PC Sleeper alerting system is weird

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Deceptive Pastry

New member
Decided to revisit and check out Alpha 20. It's generally good. A few nitpicks but things are much better since A17. I do have a problem with the new(?) sleeper triggering system though. I've seen some people complaining about the effectiveness of stealth but it's more than that.

For stealth, at first it feels like stealth just isn't effective anymore. The guaranteed-trigger rooms are ok sparingly or at the end of a POI, very dumb when it's frequent. But I've learned less of them are actually guaranteed triggers but rather the way sleeper checks are done when entering the volume. Knowing this I've been able to stealth somewhat effectively now. It seems like it's based on your "stealthiness" when entering the volume, rather than when you actually get near the sleepers. So if you're as stealthy as possible when you enter the rooms, you can then be a little less stealthy once you're actually in the room?

There's also a problem with the opposite, how being LOUD affects sleeper alerting. If you're outside of a sleeper volume (but still within the POI), it seems like you can make as much noise as you want and it will not wake up that volume. I can fire a shotgun as many times as I want just outside a room full of sleepers, but if I crouch down, as silent as possible, walk 2 feet forward and cross the volume threshold, and I fail the hidden stealth check, suddenly every single zombie 20 feet away aggros on me. It doesn't feel right. If I fire a gun in a standard size house it should wake up just about every zombie in the house, or at least 90% of them. Firing a gun in a large building should at least aggro a radius of a few rooms.

Maybe this is on purpose to feed into the direction of making POIs more like haunted houses, with hidden ambush zombies bursting out of the walls. If someone walks into every house and starts unloading, it ruins that mechanic. In gameplay though it feels very unnatural and "video-gamey". While I'm stealthing now, instead of thinking where zombies may be and carefully keeping my distance from each one, I'm thinking in terms of "Ok, where is the next invisible trigger?" I'm less concerned about making noise, because I know if I fire my gun it's only going to aggro 2-3 zombies in the current room and the next room 10 feet away will be unaffected. I also don't like how your light level seems to have no actual correlation with line of sight of any of the zombies. How well lit you are should make no difference in a zombie's ability to notice you when they're behind a wall, only how much noise you make.

 
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Actually now you should have the game making a stealth check for every zombie. But it doesn´t seem to work, at least for me it´s always the whole room waking up. Never had one waking up while others stay sleeping.

And yeah it´s kinda weird, that you can make enough noise to wake up a whole city, but if you don´t cross the magic line the zombie 10m away keeps sleeping peacefully. But i don´t have any hope that this system will go away seeing that we are near the end of development if all goes as planned.

 
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Deceptive Pastry said:
 and I fail the hidden stealth check, suddenly every single zombie 20 feet away aggros on me. It doesn't feel right.
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Yep I agree.  It feels like a video game and learning the software tricks instead of trying to sneak around avoiding noise.  It would be better if one zombie woke up, made noise when then woke up any other zombies close to it so to speak.   Instead of this light switch effect when they all wake up and instantly know exactly where you are and attack.

 
I agree that some tuning is still needed here.  It seems that the POI "volumes" (I keep seeing that used as a term) seem to separate out the sleeper zombies as you work the POI from room to room.  One room, or one encounter point, and whatever noise you make does not seem to disturb the sleepers in the next encounter point.

I have also noticed where sleeper zombies on the floor above or below will not actually spawn in until the player has actually reached that floor.  I understand, functionally, why this is - the game is focusing on one dungeon crawl "scene" or room encounter at a time.  But there was one particular instance in house_old_bungalo_11 where I broke out the stairs to disarm the "sleeper ambush" that hides out under the stairs.  I couldn't actually neutralize the zeds there because they had not loaded in.  Once I traveled all the way down the stairs, they showed up.

So - I get some of this as a limitation to the systems tech and the experiences that they are trying to create.

I made some similar observations in my A20 feedback thread:
 




 
But it's even more video gamey walking around the house tapping the walls just to draw all the zombies outside... I much prefer noises NOT waking Z's from a distance than the alternative.

 
JCrook1028 said:
But it's even more video gamey walking around the house tapping the walls just to draw all the zombies outside... I much prefer noises NOT waking Z's from a distance than the alternative.
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How is that more video gamey than a zombie right next to you not waking up from a grenade because you didn´t step over the magic line?

It´s way more realistic that noise attracts every zombie that can hear it. That´s how things work usually. It´s just not an ideal solution for the gameplay.

 
It feels bad but I also see why they decided it's better than waking up the whole building with one bullet, and then dispatching them all at once and having 'free loot'. It would probably be better having some kind of middle ground, like visible zombies being 'soft sleepers' while closet scare jumps staying 'hard sleepers'. It would feel less gamey at least, and would probably re-enable jump scares if you thought you woke up most of them but some remained hidden and caught you by surprise. As it is, you just know that every room contains at least one sleeper just waiting for you. 

If you could wake up zombies from multiple volumes, maybe a mechanic could be added so that the more zombies you wake up at once, they tougher/faster they come at you. Some kind of chaos multiplier so that clearing most zeds at once comes with some drawbacks, while being stealthy-ish lets you fight 'normal' zombies. 

 
This demonstrates another issue though imo, which is that waking up an entire building of zombies is more of a boon than a danger. Such a scenario should mean you have a tough fight on your hands. But with how abundant ammo is even early game, you could just mow them all down and end up with an easier time than actually doing the POI. Idk, the balance is a bit weird. But I have a different idea of how POI clearing should work. In a zombie survival game I'd put more emphasis on stealth, at least early game, whereas I think the devs want a faster paced shooter with more options for playstyles, one of which includes running through a POI with a machine gun but still having jump scares. So trying to balance allowing that, while still implementing stealth properly, can be a challenge.

 
I wish it would be more like the Thief franchise.  Thief: The Dark Project did stealth great all the way back in 1998 (so don't tell me that it's too expensive on cpu cycles). The 7DTD UI seems reminiscent of the way the Thief UI worked, so it's a pity that stealth doesn't work similarly.

Maybe the whole sleeper volume thing is just a sunk cost fallacy.  I get that they are inactive entities until triggered to save on AI calcs, but how hard would it be to add a wakeup check to each of them to see whether they get activated?  They could have randomly generated sensitivity modifiers to determine how heavy of a sleeper they are.

It seems like the stealth system is there, it's just this whole sleeper volume thing is messing things up.  No room or  sleeping zed should have a 100% chance of detecting the player.  Not even the boss room (although they should be extremely easy to wake up)

The problem of simply waking up the whole POI to easily mow them down could be mitigated by making their detection radius relatively small.  Maybe include a boolean "chain reaction" value to determine whether the sleeper will wake up if other sleepers around it are triggered.  That way there can still be the tsunami of zeds in particular areas if one is awoken.

 
pApA^LeGBa said:
How is that more video gamey than a zombie right next to you not waking up from a grenade because you didn´t step over the magic line?
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Because the way it used to be (with distant noise awakening them) you could draw them all out of the house to you. At least now you have to fight them more or less IN the house, in tighter quarters.

 
@JCrook1028 Yeah that´s a gamplay issue, but that magic line is way more video gamey than everything waking up when you make noise. Especially because the system is only half arsed. I can break a wall 1m besides a sleeper and he won´t wake up, but if i take the intended path he wakes up when i step on a piece of paper 20m away from him or wakes up just because i cross that line. Doesn´t get more video gamey than that tbh.

 
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Yeah I'm still in the habit to break up piles of glass etc to be more quiet, I forget, and then I'm like, why even bother, they are going to wake up anyway as soon as I cross some invisible line.

It's a different playstyle I have to adjust to.

 
ChickenWings said:
Yeah I'm still in the habit to break up piles of glass etc to be more quiet, I forget, and then I'm like, why even bother, they are going to wake up anyway as soon as I cross some invisible line.
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Samesies.  I just don't like the litter and trash, and I end up stopping to clean up every little pile.  I'm also the guy that picks up all of the rocks, and clears the tires and roadkill off of the road.  (Yes, technically you could say that I have a flower-sniffing pace. :D )

 
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ChickenWings said:
Yeah I'm still in the habit to break up piles of glass etc to be more quiet, I forget, and then I'm like, why even bother, they are going to wake up anyway as soon as I cross some invisible line.

It's a different playstyle I have to adjust to.
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Yes, exactly ... so much fun with cautious POI clearing in the stealth mode is gone ... piles of trash do not make sense, a lot of content feels to be thrown through a window.

Stealth clearing was more time consuming but also more fun, that is why often I was choosing stealth. Now I use only one comfortable option: machine gun/shotgun/magnum + a bunch of ammo = first person shooter with zombies. 

I have tried my best to keep some niche for stealth stuff in my game playstyle ... but without luck, I have started to ignore stealth completely. My conclusion is that stealth more or less is broken.

 
Zvex said:
Yes, exactly ... so much fun with cautious POI clearing in the stealth mode is gone ... piles of trash do not make sense, a lot of content feels to be thrown through a window.

Stealth clearing was more time consuming but also more fun, that is why often I was choosing stealth. Now I use only one comfortable option: machine gun/shotgun/magnum + a bunch of ammo = first person shooter with zombies. 

I have tried my best to keep some niche for stealth stuff in my game playstyle ... but without luck, I have started to ignore stealth completely. My conclusion is that stealth more or less is broken.
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I feel the same but face it, it isn't the ready supply of ammo that has done that.

It's the time and frustration plus the fact that we need to kill every living undead thing we see for 2 reasons, the mission typically requires it and XP.

Back before XP & levels and skills (which is why I still maintain this is an RPG, no matter how much running and gunning it devolves into, it will still be an RPG) when it was all about exploring and getting the things you needed it was in your interest to get in and get out engaging as few zeds as you needed to.

 
In terms of sleepers, I've less issue with waking them up than with them spawning in very late.

I am on a mid tier PC, so it might be something to do with processing power, but I can find myself stealthing into a room, finding nobody, turning around and seeing a (sleeping) zombie spawn into a corner I just walked past. There is one new PoI (sorry can't tell you a name) that as you go down to the ground floor, zombies spawn under the stairwell, yet they don't spawn until you are well within the room. You can look from above at the location they should be, but nothing. I am talking about the sleepers spawning in, not triggered. Obviously when they spawn in sleeping, and you happen to be right in front of them, they are automatically triggered.

 
ricp said:
In terms of sleepers, I've less issue with waking them up than with them spawning in very late.

I am on a mid tier PC, so it might be something to do with processing power, but I can find myself stealthing into a room, finding nobody, turning around and seeing a (sleeping) zombie spawn into a corner I just walked past. There is one new PoI (sorry can't tell you a name) that as you go down to the ground floor, zombies spawn under the stairwell, yet they don't spawn until you are well within the room. You can look from above at the location they should be, but nothing. I am talking about the sleepers spawning in, not triggered. Obviously when they spawn in sleeping, and you happen to be right in front of them, they are automatically triggered.
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If it makes you feel any better, I'm on a high-end PC and it happens to me.

There's all kinds of for lack of a better word, lagginess in A20 that I didn't have before.

 
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Krougal said:
If it makes you feel any better, I'm on a high-end PC and it happens to me.

There's all kinds of for lack of a better word, lagginess in A20 that I didn't have before.
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I haven't done any extended testing, but there does seem to be more delay, which is a killer if you are a stealth player.

I know TFP had planned introducing "walking sleepers" into the houses, but it was dropped for this alpha, and I wonder if there are "code hooks" in the current code, waiting for the walking sleepers to be fully implemented, that perhaps is affecting the current sleeper spawning. Just throwing that out there, btw, it might be something completely different.

 
Spawning in late is definitely an issue. One example; I was looting the skyscraper building site - had just crossed over the crane arm and jumped across to the area that usually contains a welcome party. Instead, there was no one there - so I carried on up the ladder. Got halfway up, then remembered the little loot room down the hatch, climbed down the ladder and everything spawned around me... I find it hard to believe that's desired behaviour.

 
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