DayZ creator Dean Hall talks humanity, barricades, damaged weapons, and all sorts of other stuff

[DeEz]

[QUOTE=NoDachi;41062368]There is a huge FAQ on exactly why he isn't doing that.

Maybe if people read it before shooting off then their would be less dramatics over the decision.[/QUOTE]

where is this

[Tobin]

[QUOTE=ntzu;41062675]The Arma 3 engine IS actually infinitely better, the only downside is that Ive heard it doesn't support AS MANY players/AI as Arma 2 does (though arma 2 with capped ai/players is unplayable anyways.)[/QUOTE]

The problem with the ArmA III engine right now is that unless the AI is on a ridiculously low level they will kill you in one hit from 500 metres away.

They barely ever miss and always know where you are.

[Persecution]

I like it.

[DeEz]

[QUOTE=ZestyLemons;41061353]There aren't a lot of engines that can have maps as big as ARMA's[/QUOTE]

[URL=http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/9/2011/11/dfda00860c2fb9fd3d17030d5a70c2c1.jpg]Right[/URL]

[Rautapalli]

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]have you played regular arma 2/ oa/ the expansions, like, at all? pretty much everyone with an ounce of brain matter agrees that it's an incredibly faulty engine.
[/QUOTE]

Played shitloads of all of them since the first OFP. Pretty much everyone with an ounce of brain matter agrees that they've all been amazing games. See how easy it is to make dumb blanket statements like these?

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]
it's clunky as fuck, movement is awkward
[/QUOTE]

Yup, but you get used to it. Just because you can't do your 360 noscopes doesn't make the game unplayable.

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]
sometimes you die because your scroll menu refuses to see what vehicle you need to climb into
[/QUOTE]

???

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]
if your vehicle taps a tree you just explode and die
[/QUOTE]

nope (although the damage model is a bit silly at times)

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]
lag is horrendous in a ton of servers
[/QUOTE]

Don't play on shit servers.

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]
close quarters combat being entirely impossible
[/QUOTE]

Yeah close quarters combat is pretty clunky, but that's just because of the stupidly huge hitbox your gun has. You can fix it with a simple addon so it's not really an engine problem, just a stupid design decision by BIS.

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]
also, wait. how could shitting on the engine not be related to dayz? it's not like dayz runs on the arma 2 engine, lol.
[/QUOTE]

[B]DayZ specific[/B]

[Stewe231]

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]have you played regular arma 2/ oa/ the expansions, like, at all? pretty much everyone with an ounce of brain matter agrees that it's an incredibly faulty engine.

it's clunky as fuck, movement is awkward, sometimes you die because your scroll menu refuses to see what vehicle you need to climb into, if your vehicle taps a tree you just explode and die, lag is horrendous in a ton of servers, [B]close quarters combat being entirely impossible,[/B]etc, etc. i could go on for years.

the only thing he mentioned that is specific to dayz is the AI.

also, wait. how could shitting on the engine not be related to dayz? it's not like dayz runs on the arma 2 engine, lol.[/QUOTE]

In this thread, nobody has any idea what an engine is.

Almost everything you described has nothing to do with the engine, rather the design decisions of Bohemia when working with the engine. Arma 3 has fantastic controls and movement, yet is still on the same engine. The only real [I]engine[/I] problem it has has to do with how it renders things, the game being unoptimized, and net code being awful when you get 100+ players.
Close quarters is very clunky, but perfectly possible with a few simple mods that remove the weapon collision.
Vehicle damage has to do with scripts, and with using mods like ace, it greatly improves it.
The lag has to do with servers that are aren't powerful enough to host the beast that is arma 2, or the server's connection isn't powerful enough. Shacktac's server is a god damn monster, and we get next to no lag other than the occasional networking error.
The AI is fine, the way he describes "spawning" has nothing to do with arma or the engine, and is 100% scripts that Dean Hall wrote himself. The AI move in a zigzag because everything they do is completely on the fly, no set movements or scripted behaviors, and the zombies are just normal ai that run at you and do a script to "attack". Dayz standalone is getting rid of the thinking part and just making them run straight at you like zombies should.

Arma's engine has a lot of problems, but it also does a fuck ton more than any other engine I can think of.

[editline]16th June 2013[/editline]

[QUOTE=Mellowbloom;41062535]you can't board up windows because the artist doesn't like it

I'm sorry, what[/QUOTE]
I guess he's referencing the time to make a model for each size door/window and finding the proper location for each window/door.

[Killuah]

[QUOTE=stewe231;41062817]In this thread, nobody has any idea what an engine is.

Almost everything you described has nothing to do with the engine, rather the design decisions of Bohemia when working with the engine. Arma 3 has fantastic controls and movement, yet is still on the same engine. The only real [I]engine[/I] problem it has has to do with how it renders things, the game being unoptimized, and net code being awful when you get 100+ players.
Close quarters is very clunky, but perfectly possible with a few simple mods that remove the weapon collision.
Vehicle damage has to do with scripts, and with using mods like ace, it greatly improves it.
The lag has to do with servers that are aren't powerful enough to host the beast that is arma 2, or the server's connection isn't powerful enough. Shacktac's server is a god damn monster, and we get next to no lag other than the occasional networking error.
The AI is fine, the way he describes "spawning" has nothing to do with arma or the engine, and is 100% scripts that Dean Hall wrote himself. The AI move in a zigzag because everything they do is completely on the fly, no set movements or scripted behaviors, and the zombies are just normal ai that run at you and do a script to "attack". Dayz standalone is getting rid of the thinking part and just making them run straight at you like zombies should.

Arma's engine has a lot of problems, but it also does a fuck ton more than any other engine I can think of.

[editline]16th June 2013[/editline]

I guess he's referencing the time to make a model for each size door/window and finding the proper location for each window/door.[/QUOTE]

I really don't see why Arma2 is such a beast to host. The map is huge, ok, but there is almost no stuff going on. Fucking Minecraft has better server performance than Arma2. The only reason I can think of is bad coding.

[DeEz]

[QUOTE=stewe231;41062817]The only real [I]engine[/I] problem it has has to do with how it [B]renders things, the game being unoptimized, and net code being awful[/B] when you get 100+ players. [/QUOTE]

This so much. Not to mention the client-server architecture is hilariously insecure (at least they're fixing this).

[Tobin]

[QUOTE=Killuah;41062884]I really don't see why Arma2 is such a beast to host. The map is huge, ok, but there is almost no stuff going on. Fucking Minecraft has better server performance than Arma2. The only reason I can think of is bad coding.[/QUOTE]

In an ArmA firefight you're going to have tons of people firing tons of bullets against tons of A.I with tons of explosions and vehicles on a huge map. That's why it's such a "beast to host"

It also comes from the fact that it's horribly optimized.

[Rautapalli]

[QUOTE=Mr. Tripp;41062920]In an ArmA firefight you're going to have tons of people firing tons of bullets against tons of A.I with tons of explosions and vehicles on a huge map. That's why it's such a "beast to host"

It also comes from the fact that it's horribly optimized.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Killuah;41062884]I really don't see why Arma2 is such a beast to host. The map is huge, ok, but there is almost no stuff going on. Fucking Minecraft has better server performance than Arma2. The only reason I can think of is bad coding.[/QUOTE]

The AI is the biggest bottleneck, it's not very well optimized. Then again not many games have AI quite as dynamic, most engines rely on pre-made AI paths, cover points etc.
Why it uses so much bandwidth I don't know, it's quite ridiculous how much bandwidth you need to have a stable game in a fairly small mission with 10 or more players.

[Stewe231]

[QUOTE=Killuah;41062884]I really don't see why Arma2 is such a beast to host. The map is huge, ok, but there is almost no stuff going on. Fucking Minecraft has better server performance than Arma2. The only reason I can think of is bad coding.[/QUOTE] Lots, and lots of simulations, every round fired has a simulation, hundreds of different things.
A really good cpu will go a long way in arma, while your graphics card barely matters.
And, as Mr. Tripp Said, it's not optimized very well.

[Leon]

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]have you played regular arma 2/ oa/ the expansions, like, at all? pretty much everyone with an ounce of brain matter agrees that it's an incredibly faulty engine.

it's clunky as fuck, movement is awkward, sometimes you die because your scroll menu refuses to see what vehicle you need to climb into, if your vehicle taps a tree you just explode and die, lag is horrendous in a ton of servers, [B]close quarters combat being entirely impossible,[/B]etc, etc. i could go on for years.

the only thing he mentioned that is specific to dayz is the AI.

also, wait. how could shitting on the engine not be related to dayz? it's not like dayz runs on the arma 2 engine, lol.[/QUOTE]
none of those are engine problems though you have no idea what you're talking about

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

the faults with arma2s gameplay aren't within the engine but how poorly done the everything is

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

ok i made that post and a minute later i dont even know if i agree with what i just said

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

the arma2 engine isn't faulty, its only out dated.
dayz is kind of making a mistake by staying on the a2 engine when the arma3 engine is right there but oh well

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

but yeah the things you said have nothing to do with the engine really but more to do with poorly though out controls, gui, poor animations, and so forth
its problems are less to do with the engine and more to do with just the features being poorly done

the real virtuality engine is actually incredible with what you can accomplish with it for large scale military simulation and its evident that its problems with arma2 considering that everything you said is just fine in arma3

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

also lag is only a problem with people that have shitty internet or shitty pings. the RV engine / arma handles the net code incredibly well.
RV is like the only engine of its magnitude that can handle having 130 people (from all over the world) in the same server with another 200 ai and it run nearly 100% perfectly

[All0utWar]

[QUOTE=Leon;41063414]
[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]
the arma2 engine isn't faulty, its only out dated.
dayz is kind of making a mistake by staying on the a2 engine when the [b]arma3 engine is right there but oh well[/b][/QUOTE]

It's not an option for them to use the Arma 3 as a base. They are stripping Arma 2 down to almost nothing and recreating it as DayZ. If they did this with Arma 3, they would have to constantly add and remove things from the game. Arma 3 is in alpha, Arma 2 has been released. There is a clear difference between the two. Although using Arma 3 would be nice, if the team did this, we wouldn't be seeing DayZ for another couple years.

[LoneWolf_Recon]

[QUOTE=DOG-GY;41060188]Warz is a bad game[/QUOTE]

FTFY

[DOG-GY]

[QUOTE=Leon;41063414]none of those are engine problems though you have no idea what you're talking about

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

the faults with arma2s gameplay aren't within the engine but how poorly done the everything is

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

ok i made that post and a minute later i dont even know if i agree with what i just said

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

the arma2 engine isn't faulty, its only out dated.
dayz is kind of making a mistake by staying on the a2 engine when the arma3 engine is right there but oh well

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

but yeah the things you said have nothing to do with the engine really but more to do with poorly though out controls, gui, poor animations, and so forth
its problems are less to do with the engine and more to do with just the features being poorly done

the real virtuality engine is actually incredible with what you can accomplish with it for large scale military simulation and its evident that its problems with arma2 considering that everything you said is just fine in arma3

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

also lag is only a problem with people that have shitty internet or shitty pings. the RV engine / arma handles the net code incredibly well.
RV is like the only engine of its magnitude that can handle having 130 people (from all over the world) in the same server with another 200 ai and it run nearly 100% perfectly[/QUOTE]
does their code even allow for contextual keybinding? it seems like if it did they wouldnt have designed it to feel like im using photoshop shortcuts to do basic things in the game.

and the fact that it takes seconds to go between standing, crouching, and prone and the running toggle is just as fucked means that if you fuck up in a single way or try to be dynamic in your movement at all you have to do it incredibly tediously. that is not good game design and dayz didnt fix this. it's even worse than it is in arma because a second of changing animations and being unable to do shit translates to getting mutliple hits from at least one agro zombie. this isnt good game design. he should have realized that the inherent flaws of arma 2 were ruining his game (which is a really good concept actually), and switched engines to something like unity or udk. they could just as well handled the map size and he could have done fucking awesome art for it and created something entirely new. no doubt that would have led to even better decisions in design as a more flexible engine opens up the ability to prototype features quicker. fuck even source would have been a better choice even if the map size would be a beast to manage. on top of all of that he could have distanced himself from the take on realism that arma has and create more interesting encounters and player interaction. off the top of my head i would say that a few good ideas would be a more unique and expanded humanity system that actually allows for meaningful interaction rather than one-sided brutality (it doesnt feel like a survival game when such a large percentage of people gun each other down on site) as well as more abstract things (like arcade style scoring or something neat) that aren't realistic. the scoring could have gone into something like skill/class systems with lots of upgrades, or just aesthetic changes.

none of these things are far outside the scope of work that this complete standalone game is going to be, and i'm sure that a different engine would have allowed him the creative control that his idea deserved. i just feel like it was squandered by the very strict nature of working with arma 2. he could have even monetized from the beginning with an alpha build similar to how minecraft did it except less vacations

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

actually i think im gonna make that video ive been wanting to express this opinion online for a long time and i've took the time and hdd space to gather a lot of footage to analyze and use. i think i even started writing a script sometime.

[Chrille]

[QUOTE=DOG-GY;41065733]does their code even allow for contextual keybinding? it seems like if it did they wouldnt have designed it to feel like im using photoshop shortcuts to do basic things in the game.

and the fact that it takes seconds to go between standing, crouching, and prone and the running toggle is just as fucked means that if you fuck up in a single way or try to be dynamic in your movement at all you have to do it incredibly tediously. that is not good game design and dayz didnt fix this. it's even worse than it is in arma because a second of changing animations and being unable to do shit translates to getting mutliple hits from at least one agro zombie. this isnt good game design. he should have realized that the inherent flaws of arma 2 were ruining his game (which is a really good concept actually), and switched engines to something like unity or udk. they could just as well handled the map size and he could have done fucking awesome art for it and created something entirely new. no doubt that would have led to even better decisions in design as a more flexible engine opens up the ability to prototype features quicker. fuck even source would have been a better choice even if the map size would be a beast to manage. on top of all of that he could have distanced himself from the take on realism that arma has and create more interesting encounters and player interaction. off the top of my head i would say that a few good ideas would be a more unique and expanded humanity system that actually allows for meaningful interaction rather than one-sided brutality (it doesnt feel like a survival game when such a large percentage of people gun each other down on site) as well as more abstract things (like arcade style scoring or something neat) that aren't realistic. the scoring could have gone into something like skill/class systems with lots of upgrades, or just aesthetic changes.

none of these things are far outside the scope of work that this complete standalone game is going to be, and i'm sure that a different engine would have allowed him the creative control that his idea deserved. i just feel like it was squandered by the very strict nature of working with arma 2. he could have even monetized from the beginning with an alpha build similar to how minecraft did it except less vacations

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

actually i think im gonna make that video ive been wanting to express this opinion online for a long time and i've took the time and hdd space to gather a lot of footage to analyze and use. i think i even started writing a script sometime.[/QUOTE]

Just why do you think he won't be able to fix any of those things in DayZ standalone? The reason why everything is done with half-solutions in the mod, is because, surprise, it's a mod. He has to work with the game code and do everything on top of that. He has no such restrictions in standalone.

And someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember rocket saying that they are doing tiered development on standalone, and the first thing they reprogrammed was the netcode and game optimization. They cut out all the necessary background workings that the vanilla arma 2 engine handles by default.

[DOG-GY]

i'm saying that if he were to develop the idea on a more flexible engine it would have certainly ended up better as there's not very much room for expansion or deep modifications of mechanics as an arma mod. it becoming a full game and the possibility of recoding doesnt change that, as it's still going to be fundamentally similar. imagine if he were able to prototype on something as flexible as udk or unity. if you spend a moment entertaining those possibilities you quickly realize that by picking such a limited platform on which to make the original, he significantly limited the scope of creating something truly unique and rich and i feel like all that value was lost. the game feels so lifeless and rigid due to arma and all i can feel while i play it is a sense of wasted potential. that's frustrating

[Clavus]

I like the Arma engine, even with all its faults. It's because it does something unique, with the whole mil-sim aspect, and because it has a great community surrounding it. They're ironing out most of the jerky movement and aiming in Arma 3 and DayZ SA, so they're definitely improving on the technical side.

[DOG-GY]

its uniqueness as a military simulation style game doesnt stem from its engine though and i would argue that the engine was actually detrimental to the design process of arma 2 as well. likewise to what i said before about dayz: imagine how much better arma 2 could have been if not for the shit engine and design flaws (broken ui, controls, etc), and how much arma 3 would be for it. not to say that arma 3 doesnt appear to be a massive improvement over 2, but it could have been even better if they had developed a better engine and made better fundamental design choices when making 2. prototyping mechanics should be simple as fuck and that's why extremely flexible engines (such as unreal) end up with incredible and diverse libraries. their engine and, to a larger extent, overall design philosophy failed to accomplish this and arma 2 very obviously suffers from this fact.

[Clavus]

Bohemia is a East European developer. If STALKER and Metro 2033 taught me anything, it's that East European developers make crazy ambitious games full of flaws.

It is what it is. You can complain all you want about lost potential but unless someone else delivers on it, there's not much of a point.

[DeEz]

[QUOTE=Clavus;41066679]Bohemia is a East European developer. If STALKER and Metro 2033 taught me anything, it's that East European developers make crazy ambitious games full of flaws.

It is what it is. You can complain all you want about lost potential but unless someone else delivers on it, there's not much of a point.[/QUOTE]

Not to mention switching engines would cost a lot of money and time for the devs. I think revising the RV3 engine like they're doing right now is the best course of action honestly.

[sp]assuming they can get their shit together[/sp]

[TheTalon]

[QUOTE=DOG-GY;41060498]it's a fact that arma's engine is a broken mess. it is an opinion that dayz is a bad game but that opinion is substantiated by that fact. even if you like arma you can not argue that it is fundamentally broken in a ton of ways, to argue that it is not is to either not understand or to deliberately ignore its really blatant flaws[/QUOTE]

Arma's engine is not a broken mess. It is dated, but it isn't broken

[profan]

[QUOTE=milkandcooki;41062598]have you played regular arma 2/ oa/ the expansions, like, at all? pretty much everyone with an ounce of brain matter agrees that it's an incredibly faulty engine.

it's clunky as fuck, movement is awkward, sometimes you die because your scroll menu refuses to see what vehicle you need to climb into, if your vehicle taps a tree you just explode and die, lag is horrendous in a ton of servers, [B]close quarters combat being entirely impossible,[/B]etc, etc. i could go on for years.

the only thing he mentioned that is specific to dayz is the AI.

also, wait. how could shitting on the engine not be related to dayz? it's not like dayz runs on the arma 2 engine, lol.[/QUOTE]

[quote][B]lag is horrendous in a ton of servers[/B][/quote]

Hardly the fault of the game itself when this is almost always the fault of bad scripting or the server being overloaded running on terrible hardware.

All of those things seem to be related to the fact that animation blending is nonexistent in the ARMA2 engine, which I agree is quite bad, as well as the fact that you can't "stop" an animation halfway through.
The scroll menu thing is something that isn't a fundamental engine flaw but which can be fixed.

Either way, stop making dumb blanket statements all the time, you come off as a complete tool.

[Killuah]

[QUOTE=stewe231;41062991]Lots, and lots of simulations, every round fired has a simulation, hundreds of different things.
A really good cpu will go a long way in arma, while your graphics card barely matters.
And, as Mr. Tripp Said, it's not optimized very well.[/QUOTE]

I'm sorry but bullet drop and ricochet is not exactly the most demanding calculation and unless it's simulating a pressure wave for every explosion like Mafia2 does I'll have to go with "the engine is crap".

[Clavus]

I do wonder how they're going to support the reportedly 150 players per server in SA. Now that the networking infrastructure is server-authoritative, doesn't this mean networking is far more intensive per player?

Just compare it to other server-authoritative engines. Source sets the limit at 32 players. Battlefield 3 can handle up to 64 by offloading some decisions to the clients from what I guess. On the flipside, there's PlanetSide 2 with networking wizardry beyond my comprehension. But that doesn't run on single community hosted servers.

Maybe it relies on the fact that players are spread out and engagements are very short.

[profan]

[QUOTE=Clavus;41068520]I do wonder how they're going to support the reportedly 150 players per server in SA. Now that the networking infrastructure is server-authoritative, doesn't this mean networking is far more intensive per player?

Just compare it to other server-authoritative engines. Source sets the limit at 32 players. Battlefield 3 can handle up to 64 by offloading some decisions to the clients from what I guess. On the flipside, there's PlanetSide 2 with networking wizardry beyond my comprehension. But that doesn't run on single community hosted servers.

Maybe it relies on the fact that players are spread out and engagements are very short.[/QUOTE]

Mount&Blade Warband is a good example, through some sort of wizardry they manage to support upwards of 200 players on a decent server.

(Hosted a 130 player one on a i7 920 before myself)

Simplifications will be made I reckon.

[DOG-GY]

[QUOTE=TheTalon;41067920]Arma's engine is not a broken mess. It is dated, but it isn't broken[/QUOTE]
thanks for the insight

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

[QUOTE=Clavus;41066679]Bohemia is a East European developer. If STALKER and Metro 2033 taught me anything, it's that East European developers make crazy ambitious games full of flaws.

It is what it is. You can complain all you want about lost potential but unless someone else delivers on it, there's not much of a point.[/QUOTE]
why not? why is there no value in considering what could have been better? Also, all of the points that I am making feed into my argument that dayz should not have been built off of arma 2 and that it would have been better for it. to me thats a pretty damn valid reason for criticism

[Cuel]

[QUOTE=DOG-GY;41070995]thanks for the insight

[editline]17th June 2013[/editline]

why not? why is there no value in considering what could have been better? Also, all of the points that I am making feed into my argument that dayz should not have been built off of arma 2 and that it would have been better for it. to me thats a pretty damn valid reason for criticism[/QUOTE]

he built the mod using arma's own scripting language, written to make it easier for anyone to mod it. anything "hard coded" that he wanted changed would have to go through BIS who are also busy updating OA/ToH and not to mention VBS2 (which is their main income). on top of that it needs to be tested and then released as OA beta build.

it was easy for him to create the mod since he had the engine, sounds, models & animations, everything that he needed except for looting / damage and the zombies. arma wasn't created to be a fast paced shooter but instead more of an arcade slow paced milsim available to the public since it can't afford VBS2. its main focus is outdoor combat vs AI, while PvP can also be played, it has never been the core purpose. this is also the reason why some people experience the movement as clunky, even tho it is dated it still has its purpose of faking what you can't translate between real life and a game. they didn't really use proper hardware for animations either. dayz began as a proof of concept and literally exploded when shacktac played the early alpha. that's when all the complaints about animations and clunky movement began dropping in, obviously these issues exist for people playing normal A2 but they're using mods which makes it less of an issue, something that dean didn't want implement since he wanted to know the code/configs or w/e. it's not like he could utilize all of BIS resources, i'd imagine that in the beginning he could maybe ask for help from a few dev's and even then they could probably not help him 100% of the time.

dayz standalone is running on ToH engine with A3 improvements implemented. it's easy to have hindsight of what could've been done better and on what engine it would run better but it's not going to happen. he's still a BIS employee, he can utilize resources from there and he has excellent knowledge of working with the engine and its scripting language. none of what you mention are reasons enough for him to switch as he can now work with the source code without having to go through BIS and making them release it as beta for OA.

[DOG-GY]

i never said he should switch engines now tho im saying that from a design standpoint the idea could have been done better with a more flexible engine, and its easy to imagine that it would have led to it being a more unique game because of that. im also saying that he should have been more ambitious and realized that arma 2 wound up limiting what he could do