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Improved Hordes [V1.0]

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-beta.1 for A21 b324 released.

This is an experimental release of Improved Hordes. If you encounter any bugs/performance issues regarding the mod, report them in the Issues section of the repository with the experimental label.

Download: https://github.com/FilUnderscore/ImprovedHordes/releases/download/2.0.0-beta.1/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip


Changelog



Added


  • Support for DLL-based Improved Hordes add-ons.
  • Sound events are now properly processed and capped instead of relying on heat values provided by the game.

    Weapon silencers should work properly and attract less attention, even when used repeatedly.
  • This system may still need a few tweaks here and there, but it mostly works. Share your feedback on how it feels.

[*]Re-added chance attribute to horde group entity tags.

  • This will be ignored if no other entities are valid from a selected group.
  • Reduced feral wandering zombie hordes from chance of 1.0 to 0.8 after unlocking them after reaching GS 70.
  • Reduced radiated wandering zombie hordes after unlocking them after reaching GS 180.

    Wasteland radiated wandering zombie hordes chance reduced from 1.0 to 0.4.
  • Other biome radiated wandering zombie hordes chance reduced from 1.0 to 0.2.


[*]Re-added weight attribute to horde group tags.

  • This will be ignored if no other groups are valid within a horde. If no group matches any of the spawn conditions, then the horde is killed off.
  • This replaces the previous chance attribute that was applied on groups (not related to the entity ones!)

[*]Added horde_biome_curve_scale setting.

  • This setting controls how aggressive the horde_biome_multiplier scales specifically in the wasteland biome (not much effect in other biomes).


Changed


  • max_world_density setting changed to density_per_km_squared


    Each world has a different size. The max world density should adjust accordingly.
  • The previous value of 350.0 (based on 6144x6144) is now equivalent to 9.3.

[*]Lowered screamer delay from 18.0 to 6.0.

  • This change means that screamers will scream sooner when you first encounter them.
  • However, screamers now have a longer delay for each successive scream (3 times).

[*]Increased wilderness wandering horde spawns in all biomes.

[*]Spawn system improvements.

  • Horde spawning now has a slight delay of 2 ticks between each zombie spawn to reduce stuttering.

[*]Improved improvedhordes stats command output to be more informative.

  • Now provides more information regarding main thread requests that are being processed (e.g. zombie spawning, AI updates, etc.)
  • Provides information about the current POI zone (i.e. city/town) you are in, listing attributes such as size, POI count, density and the central point.
  • Provides information about all player groups and their respective players, gamestages, and biomes.

[*]Settings are now loaded when needed instead of only once at startup.

  • This fixes a bug where certain settings would not be applied properly.

[*]Improved Wandering/Screamer Horde Zone AI

  • Hordes will now wander around more frequently in zones as a single pack, stopping to take breaks as they reach certain parts of town. They will repeat this for a number of times (dependent on zone size & other attributes).
  • Hordes will try to avoid wandering near POIs where Land Claim Blocks are present.

[*]Changed minimum town-qualifying POI weight from 4.0 to 3.0.

  • This means a POI is classified as being potentially part of a town if it has 3 or more POIs near it.
  • This should include POIs near the outskirts of a town, as they are still considered part of the town.

[*]Reduced horde_biome_curve_scale from 5.0 to 2.0.

  • This should make wasteland POI zones less crowded but still more difficult than other biome POI zones.

[*]Increased horde_biome_multiplier from 0.1 to 0.5.

[*]Reduced wandering_animal groups Boars and Stags weight from 0.5 to 0.25.

[*]wandering_animal_enemy wilderness hordes are now affected by biome difficulty scaling.

  • You will see more aggressive animal hordes in harder biomes as a result of this change.


Fixed


  • Fixed NullPointerException when closing a game as the world unloads before the mod shuts down all its threads.
  • horde_biome_multiplier setting not being applied.
  • "Failed to spawn horde cluster" and "Bad spawn location at" warnings fixed with the spawning system improvements.
  • Random cases of horde entity group generation failing and using the placeholder zombieSpider entity class.

    This should only be used now if you haven't defined all possible cases for group entity spawning as a guaranteed horde measure, letting you know that there are no valid groups with the current game attributes (biome/time of day).

[*]Horde entities despawning early when most of the horde has already unloaded.

[*]Horde entities sensing invisible players.

[*]Player group gamestage being slightly higher than intended.

[*]Screamers not causing world event reports when AI Player Sensing is enabled.


Removed


  • AI Player Sensing option

    This has now been fully integrated into the AI system, it was made a setting temporarily for testing purposes.
  • Note: To be honest it was always enabled regardless of the setting in the config file. As mentioned before, certain settings were bugged and not applied when initialized, this was one of those settings upon closer inspection. Good thing the fix made in the previous version worked.


Known issues


  • Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.
 
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I'm not sure if this is known, but zombie hordes will frequently just walk back and forth in the same place usually in a 100 km line. They also seem to ignore the player or forget about the player 50ish% of the time. If you climb up something that is 3 or more blocks tall they will hit it a few times and then just walk away and start there back and forth pattern again. Overall this is an amazing mod and it's been awhile since I've had to think about my actions in game. Hit a police car last night because in vanilla it just spawns a few zombies and then that's it. Instead, I got a train of about 80 zombies which ended up with a screamer coming, which alerted another horde. I would have died if it weren't for the walking back and forth behavior. I appreciate all your hard work!

 
how does this mod now compare to the "enhanced wandering hordes" in the DF standalone mod section? Does anyone know? 

I would like to go back to this mod, it just had some bugs last time I used it. Have most of those been resolved, cause I love the idea of this mod ! 

 
ItsRileyNJ said:
I'm not sure if this is known, but zombie hordes will frequently just walk back and forth in the same place usually in a 100 km line. They also seem to ignore the player or forget about the player 50ish% of the time. If you climb up something that is 3 or more blocks tall they will hit it a few times and then just walk away and start there back and forth pattern again.
Click to expand...
Looking into this. The AI system interfaces with the vanilla AI which can cause these weird behaviors sometimes.

MrSamuelAdams said:
how does this mod now compare to the "enhanced wandering hordes" in the DF standalone mod section? Does anyone know? 

I would like to go back to this mod, it just had some bugs last time I used it. Have most of those been resolved, cause I love the idea of this mod ! 
Click to expand...
Most of the bugs have been fixed and some optimization has been done. There are still some relatively minor bugs like AI sometimes ignoring you, but it's running pretty well now I reckon.

 
<max_horde_density>2.0</max_horde_density>

<density_per_km_squared>9.3</density_per_km_squared>

<horde_biome_multiplier>0.5</horde_biome_multiplier>

If I change all these to much higher then its going to get very crazy in game right? I would like to remove the horde nights and use this mod as an alternative.

 
Agame said:
<max_horde_density>2.0</max_horde_density>

<density_per_km_squared>9.3</density_per_km_squared>

<horde_biome_multiplier>0.5</horde_biome_multiplier>

If I change all these to much higher then its going to get very crazy in game right? I would like to remove the horde nights and use this mod as an alternative.
Click to expand...
Yep, just watch out you don't crash your game with too many zombies. You'll want to run "improvedhordes flush" if you're changing these settings for an existing game to reset all hordes, or wait around 7 in-game days for them to respawn.

 
FilUnderscore said:
Yep, just watch out you don't crash your game with too many zombies. You'll want to run "improvedhordes flush" if you're changing these settings for an existing game to reset all hordes, or wait around 7 in-game days for them to respawn.
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Wouldn't that be impossible to do unless you were also modding values like the MaxSpawnedZombies in your serverconfig.xml file?

 
Venturai said:
Wouldn't that be impossible to do unless you were also modding values like the MaxSpawnedZombies in your serverconfig.xml file?
Click to expand...
Yep, but I don't know what other settings they might be changing on top of the ones they've listed already, like MaxSpawnedZombies as you've mentioned. If you're using default setting of 64 zombies, hordes just stop spawning in until you've cleared out some zombies.

 
And thats interesting does it mean if say I come across a horde of 100 zombies and then go somewhere else those 100 stay spawned in? So if my max zombies was 100 I would not get any new spawns elsewhere from 'natural' spawns?

Also a question on horde count, I have noticed via stats that it has been steadily decreasing during game time, from 100s to now 50. Previously it always seemed to stay at a steady amount 400 to 500, not sure why it keeps dropping.

 
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Agame said:
And thats interesting does it mean if say I come across a horde of 100 zombies and then go somewhere else those 100 stay spawned in? So if my max zombies was 100 I would not get any new spawns elsewhere from 'natural' spawns?

Also a question on horde count, I have noticed via stats that it has been steadily decreasing during game time, from 100s to now 50. Previously it always seemed to stay at a steady amount 400 to 500, not sure why it keeps dropping.
Click to expand...
The zombies will despawn when they get out of view distance until you get near them again.

Horde count may be dropping due to the biome decay where when they cross over into other biomes they start to shrink unless they return or die out. Should repopulate after 7 days of initial spawns.

 
thx to this great mod and the overall nice A21 im getting close to my 5k hours. Rly great i just wonder why this isnt in vanilla. Thx one more time for this mod

 
Okay, I've set everything back to default for now, except for max entities spawned per player which I can't not set at -1 (because I'm damaged like that).

We had an interesting experience yesterday while running some of the settings Picklefart suggested a couple of pages ago (max horde density from 2.0 to 4.0 and the possible groups for wandering hordes set to mincount 20 maxcount 30).

We were in the midst of dealing with one large horde and had another in the near distance, but a sizeable chunk of them (I'd say a minimum of 20) had crouched and were non-responsive, only agro'ing when we got closer (like when clearing out a POI). At a guess I'd say it's because we were hitting a limit in some way despite having forced too many zombies to spawn.

So much fun though.

 
Venturai said:
Okay, I've set everything back to default for now, except for max entities spawned per player which I can't not set at -1 (because I'm damaged like that).

We had an interesting experience yesterday while running some of the settings Picklefart suggested a couple of pages ago (max horde density from 2.0 to 4.0 and the possible groups for wandering hordes set to mincount 20 maxcount 30).

We were in the midst of dealing with one large horde and had another in the near distance, but a sizeable chunk of them (I'd say a minimum of 20) had crouched and were non-responsive, only agro'ing when we got closer (like when clearing out a POI). At a guess I'd say it's because we were hitting a limit in some way despite having forced too many zombies to spawn.

So much fun though.
Click to expand...
I have been messing around with settings and decided you can actually have to many hordes, I got to the stage where I did not have enough time to even make ammunition, so I am backing it off for now!

It is great fun though and I am also very surprised the devs have not done more work with the hordes mechanic, as it creates a much smoother and more realistic experience in game than the 'horde night' which feels so artificial and cheap.

 
Venturai said:
Okay, I've set everything back to default for now, except for max entities spawned per player which I can't not set at -1 (because I'm damaged like that).

We had an interesting experience yesterday while running some of the settings Picklefart suggested a couple of pages ago (max horde density from 2.0 to 4.0 and the possible groups for wandering hordes set to mincount 20 maxcount 30).

We were in the midst of dealing with one large horde and had another in the near distance, but a sizeable chunk of them (I'd say a minimum of 20) had crouched and were non-responsive, only agro'ing when we got closer (like when clearing out a POI). At a guess I'd say it's because we were hitting a limit in some way despite having forced too many zombies to spawn.

So much fun though.
Click to expand...
Yeah I believe vanilla pathfinding calculations has support for up to 8? entities at a time, which might be what’s happening. Looking into any changes I could make to improve this in the mod. Could also be related to the new A21 optimisations for zombie pathfinding depending on distance from a player.

Still marked as a known issue until I can figure out a way to improve this.

Agame said:
I have been messing around with settings and decided you can actually have to many hordes, I got to the stage where I did not have enough time to even make ammunition, so I am backing it off for now!

It is great fun though and I am also very surprised the devs have not done more work with the hordes mechanic, as it creates a much smoother and more realistic experience in game than the 'horde night' which feels so artificial and cheap.
Click to expand...
I did warn you lol

MrSamuelAdams said:
could this run in conjunction with Khaine's "Wandering Horde Frequency" Modlet? 
Click to expand...
Should do, the mod now handles hordes with its own system. It has disabled vanilla screamers from naturally spawning though since they cause enough havoc around town now.

 
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