[Hack Aimbot For Killing Floor
Tilo Chopin
I can understand the sentiment. We all hate hackers because they have the power to ruin the game unfairly with a single click of their mouse and end your life. As sniping is currently implemented in DayZ it's not too far from a hack itself.
I play primarily as a sniper and I want to see it become a lot more difficult for my kind. It's currently not fair to other players because sniping is far too easy to do effectively. Anyone should be able to find a high powered rifle and range finder easily; putting a round in some new spawn in Cherno from 700m should not be easy. Don't limit the availability of the gear, make it more realistic to use.
Sniping, marksmanship, and external ballistics is one of my real-life fields of knowledge. I've played the ArmA series since it came out as Operation Flashpoint in 2001 [yes I'm old]. The environment, realism level, sniping (and on an unrelated note, helicopter flight) were the things that drew me to it so much.
I used to create small missions to practice sniper/spotter roles with people, as well as having competing sniper teams hunt each other down. This worked well because everyone was on a level playing field with equipment and environment. It was about the tactics and strategy, not the shooting (which everyone could do equally well with similar equipment).
In DayZ that equality goes right out the window. It's you and your flashlight against a world of Ghillie guys with AS50's and L85's who need only to set their scopes to your range and spam shots at noobs until they run out of ammo. Why should you be required to have the skill to evade all the dangers of DayZ, while they aren't required to know how to shoot long range?
A sniper/bandit can lay prone over a thousand meters outside any deserted point of interest on the map (visibility permitting) and when zombies appear, they know there's a new victim to pick off. You can be the stealthiest player in the game, and they're still going to know you're there because of the zombies.
I hope this can be fixed at some point by having zombies be present even if a player is not around. As a programmer [not a game programmer] I understand the overhead issues surrounding this. Perhaps in the standalone version [where Rocket has more control over the underlying code] zombies can hurr-durr around all the time, but only activate their visual and audio scanning when a player is in their vicinity. Or maybe the raytracing can be done client side from the player to the zombies which would then check to see if the zombies are facing that direction when the player is visible to them, thereby triggering the aggro.(?)
I read somewhere that Rocket started DayZ as purely a survival (without zombies) mod. I'd love to see a version of DayZ with more players and no NPC's. I'm not sure it would be as popular, or even if I would like it as much as DayZ, but NPC's always find a way to bring a game down. Would be neat to see what DayZ would be like without them and the problems they bring along.
As for the snipers; DayZ is supposed to be hard, but not unrealistically unfair. It's supposed to be hard for the right reasons. In a real world post apocalypse of any kind there is only going to be one out of several thousand people able to make accurate shots at distances beyond 400 meters. Per capita there are more people who know how to fly planes and helicopters than know how to shoot like this.
If people want to be snipers in DayZ, make them learn. Just like you have to learn the map, learn how to get around zombies, use the gps, DMR holdovers, helicopter flying, etc. It's not extremely difficult to learn, but difficult enough that if people had to learn it there would be a much more realistic ratio of sniper to non-sniper survivors. People could still easily pick up a DMR or hunting rifle and be effective to a few hundred meters/yards.
What should be fairly common in DayZ (especially considering the number of deer stands) is the equipment. Rangefinders that work out to 600m and Deer rifles with adjustable scopes should be common in just about any rural home in Chernarus. Rangefinders that work to 800m and beyond should be somewhat more rare, as should match grade long-range rifles and ranging scope reticles, like the mildot scopes found on US military sniper rifles.
Some of these things ArmA does a fair job at, but simplifies so much that anyone who can range a target can hit it [my 13 yo son has a 34 day character with an AS50 and a lot of kills to prove it, and he doesn't know anything more about applying external ballistics to shooting than most other people].
NOTE: There are other factors such as transitional phases to and from stable flight. When a bullet leaves the barrel of a rifle it's not stable, and when it starts slowing to a trans-sonic/sub-sonic speed it becomes unstable. I don't think this stability is very important to emulate in-game.
Wind has drastic effects on shot placement. A 1mph breeze (depending on angle/direction) on a 175gr M118LR bullet fired from an M24 or M40 will blow the bullet roughly 10 full inches off course over 1000 yards [depending on atmospheric pressure]. Several factors determine how this works with different rounds and calibers. It's even more of a bitch in real-life when wind can be blowing multiple directions and speeds over the path of your shot.
Repeatedly firing a rifle causes the barrel temperature to rise. The barrel reacts to this by warping. As the barrel of a gun gets hot and warps, it throws off the shot and this can be quite drastic depending on the barrel and distance being shot. Spamming with a sniper rifle decreases your accuracy. Time should be required to cool the barrel to regain accuracy. Non match grade rifles (like the CZ and DMR) should be way more prone to warping (and slower at recovery) as match grade sniper barrels are thicker and have more surface area to dissipate the heat faster.
Sniper rifle scopes do not adjust by range. They adjust by fractions (usually or 1/8 MOA). The reason is that [depending on atmospheric pressure due to mostly altitude and temperature and incline shooting] a bullet may take quite a drastically different path in flight because it faces more or less air resistance and gravity. A marksman would have to adjust his scope dope MOA to accommodate for these differences. When you adjust a rifle scope, you're moving the crosshairs to where the bullet should hit. Under different circumstances (even on the same day) that scope will have to be adjusted differently for the same range shot.
Recoil in game should not return to on-target so well. This increases the need for a spotter for follow up shots after a miss. The spotter should have a mildot reticle spotting scope centered on the target and tell the shooter where the bullet splashed so the shooter can adjust his follow up shot to be on target. Currently it's way to easy to do as a single shooter.
Due to accuracy and velocity degradation I would like to see DayZ adopt a damage model where shots are more likely to miss at extreme ranges and do far less damage based on MOA. The AS50 [for example] is listed as a 1.5MOA shooting solution [pretty horrid for sniping]. At 1000 meters it's far more likely to simply graze a human size target than provide a direct kill hit. A headshot being mostly improbable.
Running these calculations requires very little (almost none) overhead at all and could easily be factored into the game. In fact, there's a mod for ArmA called ACE which does some of this, as well as other great changes to other areas of game play.
The simplicity of sniping in this game steals away from its authenticity more so than it does when playing regular ArmA missions where everyone gets their gear from the beginning. Until you get that gear you're just a target. You better forget about the zombies and just run, because the snipers know you're there, and you're easy to hit if you're not moving. Zombies are going to kill you slowly [if they even catch you], the sniper has an unrealistic ability to end you most instantly.
Running [by itself] isn't enough to throw the sniper, partially due to the issues I listed above [especially warpage and recoil], but also because it's not hard to note the distance a target runs in mils while counting the time it's going to take the bullet to get to them, then simply lead them by that many mils and shoot. I've made enough 700m sprinting headshots in game [that I know I never would have made in real life] to know it's way too easy in game.
I think most players would appreciate this as when they're fresh spawns trying to work their way up to the good loot they aren't going to be such easy targets for snipers, and because of the difficulty required to accurately snipe there won't be nearly as many, certainly not as many effective ones. Likewise, those who really want to snipe in the game would love the challenge of learning the craft. After all, it's how difficult and unforgiving that DayZ challenge is that draws most of us to it, and learning external ballistics isn't really rocket science. There are even numerous applications for PC, Android, iOS, and even Palm to calculate your shots. I currently use Shooter on Android [in real-life] to generate range cards for my rifle at different temperatures at my altitude.
I made some remarks about the availability of rangefinders (and other gear) on reddit and was told by someone basically not to be a carebear and learn mildots. My argument was that rangefinders should be more available, and that mildots aren't nearly as useful in the game as they are in real life where there are several common things you can measure and use for rangefinding via mildot. Getting accurate range off a distant prone target where you're guessing the height isn't nearly as accurate as measuring the mils of the stop sign, car wheel, or door frame he's next to, which you know the exact size of. Not to mention the problems introduced when mildot rangefinding at an angle.. By then I had a rangefinder for a while and used it to reverse measure some common things in DayZ, such as the window frame of the firehouse, the store glass, different doors and windows on different structures, vehicle wheels, etc. So I could mildot different items from my hide and draw range-card maps to different things. I knew if someone was by the store they were 800 meters away, with a glance at my card.
795a8134c1