod.
Before we start, though, let's clear something up: this isn't strictly a fan-made mod. One of the reasons DayZ is running so well so early in its life (it's still in alpha) is that Hall actually works for Bohemia Interactive, the developers of ArmA II, where he's been since January after Skype chats with BI's creative director Ivan Buchta turned into a job offer.
"It is definitely an advantage because you can learn about how the engine works, and how you can work with the engine to achieve what you want", Hall says. "In a way, DayZ was a chance for me to really consolidate what I was learning during the day, in the weekends and at night. This allowed me to quickly refine and consolidate my knowledge in the engine."

Don't go calling this an official mod, though. Work on DayZ began long before Hall flew to the Czech Republic. "Much of the actual tech underneath I actually developed prior to turning up, in things I had been developing that was more like a persistent world battlefield (i.e. no infected people). But being at the heart of the development allowed me to learn how to work with the engine in what I was trying to achieve."
When I spoke with ArmA II devs Bohemia Interactive last week, they told me that sales of the game had shot up fivefold since DayZ's release, with the ageing shooter even occasionally topping Steam's sales charts ahead of brand new, AAA blockbusters.

    
Has this caused any problems for Hall as far as development of the mod goes? You bet it has. "In many ways, it slowed development to a crawl. I had to focus nearly all my time on performance issues associated with the drastically increased numbers."
"But it allowed the concept to be proven in a mass-scale environment. I really didn't have time to think about anything for the first few weeks, it was one problem to the next. Luckily there were members from the community to help me at every turn."
Getting a little deeper than his immediate responses to the flood of people rushing to try the mod, I ask Hall for his thoughts on the game's real hook: its emotional effect on the player, and how the game's lack of design, for want of a better term, was part of its appeal.
"Well I guess it depends what you mean by design", he says. "I think that's the core problem in the game industry at the moment, many people think design largely means story, progression, mechanics. I think as an industry we got stuck on repeat with that and designers started to devote more and more time to that. I spent far more time on design that I did on really anything else within DayZ, but that design was entirely focused on developing and refining how the game would effect the players thinking and develop their emotions, how the mechanics in game with affect the player and what situations the player would be faced with. Because I didn't allow for anything else, I couldn't take the easy way out. The base mechanics had to work because there was nothing else to pull it through."
 While DayZ's terrifying appeal is built on keeping things to a relative minimum - an irony given the complexity of ArmA II itself - that doesn't mean the mod is going to simply stay at "man vs zombies vs other men" level. Hall is committed to adding new and more immersive features to DayZ as he and the community see fit.
"I just added the temperature system, I am really passionate about having the game world have a key effect on the players thinking. I think this will make the players feel more engaged with the game. I loved Skyrim's visuals, they made me dreamy, but I always felt disconnected from the world because it had no effect on my character. I didn't have to factor in the rain or the snow, or being in water. I want to explore this concept with the DayZ players and see how this can be refined to add a whole dimension to the gameplay."
Looking at DayZ's success, even given the mod's early development stage and rough code, it's clear that Hall has struck a nerve, giving PC gamers an experience they weren't getting elsewhere, but which they were clearly hanging out for. Which begs the question: rather than simply exist as a mod, could DayZ, or something similar, work as a standalone, dedicated product?
"I think that DayZ has proven that such a concept would not only be a critical success, but a financial one as well. I think it's really just a question of who, on what, and when before this kind of gameplay mode becomes an actual game. I think that's great news for gamers, they have hit directly into the bottom line - and that is what will make studios take notice."
Before we wind up, I have to ask: given the mod can be very difficult for newcomers, what advice does Hall have for those taking their first steps in DayZ?
"Probably the same advice for any natural disaster: Have a plan and don't do anything stupid."
    
 

Latest Version !!!

 Well the newest version of DayZ is out now. This time you should avoid trying to install it manually. Instead you need to make sure you update and install through the "Six uppdater" and the "Six installer".  Of course if you are already in the know then that is cool, but for any people who are new to DayZ or thinking about playing it then make sure you goto
 DAYZ offical site

DayZ on the BBC

CLICK HERE  to see what the BBC had to say about DAYZ