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(A19) WalkerSim - Enhanced roaming zombies

danielspoa said:
guys, Im giving it a try and I have a few questions. Basically Im LOVING the "outside", going to the city is cool as f. But entering two houses I noticed no zombies inside, and a clean way to a safe. Is there a way to keep the sleepers working or - even better - have a few zombies walking in the house replacing the sleepers?

My other two questions are:
1 - how does it interact with wandering hordes and screamers? are those removed?
2 - I saw it doesn't keep the gamestage in mind when spawning the zombies, as said by preference. Is it hard to make gamestage affect it? Im just starting with harmony and all this coding stuff , quite a noob still

thank you :)
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Screamers are still unaffected as far as I know, you might have not seen any sleepers wake up if you exhausted the maximum zombies that can be alive. I need to look into a potential issue here. I might need to reduce the maximum zombies that are outside by preserving a certain amount for sleepers or something. Regarding game stage, it might be a bit overwhelming when you are at a game stage like 300 and have about 4k zombies roaming, I need to experiment with this.

mr.devolver said:
@ZehMatt, I was playing with it, trying to reproduce it and it happened again. Looks like it happens after some longer time spent in game and then returning to menu.

View attachment 14176
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Thanks, ill look into it.

 
Ok, so I played with this mod a little bit and here are my thoughts...

Do you remember the neverending hordes that used to be in the cities in vanilla game? I always loved that idea of world full of zombies, but then I realized how flawed the original vanilla implementation was. The problem was that the hordes were never ending to the point that it was impossible for single player to loot the city. This led to frustration of many people including myself, because no matter how good I was at shooting, no matter how good weapons and armor I had, no matter how much ammo I had when I entered the city, once the zombie hordes sensed me, they kept spawning and chasing me infinitely, no matter how many of them I killed.

This mod kinda reminds me of that era. Not in a bad way though, because with this mod, I see a chance to get the implementation of the original vision right. While I'm a fan of bigger amount of zombies, I'm not a fan of never ending hordes, because they may be realistic, but not fun and not viable for a long term gameplay. After long years of feedback, TFP came to a conclusion that their implementation of realism with many zombies was a bad idea and unfortunately, rather than trying to find ways to improve it, they decided to dramatically change the whole system of zombie spawning that would no longer produce huge groups of zombies in the cities. While that solved the problem with never ending hordes in the cities, in the same time it made the world feel empty, with occasional zombie here and there which is not the ideal middle ground zombie game fans would expect to see in games like this.

What I'd love to see is world full of zombies, but with the ability to clear out an area to make it safe for base purposes, safe looting, etc. Zombies should be dumb, so killing the horde of say 30 shouldn't necessarily mean that 5974 other zombies will immediately go after me to avenge their fallen friends and this is where the original vanilla implementation of big hordes failed at. I wish this mod could fill up that gap for us, but please don't feel under pressure here. This is just my opinion, this is your mod and I will respect if your vision is different.

 
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mr.devolver said:
Ok, so I played with this mod a little bit and here are my thoughts...

Do you remember the neverending hordes that used to be in the cities in vanilla game? I always loved that idea of world full of zombies, but then I realized how flawed the original vanilla implementation was. The problem was that the hordes were never ending to the point that it was impossible for single player to loot the city. This led to frustration of many people including myself, because no matter how good I was at shooting, no matter how good weapons and armor I had, no matter how much ammo I had when I entered the city, once the zombie hordes sensed me, they kept spawning and chasing me infinitely, no matter how many of them I killed.

This mod kinda reminds me of that era. Not in a bad way though, because with this mod, I see a chance to get the implementation of the original vision right. While I'm a fan of bigger amount of zombies, I'm not a fan of never ending hordes, because they may be realistic, but not fun and not viable for a long term gameplay. After long years of feedback, TFP came to a conclusion that their implementation of realism with many zombies was a bad idea and unfortunately, rather than trying to find ways to improve it, they decided to dramatically change the whole system of zombie spawning that would no longer produce huge groups of zombies in the cities. While that solved the problem with never ending hordes in the cities, in the same time it made the world feel empty, with occasional zombie here and there which is not the ideal middle ground zombie game fans would expect to see in games like this.

What I'd love to see is world full of zombies, but with the ability to clear out an area to make it safe for base purposes, safe looting, etc. Zombies should be dumb, so killing the horde of say 30 shouldn't necessarily mean that 5974 other zombies will immediately go after me to avenge their fallen friends and this is where the original vanilla implementation of big hordes failed at. I wish this mod could fill up that gap for us, but please don't feel under pressure here. This is just my opinion, this is your mod and I will respect if your vision is different.
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First of all I'm grateful about the feedback, this is the kind of stuff I need to have the default configuration enjoyable. Most of the simulation is parameterized so I can just tweak the values for what it needs adjusting for. Right now the default population density size is 125 per square km, this is a huge density. You can change this to to a lower number lets say 35, which is about what the United States has. To do so you need to copy the "WalkerSim.xml" into "%7DaysToDiePath%\Mods\WalkerSim\WalkerSim.xml", there you can change "<PopulationDensity>120</PopulationDensity>" to "<PopulationDensity>35</PopulationDensity>", this should create a new simulation when you change the parameters.

Also clearing areas should be no problem for as long you dont shoot around, silenced weapons have a really small radius of who gets notified. Also with the reduced density this should feel way more natural, what you are playing against right now is probably something like Hong Kong where a lot of people are close to each other :)

Also feel free to mess around with the other parameters and use the viewer to inspect whats going on.

 
Might have to change some defaults myself. 50fps on a 2080ti isnt a good sign haha. testing this mod to use on my server

 
I love this mod. Been running this on my test server and here are my observations:

Initial server settings - Insane difficulty, walk-walk-sprint-sprint, 80 zombies plus vanilla walkersim settings

This was very very intense. After a few minutes there were zeds everywhere. We had to continuously run to avoid getting overwhelmed. It was difficult to do much non-killing activities due to the constant throngs of zeds.

Tried a different set-up.  

Second server settings - Warrior difficulty, walk-walk-sprint-sprint, 64 zombies plus vanilla walkersim settings except that I lowered the Population density to 70 from 120.

Still very intense, but just slightly. A bit easier to kill the zeds so I might up the difficulty to Survivalist. Still have to move a lot to avoid getting overwhelmed. I did see sleepers inside buildings so they appear to be working fine on my server.

Performance has been silky smooth with a lot of zeds on screen and they appear to exhibit a nice range of behavior. Some wander aimlessly while others seem to head right to me once the "notice" my presence. As someone else mentioned above, is there a way to allow the player to temporarily "clear out" an area to be able to have a tiny break from the zeds.

Picture below is with a Population density of 70. There are 9 zeds in front of me and another 6 to 8 on my sides and behind me.

zeds.png

 
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Cork55 said:
As someone else mentioned above, is there a way to allow the player to temporarily "clear out" an area to be able to have a tiny break from the zeds.
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It was me, I still haven't found a real way to clear out an area. The mod is nice, but with no chance to clear out an area of zombies, there's no way you could easily set up a base and defend it for a long time...

I decided to try some extra settings not existing in base mod, to "dumb" the zombies down a little bit by reducing their vision, so that they will have harder time to see you - frankly with such a high amount of zombies this totally makes sense as the vanilla settings that make the zombies much more sensitive are meant for much smaller groups of zombies. It seems to help a little bit, but it's still impossible to build a base without the place getting constantly crowded with zombies.

 
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Perhaps a delay in re-spawning the zeds at the edge of the map after they are killed. This might create a ripple effect where the zeds wander in waves. How low have you set the population density mr.devolver?

 
Cork55 said:
Perhaps a delay in re-spawning the zeds at the edge of the map after they are killed. This might create a ripple effect where the zeds wander in waves. How low have you set the population density mr.devolver?
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I'm currently testing density 10. I know it's low, but I'm playing this solo right now, I figured that it'd be best to find the best number for one person and increase it accordingly when more people join and I noticed that when you shoot couple of times, you're soon surrounded by the whole horde of zombies, even with this low number, so yeah... I'm still trying to find a good number.

 
Upping my test server to Survivalist difficulty and lowering the population density to 50. We will see how this plays out.

 
I ended up settling on a population density of 60 combined with survivalist difficulty. A reasonable number of zeds lurking about and a tiny bit of a challenge to kill them.

 
ZehMatt, you are the best!

I've been seeking to get back more dense population in cities with realistic hordes since A15. When you should be mindfull about triggering urban horde's attention. When those suckers don't appear in playing view behind closest stone or tree. And everything else is dead around you...

The configuration available in your mod is what makes it truly versatile!

Since A18 only biomes is what is left in spawning configuration, hell, I want zombies in cities, not in empty forests\deserts, it's logical! And those sleepers... I've dropped A16 and 17 because of them. Spawning right in front of you, spawning where you've already cleared - what the hell? Even got dnSpy software and tweaked the source code of SleeperVolume a bit to spawn sleepers beforehand in normal distance around player.

I've got one issue, though. Zombies spawn and roam offline in water too. Not fatal, but kinda funny. I'm playing map of UK (https://7daystodiemods.com/uk-map-pack/), checked with your viewer to be sure. Can be adjusted with "POI interest" option, but maybe you could make blacklist of terrain for roaming.

 
Tried this out on stream last night, and although it's fun, like a few above, I got MOBBED by a steady stream of never ending zombies. After I killed 200+ of them ... with brass knuckles no less ... they were STILL coming, and I had to stop the server and take it off.

Definitely fun, but not even a tiny break to do anything ... no quests, no nothing.

EhXeydkWkAAJokM.jpg

 
Thanks for the mod, I really like how this changed the dynamic of the spawns and made Stealth so much more valuable. 
I would like to suggest an alternate mode though one with a fixed population across the map and refresh every bloodmoon.

Right now, there's a sort of negative feedback loop where the attracted zombies whacking a door draws in more and more zombies until there's a huge horde sitting outside my base besieging it. If there's a finite population, then this could be a viable tactic to try and clear them all so that surrounding POIs are easier to explore in the morning.

There's a game called They are Billions! where all of the map will aggro at the final wave, which gives incentive to clear out zombies before then. If the bloodmoon could have something where all zombies will dogpile you in an X radius on top of the usual horde, then clearing out zombies throughout the week would be a decent incentive. 

 
I would like to report what I think are bugs. Animals don't seem to spawn and I'm not getting sleeper Zombies respawn properly in Clear Area missions, I just instantly complete it after wandering around all the ambush points.

Edit: Tested it out again on Navezgane and I am getting Animals and Sleeper zombies spawning in Quests normally. Guess it's an issue with Compo Pois and a small Nitrogen map.

 
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This mod sure is awesome but I'm having the same issue. Hostile animals are not spawning in a Navezgane game. Sleepers work OK.

 
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This mod is amazing! still needs more "polishing" but amazing for what it is.

Sometimes I come across mods that kinda surprise me that they are even possible and this is one of them I hope ZehMatt continues to support & develop this mod for a long time ;)  

 
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