Updated: January 10, 2013
All right, listen carefully. The videos you are about to see are probably my most ambitious multimedia project so far. From this moment on, you will call me Ljubrick. The story goes as follows: DayZ is an absolute masterpiece zombie-theme mod for ArmA II, a superb first person shooter game, by Bohemia Interactive. Yes, you take the most realistic shooter out there, made by those crazy Czech guys, and you add zombies. And then, you start playing. Welcome to a beautiful, self-induced nightmare. Not for the faint-hearted.
It is very difficult for me to tell you just how much I love this game without sounding like a total retard. But the thing is, DayZ is the best thing to hit the gaming scene in years. It surpassed all my expectations from a video game, and brings out the best in ArmA II and the worst in humans. This is psychology reincarnate, this is pure terror, this is bloody scary. And now, in high definition. After me.
The videos
I have uploaded there videos to Youtube, approx. three minutes in length each, replete with effects. The videos are recorded in full high definition, and that means 1920x1080p, on highest graphics settings in-game. So not only do you get to experience DayZ first hand, you get the best quality around. Without further ado:
DayZ video review and unofficial trailer - Part 1: Find a gun
Link for those who do not like embedded stuff.
DayZ video review and unofficial trailer - Part 2: Defend yourself
Link for those who do not like embedded stuff.
DayZ video review and unofficial trailer - Part 3: Kill 'em all
Link for those who do not like embedded stuff.
Behind the curtain
Now, a bit on the mechanics and internals of my Kubrick-like work. I took videos in game using FRAPS, amounting to a beautiful 16.1 GB worth of footage. Then, I transcoded the videos and clipped their size to a more presentable 350MB, ending up with nineteen separate scenes.
Next, I loaded a Pangolin instance on my HP laptop, which also happens to be the Steam Linux beta test box, and started editing the videos, like I did in my Frankenstein experiment. I used Kdenlive, audacity, mencoder, avconv, and some GIMP to get the desired results. The rendering of these three-minute clip took about one hour of CPU time to finish, weighing about 100-180MB each. At that time, the laptop was working really hard, using all of its 4GB RAM and some 2GB of swap.
All in all, about 5-6 hours of game, 16.1GB raw footage, six hours of editing and processing, and about four hours of rendering. And what you get are some pretty neat videos. I have one small request, if you like this, share, share like mad. I really hope you like it, and if you want more stuff like this, do let me know.
Cheers.