Nasdara Mirages - heatstroke mirages for DayZ

The desert is cruel to a body that cannot cool down. When your character suffers heatstroke, or runs a red-hot body temperature, Nasdara starts showing things that are not there. Something appears far away, at the edge of your vision — and when you look again, or walk towards it, it is gone.

Alpha version. This is an early release: expect rough edges and changes between updates. Bug reports and ideas are welcome on our Discord.

A grove of green palms standing alone on the sand dunes under a clear sky — An oasis: five to ten palms around a small pool, in the middle of nowhere.

Two mud-brick houses alone in an empty sandy desert — A settlement that was not there a moment ago.

A crouched figure with a scoped rifle in the desert grass, an oil derrick behind — A sniper with a scoped rifle, shifting from side to side.

A crouched survivor among desert grass with a water tower on the horizon — A survivor crouching at the edge of cover.

The pictures are staged much closer than in normal play — a real mirage stands 400 to 600 metres away, where it is only a few pixels tall.

What it is not

Seen only by you. The server only decides when it happens; every mirage is created on your own computer. Nobody else sees it, and nothing is sent over the network.
Harmless. A mirage can not be killed or looted, can not hurt you, and leaves nothing behind when it fades.
Believable. It appears only where something could really stand: on level ground, in a spot you can actually see, never inside a tree, a rock or a building.

When it happens

Every 30 seconds the server rolls a chance for each player who is overheating. These are the defaults; a server can change every one of them.

Condition	Chance per roll
Red body temperature	3%
Heatstroke, stage 1	10%
Heatstroke, stage 2	20%
Heatstroke, stage 3	35%
Heatstroke, stage 4	50%

A mirage appears 400 to 600 metres away and 60 to 100 degrees off your line of sight, lives for 10 to 30 seconds, and vanishes if you come closer than 200 metres. While it is on screen the air shimmers a little.

For server owners

Get it from the Steam Workshop, put it into -mod= on the server and on the clients, and copy the key from its keys folder into the server's keys. No other mods are needed. It requires DayZ 1.30 and the Nasdara map.

Settings are written to profiles/NasdaraMirages/settings.json the first time a player joins and apply after a restart. You can change the chance for every stage, switch each kind of mirage on or off and give it a weight, set the distance, lifetime and angle, tune the heat shimmer, loosen or tighten where a mirage may stand, and force a single kind for previews and testing.