PC Do you think the game would ever be able to handle this many zombies alive at once?

TotallyNotABot

TotallyNotABot

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One thing that makes the zombie apocalypse seem scary to me is not singular zombies or mutated zombies. Those are cool and all, but what really makes them scary is their numbers. Obviously I am aware that the game simply can not handle absurd numbers at the moment, but do you ever think it will be able too? I for one, sure hope so.

Maybe one day I can look over my walls and see something like this.

(The insert image option is broken for me, so I hope you trust links. If not, it's just big hordes of zombies from TWD)

https://i.imgur.com/KpzS7TF.jpg

or this

https://images.amcnetworks.com/amc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/AMC_TWD_S4_403_MakingOf_REV.jpg

or dare I say, THIS?

https://comicnewbies.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/the-whisperers-army-heads-towards-alexandria-3.jpg

Do you ever think the game will be able to handle 500 zombies alive at once or more? I'm not sure, but God I hope so. The incredible hordes of zombies are simply a staple of the genre and I really hope this game can handle hordes like these one day. Current hordes are simply too easy, and I'm not exactly a fan of bullet sponges. I'd rather be overwhelmed by numbers than a few rad cops.

Don't get me wrong, I like the tough enemies, but I wouldn't mind being attacked by more regular zombies from time to time.

 
I don't know the limit on the current game version but I played a custom mod on a server and there were at least 50 zombies and they were hard to contend with - I basically had to outrun them or keep them busy while my partner looted the buildings. I can't imagine trying to contend with 500 after only 50.

 
I usually play co-op with 4 other friends and 50 alive at once pose almost no threat unless somebody is afk. I can see how that would be more challenging if it was just you fighting them though.

 
It's one of my main "issues" with the game (if you can call something in an issue on a game you spent more than 1k hours on :D ).

At the moment the cap is 64 zombies - unless something changed in the meantime - and 64 bring most PC's to a crawl during D7 night, but even then I still enjoy having more rather than less.

My ideal number would be about 1k, which is certainly unrealistic with the type of game/graphics they are going with, 256 would be really, really, nice, 64 is just about OK when playing alone, but on the low end. They were even trying out 8 in an earlier alpha, which pretty much killed the point of the game for me at that stage. I am certainly very happy that they allowed up to 64 as is.

The issue is that having more zombies on screen creates a hard cap with what they can do for other aspects of the game, and it's possible that investing in other aspects of the game would make the game sell better. A part of the audience will inevitable be disappointed with any change/removal of an aspect of the game, so I am happy that a mini-horde of 64 is still possible.

I am hoping that they will change/remove any hard caps so once we move from silicon for CPU's/GPU's in a decade or few, we will be able to run this really old game, by then, with as many zombies as we would like.

 
Not in a million years. The game has performance problems as it is, and there aren't bandit and survivor npcs yet. No matter how much they work on optimization, there's no way the game will ever have that many zombies at once.

 
Would be nice to know if they can finally use more than 2 cores. Guess that would help alot.

Can´t find any info on that. But it would be about time with 6 and 8 core cpu´s for moderate prices beeing available.

A game with horde in the subtitle should at least handle 100 at a time without any problems.

 
Not this game, because of the engine used. Configurationwise, If Big If a person or company had a blade server with 32 4ghz+ single core, cpus. Ram daughterboards for each cpu board. golaem controller software incorporated, And 1 Hellacious programmer to rewrite the code to split the load over all of the cpus and ram at one time. An maybe throw in a real ram drive.

golaem crowd

I think this is what you are looking for visually. If its for interaction and destruction capbility. just adjust timing for biome spawns in all of the spawning.xml to .006 instead of 7, and change maxAlive to TotalAlive.

 
Really high numbers of zombies can work in a game that is specifically designed to do that.

In a static level, with a limit to where the player can walk, and a scripted "horde event", the programmers could implement all kinds of tricks to let the game visualize hundreds of zombies.

(there are several tricks to reduce the costs of pathfinding, ai state machines, collision detection, animation, LOD, in a scripted game event).

But 7DTD is a sandbox game, so all of those zombies need to be real fully working AI actors. Visual tricks and scripted events dont work here. And there is just not enough performance budget to make hundreds of those AI zombies next to all of the other things the game has to handle.

 
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My personal preference is for tons of weaker zombies over a few tougher ones so I'd LOVE to see that many Zs, but the few tough ones are a worthwhile trade-off for a destructible sandbox game-world.

 
So if unity enginge is the reason we can´t have it, why did they choose unity for the survival HORDE crafting game?

And when they choose unity and probably knew that a lot of Z´s will not be possible, why did they put "Horde" in the subtitle?

 
So if unity enginge is the reason we can´t have it, why did they choose unity for the survival HORDE crafting game?
And when they choose unity and probably knew that a lot of Z´s will not be possible, why did they put "Horde" in the subtitle?
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Ok, first off, a horde doesn't need to have thousands upon thousands of zombies to be considered a horde. By definition, "horde" means "a large group of people", and the groups of zombies that attack the player's bases relentlessly every 7 days are exactly that.

Now, you have to choose between a randomly generated, fully destructible and modifiable open world with complex building mechanics or hundreds of zombies at once. You can't have both. No game has ever had both features because it's just not feasible.

Now, to finish off, I just want to mention that there have been discussions in this community that presented the hypothetical situation in which the devs sacrifice the fully destroyable voxel based terrain in exchange of more zombies, and big shock, the great majority of players were against this idea. I want hundreds of zombies just as much as the next guy, but you can't always get everything you want at once.

 
If you can´t have more than 32 without drops in performance, you can technically call it a horde, but that´s stretching the meaning of the word tbh. Not even talking about thousands of Z´s. We can´t even have 100. That´s pretty lame for a horde.

If talking about Zombie hordes outside of this game there is no one who talks about 32 Z´s when using the word horde.

And i know that we can´t have both. Hence i asked 2 questions. You know if people stumble across the 7D2D website and see horde they do not imagine 32 at max. Just saying that this is a bit misleading.

 
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If you can´t have more than 32 without drops in performance, you can technically call it a horde, but that´s stretching the meaning of the word tbh. Not even talking about thousands of Z´s. We can´t even have 100. That´s pretty lame for a horde.
If talking about Zombie hordes outside of this game there is no one who talks about 32 Z´s when using the word horde.

And i know that we can´t have both. Hence i asked 2 questions. You know if people stumble across the 7D2D website and see horde they do not imagine 32 at max. Just saying that this is a bit misleading.
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Yeah, that I agree with. I myself wish the game had more zombies overall; zombies are only truly dangerous by the numbers they come in, but it's the price to pay. It's not that bad, really, especially if you tamper with the game's files to increase the numbers by whatever setting you want.

 
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