PC A suggestion to solve the BIG problem

[Laz Man]

This is exactly what I was getting at. We used to have huge hordes of lightweight (processing-wise) zombies. If the game supported them before, it's hard to argue that it couldn't now if they reverted back to these zombies (and maybe gave up some additional load from other things, I realize).
I would really like to understand what the game would have to give up (SI?, high-rez textures (all/some?), etc) in order to get these zombies back. I think I would probably be happy to make that trade.

Dont let the picture fool you. With 594 zombies, the game was unplayable. I was just curious on how many zeds I could get out at one time.

Also, back in the early alphas, the game was completely different.

 

[Aerial]

Dont let the picture fool you. With 594 zombies, the game was unplayable. I was just curious on how many zeds I could get out at one time.
Also, back in the early alphas, the game was completely different.

Nah, I wouldn't expect quite that many, but the game was quite playable with a couple hundred in the area. I remember getting wandering hordes of 60+ and the cities were crazy. That's what I want back.

 

[leaderdog]

What does surprise me a little about how zombie numbers have gone is that in Alpha 10 (which I still play from time to time), it was possible to jack up the zombie numbers massively in cities (500%-1000% increase in the base zombie spawn rate). We used this as a sort of difficulty slider - making cities something you could approach only when pretty well kitted out.
The result is mass zombies, and done on a 3 player server without any significant lag (indeed, it took all three of us to get in there and clear a city block).

Now, to be sure, this is pre UMA zombies, and pre smart zombies, so I've no doubt there was much less stress in generating these hordes than would be involved in doing so now, and the number of zombie textures were much smaller too, but I'd happily go back to that in order to boost the numbers, and reserve high texture, smart entities for bandits, which I wouldn't expect to turn a corner and see several dozen of.

Is this hard coded in? or could a talented (not me) modder go in and swap this ai and uma zombies for the older ones? Thus we could have the better graphics, more (some of us preferred) zombie like AI and hordes and hordes of zombies in game?

The game ran great until they brought in the motion capture zombies, and since then zombies have been sparse and added copious amounts of lag/stutter/mem theft.