Short nights, long dayz

A problem I had with the time acceleration, that may or may not be an issue with your script.... if the server was night time, and a player died, they would respawn and it would be daylight for about 10 minutes until they synced again and then it would be instantly night. I never saw a fix for this.

Don't do time acceleration. Try doing this: day, day, day, night. BEC can do this for you. you have to have access to your hiveEXT.ini but you can swap it out each reset. I say let it roll and keep the day/night cycle. Big gamming groups like CCG, won't let night every come on any server. your server times are set in the .INI, hence you can roll it to whatever time each reset.
 
The reason why they don't let nights come, is because nights kill the server population. There are a few servers out there that may be a bit popular and also run nights, but for the most part when it gets dark people leave the server. I have been running a server for almost 2 years now and I can tell you that I've tested this a few different ways. Ive used accelerated time, I've used regular day/night cycles, etc.
I think night time just annoys most people. It certainly does get annoying after a couple of hours for me. Especially night vision not being compatible with most scopes.
I've personally known several servers that ran nights, and they are no longer around because nights killed their server population.
Many people say they like nights, but the silent majority doesn't. Running nights just isn't a good idea unless you've somehow managed to attract a certain type of regular players who enjoy night. But that's a huge gamble, and with their being so many other servers to choose from, and with the mod slowly dying in general, I wouldn't recommend it.
 
ccg is gay

i like a,certain amount of,night. zombies,are easier .. but thats moot now because the pussy servers have made,zombies walk ... you can,find heli,crashes easier because of the burning,light ... but thats a moot point now because there is enough loot that nobody cares about helicrashes anymore ..
so yeah, not much point in it.
i like the change, players using flares, flashlights, makes pvp harder ... i always just started the server at a time where the last hour would be at night. i think it would,work,better to accelerate the time to dark when it hits sunset and avoid the twilight .. then have 30-60 minutes of night and restart,into day.
 
Actually I always hated sunset/sunrise in arma, it completely blinds you. I like the twilight hours for sure though.
 
thats the time i mean to avoid. i agree, dark is better than the blinding sun and the arna graphics goes from,bright to dark depending on which direcction you look .... sucks hairy goat balls
 
Actually the gaming community has degraded but this is only my opinion, I've been gaming longer than most people reading this have been alive. Far as the DayZ/Epoch/etc community it degraded to "pay-to-win", "easy-mode", or I leave your server. If you make it a challenge then you only get 30+ year old players anyone under that age group (for the most part) seem to want it easy or not at all. (or so it seems)

Nights excluded for the not-so-silent majority, if they were silent there would be nights. I personally like night, one server restart about 4 hours of night. Night has distinct advantages during game play that out weight the disadvantages.

What do server owners want? large populations of numpties running about?

Which mod dying? Epoch and Overpoch seem to still be very strong with the server population numbers.

Its quite sad over all the state of most of the gaming society, I would go into specific reason why I think this with data behind it but it would bore the crap out of everyone involved. I'll probably get a ton of troll mail just over this post alone.

I personally won't remove one night cycle out of the rotation. Nor will I ease up missions, or game-play, challenging is more rewarding than I horde everything then I have nothing to do but harass the bambi player base.

The reason why they don't let nights come, is because nights kill the server population. There are a few servers out there that may be a bit popular and also run nights, but for the most part when it gets dark people leave the server. I have been running a server for almost 2 years now and I can tell you that I've tested this a few different ways. Ive used accelerated time, I've used regular day/night cycles, etc.
I think night time just annoys most people. It certainly does get annoying after a couple of hours for me. Especially night vision not being compatible with most scopes.
I've personally known several servers that ran nights, and they are no longer around because nights killed their server population.
Many people say they like nights, but the silent majority doesn't. Running nights just isn't a good idea unless you've somehow managed to attract a certain type of regular players who enjoy night. But that's a huge gamble, and with their being so many other servers to choose from, and with the mod slowly dying in general, I wouldn't recommend it.
 
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What servers owners can do is use BEC (BattleEye Extended Control) to copy over a new HiveExt.ini so you can have no sunset or morning hours. Just give the .ini a time where its past that time (morning hours or sunset hours) or have it so the next restart its already early morning but "night" so its not "black" out but easy-mode night.

Example: (server restarts) BEC copies .ini file with time set to 1am (4 hours before next restart) = 5am in-game-time (server reboots) BEC copies .ini file with time set to 11am. Bob's your uncle, you have a "nerfed night setting" and then it blamo back to mid-morning (no sunset, no sunrise). it would take a bit more working out times on paper to get it properly setup with your server's reboot schedule but it can be done.

just a FYI if anyone ever wants to try it.

ccg is gay

i like a,certain amount of,night. zombies,are easier .. but thats moot now because the pussy servers have made,zombies walk ... you can,find heli,crashes easier because of the burning,light ... but thats a moot point now because there is enough loot that nobody cares about helicrashes anymore ..
so yeah, not much point in it.
i like the change, players using flares, flashlights, makes pvp harder ... i always just started the server at a time where the last hour would be at night. i think it would,work,better to accelerate the time to dark when it hits sunset and avoid the twilight .. then have 30-60 minutes of night and restart,into day.
 
I agree 100%. I like to read all the server advertisements and the ones that say "hardcore" mean the AI are difficult, but its still that same easy game where you can walk into a firestation and pick up 4 rifles. And you can go buy the rifle you want.
Ease of access DEVALUES the items. Dayz is about scavenging, fear and desperation. And the donations are absurd. If someone LIKES the server they should donate, but get nothing in return more than the owners eternal gratitude. Or something that doesn't affect gameplay, like a special skin, or spawn at their base ...
 
What servers owners can do is use BEC (BattleEye Extended Control) to copy over a new HiveExt.ini so you can have no sunset or morning hours. Just give the .ini a time where its past that time (morning hours or sunset hours) or have it so the next restart its already early morning but "night" so its not "black" out but easy-mode night.

Example: (server restarts) BEC copies .ini file with time set to 1am (4 hours before next restart) = 5am in-game-time (server reboots) BEC copies .ini file with time set to 11am. Bob's your uncle, you have a "nerfed night setting" and then it blamo back to mid-morning (no sunset, no sunrise). it would take a bit more working out times on paper to get it properly setup with your server's reboot schedule but it can be done.

just a FYI if anyone ever wants to try it.


Most server owners have a hosted server and a BEC that doesn't allow batch files to run. But good idea for the rest of us. Personally, I prefer to just have the last hour be night so I start at 2pm and run 7:30 until next restart, and then Fannies your aunt ..:).
 
Actually I used Vert and Vert would allow you to have access to the .ini file, all you need to do is ask them. Vilayer might as well far as the others goes... don't know. I put in a support tickets specifically outlining what I wanted to do and they said "yes" which I was very surprised.

Vert hosting has outstanding customer service.

Most server owners have a hosted server and a BEC that doesn't allow batch files to run. But good idea for the rest of us. Personally, I prefer to just have the last hour be night so I start at 2pm and run 7:30 until next restart.
 
Vilayer is good too .. thats the best thing they have going for them (outside of good, cheap VPS servers).
I had asked one host about custom batch files in BEC a few years back and it was and emphatic NO, "You must use one of our VPS" they said. .. so thats what I did .. with a different company.

but it never hurts to ask, most of these hosts are small enough companies they will do special things for customers. I dont think vilayer fits that model though.
 
The other problem which I personally believe you gentlemen fail to consider, is quite simply, the game gets boring. Every once in awhile I like to revisit the old school dayz vibe, stuff is hard to find, modded addons don't make the game easier, days/nights, etc. But after awhile, that game gets boring for a lot of people. I think dayz mod became what it is now because servers that made the kinds of changes we see today gained popularity and maintained a steady player base, and one's that didn't make those changes, died off.

I run a PVP death match server. It's a blast. A lot of people play and enjoy it. Theres no shame in that. Is it everyone's cup of tea? No it isn't, but that's ok. It might not be dayz in the way that the original developers of dayz had in mind. Then again, DayZ wasn't what the original developers of Arma had in mind.

If you guys haven't checked out DayZero, you probably should. https://zombies.nu/
I haven't really played it myself, but from what I was told it's more true to old school dayz and done right.
 
I wrote a couple paragraph reply and then decided that we have discussed this so many times and deleted it all. So all I am going to point out in response to the "mods making dayz what it is today" is this chart showing there are 1800 most of which are nearly empty and the Dayz Standalone is on a steady decline also while 2 years ago there were 6500 dayz servers.. .. So yes,I agree the mods made Dayz what it is today .. a dying game. Making changes to a successful game is not always a good thing. CS 1.6 is what, 15 years old and is still 20.000 servers? Dayz originally sent Arma2 to the top of the steam sales charts, must have been something good there ...
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CSGO is not the original counterstrike, its a lot different. Its a fast paced call of duty with a market and rare items so people can compare dick sizes.

My point was that the original game as it was intended to be played, gets incredibly boring for a lot of people after awhile. I too, a couple years ago, fell in love with dayz. Spent hours completely lost in the woods looking for guns and avoiding zombies. Then the you get to a point where that's not really fun anymore. Theres no adventure because you've seen it and done it all.

A lot of the mods aimed to add more content to the game so there was actually something to do. That's why Im sure you can see that the majority of those servers are epoch or overpoch, which is really the only thing keeping the mod alive at all.
 
Long post deleted ... replaced with short post because we have discussed this many times in depth. Short story is I see it the exact opposite. I see the abundance of overpoch servers the REASON why dayz servers have declined 75% because they remove the reason to play Dayz and replace it with the shallow deathmatch style of play with all the gear you need and zero survival aspects. Other games do that better. What is ironic is that I have also run an Arma2 Deathmatch server (which is unbelievably fun) and those are not popular either ..
Oh, and I was referring to CS1.6 with its 19,000 servers which I am familiar with as I host all 3 versions of Counterstrike .. Source is by far my favorite though ...
 
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