kodabar

Mm, I saw your post. I was hoping it was just you (sorry). But it's not looking good. Damn it - I was having the best game. I've only found one food item so far and that was a rusty tin can - thank goodness they give more nutrition now, but I'm still going to starve to death at this rate.

I'm sorry to say that I'm not able to gut a rabbit either. Started a new game with the last update and I have no other mods loaded, apart from CBA. I was zooming around in the darkness in a truck. Sometimes travelling too quickly can make loot spawns appear late or not at all. I've arrived at one of those half-finished buildings (building on a construction site with no walls) and seen crates appear in front of me and drop to the ground (they seem to spawn about half a metre above the ground). So perhaps the rabbit wasn't fully formed? I'll try to find another whilst travelling on foot to see what happens. I've got a blue-handled "gutting knife" and there's no option on the action menu and double clicking the knife doesn't do anything either. I tried putting it in my clothes (rather than the chest rig or backpack) just in case, but that didn't help either. The only other thing I can thing of is that this is a resumed game. I saved when I stopped playing yesterday and resumed today. Has anyone managed to successfully gut a rabbit yet? Edit: Added a screenshot in the spoiler below

Small issue: When filling empty cans with water, I can't tell which cans now contain water and which don't. It just means I need to be a bit organised in my approach to filling cans.

Bugger. I'm mixing up my ravagé, ravager and uh, I dunno... ravagée? Ahem. I'm sure as hell not going to say les ravages as that sounds more like a ski resort to me. "Yeah, we're heading over to Courchevel at the weekend. Going to do some skiing at Les Ravages" I am doubly shamed that I had to look up Barjavel because I didn't recognise the name. And I realised the only work of his that I'm familiar with is the film Le Retour de don Camillo. It's easily one of the best Don Camillo stories (and stars Fernandel), so I don't feel quite as bad. Never mind. The flurry of posts concerning pronunciation is almost a large as that when there's an update. So my work here is done (somehow).

If I remember my French properly, ravage in French is more akin to the past tense 'ravaged' (rather than the present tense 'ravage') in English. And that makes more sense. So I think Lecter's right with the ravage/fromage comparison. I am also from the east coast of Scotland, but I went to a proper school, so I realised my mistake and moved to England so I didn't have to listen to stupid accents all day. And I'm posh.

Here's an odd thing. Haleks is French. So how do you think he says 'ravage'? Remember when DayZ first came out and we didn't know if it was DayZed or DayZee? Even when we discovered Dean Hall was from New Zealand that didn't help. Finally, we heard him say it and it's been DayZee ever since (much to my annoyance). So do we pronounce Ravage to rhyme with the way that British people say 'garage' or the way that yankees say 'garage'? Or even worse, is there an implied acute on the final 'e'? Otherwise, the pronunciation changes the tense.

Personally I'd welcome that. Food is the defining limitation right now. My record for surviving is four days although most of the time I don't make two. The thing that always kills me (provided I don't get shot) is starvation. I find most of my food on AI bodies, so the game is almost entirely me hunting for AI to kill in case they have food. And I'm not getting enough food for it to be worth having a base or playing for an extended period of time. I can understand rusted cans having less nutrition in them, but 5 is pretty mean. That's really just a few minutes of extra life. When you mentioned adding a tin opener, I was quite surprised. You want to make me starve to death more quickly? But with the ability to hunt rabbits, that should balance out. One of the problems with the DayZ mod was that it became easy. If I started in the map corner with Kamenka, Komorova and Balota, I would just walk north, visiting all the deer stands until I was geared up. That would take me about half an hour. And then there's nothing to do except kill other players or avoid them entirely and live off the land. Yawn. I like the way the standalone makes you start off hungry, so you've got a more immediate problem than other players. But that gets solved when you realise you can just stand at an apple tree until you're no longer hungry or thirsty and have enough spare apples to last you on a journey that goes twice across the map and still have some spare. What I do like is when you're stuck with a difficult choice. Do I go out and hunt rabbits or do I hunt AI? You have to make sure that neither choice gives me too much food. If I can build up a food stockpile, then I've removed hunger from the list of dangers. That makes it too easy. You need to be able to balance it so that I can't quite get enough food from killing AI (like it is at the moment) so that I need to hunt rabbits too. And vice versa. If I can solve a problem, then I will. You need to make sure that I can't solve problems in the long term. Maybe I can get enough food to last me for today, but you mustn't provide enough food for me to be able to last a week. I must not be able to solve all my problems at the same time or there's no reason to play.

Another ArmA 3 update is going through just now. Just a small one (25MB). Seems to be a hotfix for the big one. It's probably this: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/183855-release-candidate-branch-announcements/?p=2944651#entry2944651 Has minor effect on stamina and an increase in the limit of remoteExec(Call) targets.

I did something a little stupid in Ravage. I had to mute the microphone as I was laughing too much. YouTube video in the spoiler:

Haleks. Is there anything that anyone can do to help? Obviously you pretty much have to do the coding yourself, but are there other things that one could help with? Translating text strings? Documentation? Anything?

A big (2.2GB) ArmA 3 update has just hit Steam. There's a lot of changes, including some interesting stuff about mod dependencies in the launcher.

I have spent the last few hours trying to find the magic helicopter so I can shoot it down. And then I found something that makes that a good deal easier.

It can take a lot or a little depending on the weapon used and your accuracy. In the original DayZ mod, there was a lot of debate about whether a Makarov pistol could bring down a helicopter. Someone claimed they had done it and promised a video, but never came up with the goods. In quite specific circumstances, I managed it (video in spoiler tag). In Ravage, you're up against an armoured helicopter that's moving. It's difficult to hit it, let alone accurately target individual areas of the helicopter. The best way (in my opinion) to bring down an AI helicopter is to aim at the tail rotor. It's a fairly large area and you can't really armour rotor blades. Without the tail rotor, the helicopter is uncontrollable at low speeds. The AI pilot will attempt to land it. If they manage, you can murder the crew, steal their NVGs and maybe even fix the helicopter. Even if you can't fix it, you can still use it if only the tail rotor is broken. At low speeds, it's difficult to control, but once you get moving in any direction, the tail gets pushed back by aerodynamic forces and you're just fine. The problem of course comes back when you slow down again. I am currently doing my utmost to shoot down a heli in just such a manner. I've got three technicals at the edge of the airfield just waiting for a heli to show up. Of course, now that I'm ready, I can't find the bloody thing. If I manage it, I'll post here.

I finally saw the magic helicopter.

I've put stuff in a vehicle and tent, travelled to the other side of the map and come back. Everything was still there.

Hey, Play with Six guy. Your web page shows the description for 0.1.3, even though the download is 0.1.3.2

I had a bit of a playthrough. This was actually in 0.2.0 (0.3.0 came out immediately after I'd recorded this). It's in three parts.

I'm using 0.1.3 of Ravage with only CBA added. i7 4790K with GTX 970. No drop in framerate for me. PS rsoftokz - love your sneaky syphoning. Brilliant.

I've been playing Ravage quite a lot since the .2 update and I like how hard it is. As far as weapons go, I have had no trouble getting hold of them (I've got way too many piled up in the back of my truck). Everyone's got a favourite weapon that they want in the game, but I think appeasing them would spoil things. This is supposed to be a survival game, not a weapons bazaar. I used to get a lot of questions from people about DayZ (over 100 emails a day at its peak). The most common question from people was "Which is the best gun?" They didn't realise what a pointless question it was. I mostly ran around with an M16 ACOG. If I killed someone, the most common excuse they used was that they didn't have the right gun. If they'd had their AS50 (or whatever), they'd have killed me for sure. I didn't go in for gunfights much. And I didn't win because I had the best gun or because I was the best shot (I definitely am not) - it was because I spotted them before they spotted me. This allowed me to decide if there was going to be a gunfight. And if there was, it was going to be on my terms. It didn't matter what gun they had. It didn't even matter what gun I had. I lost a lot of interest in DayZ when people started modding servers to make guns and vehicles more readily available. It made the game easy and pointless. I still remember finding my first helicopter on a vanilla server. I was on my own and all my regular playing chums were offline. I spent eight hours (eight REAL hours) finding the parts and getting that helicopter fixed up. When you're carrying a main rotor assembly 10km across the map, there's very little room for supplies and ammo, so I spent those hours being stressed and paranoid. When I finally completed the heli and took off, the sense of achievement and relief was incredible. Now I can just join a modded server and there's five of them parked round the corner in perfect condition. Sod that. Back in the olden days, games were hard. the only game I ever completed was Golden Axe in the arcade. I friend of mine completed Jet Set Willy on his ZX Spectrum and was legendary at our school for doing so. Now everyone feels that they have the right to complete every game for some reason. So maybe I'm just being old-fashioned when I saw that I like games to be hard. Too many games are really just vaguely-interactive films. When you play Call of Duty, it's very pretty and it has some neat tricks, but really I'm just walking down a corridor shooting at pre-determined targets until I reach the end of the script. So I've enjoyed Ravage as an exemplar of what I liked about DayZ and 'proper' games. It's hard. Last night I had a camp with two tents, two vehicles (and I had marked several others). I'd even recruited a team mate and I had an anti-radiation suit and gas mask. I had so many guns and so much ammo that it wasn't even a concern. But I was dying of starvation. I was having to out and fight simply because I could not find any food in buildings. At the end of a looting run, I was returning to camp and risked everything to get into a big firefight just for the chance of a can of tactical bacon. And then my gunner got shot. And then I got shot. And I practically screamed because of the sense of loss. If too many guns and too much food is added, then I'll just be spending my time making a campsite and working out which gun's my favourite. And that's not why I'm playing. I quite understand people wanting to make their own variants with different settings and setups, but please be careful not to spoil what makes this good.

That's completely fine. I'm sure most of us reading this understand what you've done and why. You're not preparing a mission for use by hundreds of people in differing computing environments - you've modified this so it works for you and your son and you've posted details on here in case anyone's interested. And I can assure you that people are interested - I, myself am one such. So please, don't be disheartened. I think some chaps got the impression you were working on a public release and commented accordingly. I, for one, am jolly interested to hear what everyone's doing with this. I love to see what happens when people find out they can modify a game. People do all sorts of things that I would never have imagined. And reactions to them are equally interesting. So please keep on with what you're doing. You'll notice that people are posting to say they like what you've done. On a vaguely related note, I made a video of some dancing zombies from the original DayZ mod. I had a father write to me to say that his son had previously been afraid of zombies, but, having seem them dance to a jolly upbeat tune, he was no longer as afraid. I could never have predicted that outcome and the email was quite the most surprising thing I read in a while. The video's here if you're interested:

The AI never seem to run out of ammo. I had that AI unit with me for about three hours (the video is condensed) and he was shooting a lot, yet never ran dry of ammo. There's no way he could have been carrying all that ammo, so I'm guessing that Haleks wisely gave the AI infinite ammunition.

I'm very much enjoying this. It's tough, but that's a good thing. No new bugs to report. I made a video showing gameplay and explaining installation (not that there's any need). Here it is: Some music for you, Haleks. I enjoyed your links.

Very nice work, Haleks. I've been playing it with no problems (apart from thirst). You've got a great balance of difficulty and rarity. Runs perfectly as well.

Definitely up for this. Looking forward to it in fact.