ZLocator - DayZ has no map. Point your phone at the screen and find out

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DayZ has no map and no minimap. Every other DayZ map needs you to know where you are already. ZLocator finds it: point your phone at the screen and it recognises the terrain in front of you, names the town you're next to, and shows which way you're facing. Nothing is installed on the PC or console — it only looks at the screen, so it works on Switch, PlayStation and Xbox too. Chernarus, Livonia and Sakhal. The map is free; finding yourself is the paid part.

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Hi Product Hunt, DayZ is a survival game with no map and no minimap. That is the game's own choice, and players solve it the hard way: memorising coastlines, reading road signs, or dying somewhere they never identified. There is nothing to query either: the game has no public API that would hand a player their coordinates. On PC you can at least join a modded server that shows them. On PlayStation, Xbox or Switch you cannot even do that. So ZLocator does the only thing left. You point your phone at the screen, it finds the screen inside the camera frame, straightens it, and recognises the terrain in front of you. Then it names the town you are standing next to and marks you on the map. The part I am proud of is not the code. To recognise a place, you have to have been there. We walked all three DayZ maps in game and photographed them from every angle — about 1.17 million reference views. Every map tile, every place name and every reference photo was made that way, by us. In our tests the median error is 67 metres and 99% of fixes land within 500 metres. It needs daylight in the game, and deep forest is the hardest case. I would rather say that here than have you find it out. We could not find another app that does this — not for DayZ, not for any other game. Every game map we found needs you to know where you are first. The tools that don't, like PUBGIS for PUBG, read a map the game itself draws. DayZ draws none, so the terrain is the only clue there is. The map is free. Finding yourself is the paid part. Happy to answer anything.