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Improved Hordes [V1.0]

Dragonchampion said:
REALLY want to use it but most horde mods just don't have the oomph that I want, Is there a way to edit the amounts of the mod to make it have x10 the zombies?
Click to expand...
Yeah, edit the hordes xml file in the Config/ImprovedHordes folder in the mod folder and play around with the entity counts to get bigger hordes. You can check out the wiki (linked in main post) to find out what everything does.

There will be more settings in a later update for customising how hordes are populated throughout the world.

fnfear said:
Day 28 horde was a cluster fk. There were probably 200+ zombies at all times and at the end of the horde suddenly like 100 radiated screamers spawned lmao, here's a screenshot of the screamers coming in, idk why the screenshots became white like this but I kept trying to take new ones and they all got like that 😕

Click to expand...
Huh. Are you running the latest version of the mod? Screamers should be much more reduced now, but never seen this o_o

 
FilUnderscore said:
Yeah, edit the hordes xml file in the Config/ImprovedHordes folder in the mod folder and play around with the entity counts to get bigger hordes. You can check out the wiki (linked in main post) to find out what everything does.

There will be more settings in a later update for customising how hordes are populated throughout the world.

Huh. Are you running the latest version of the mod? Screamers should be much more reduced now, but never seen this o_o
Click to expand...
Haha, yeah it gave me a big fright lmao, had to close the game and go back in. I was and still am using the latest version so Idk what happened o.o

 
FilUnderscore said:
New update should be more balanced now, there should be less screamers popping up and less aggressive hordes.
Click to expand...
This release is definitely more tamed than the previous versions. I seldomly have screamers around the house maybe 1 a day. I do run into clusters of zombies frozen in place waiting for me to approach the activation range.

 
Picklefart said:
This release is definitely more tamed than the previous versions. I seldomly have screamers around the house maybe 1 a day. I do run into clusters of zombies frozen in place waiting for me to approach the activation range.
Click to expand...
Good to hear. Zombies frozen in place might be a bug with sleepers / the AI lagging behind, I'll look into it.

 
IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.4 for A21 EXP b317 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-alpha.4/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip


Changelog



Added


  • Settings to control wilderness horde populations.

    wandering_animal_wilderness_sparsity controls how sparsely populated the world is with wandering_animal hordes. Higher number means more sparse.
  • wandering_animal_enemy_wilderness_sparsity controls the sparsity of wandering_animal_enemy hordes in the wild.
  • wandering_enemy_wilderness_sparsity controls the sparsity of wandering_enemy hordes.
  • wilderness_horde_repopulation_days controls the number of days before hordes can repopulate in the wilderness.
  • zone_horde_repopulation_days controls the number of days before hordes can repopulate in POI zones.


Changed


  • Lowered the sparsity settings to lower the wilderness horde spawns.

    Number of hordes in POI zones have been lightly increased to compensate. There will be fewer hordes in the world with the new default settings.

[*]Lowered entity counts in hordes and changed some game stage requirements. Game stage calculations for player groups within view distance have been re-done to be more closely aligned to the way the game calculates game stage for partied members.


Fixed


  • World horde state is not saved. Hordes respawn every time the game is started.

    Data is now saved residing in the same folder as the game data, in ImprovedHordes.bin.
  • Hordes will now be saved to their last known locations and resume doing whatever they were doing when you last played.
  • Clearing areas out of hordes is also saved until the next time the world is repopulated with hordes (default setting is after 7 days).


Known issues


  • Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
  • Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.
 
Trying out the newest version; 4.

CONCEPT: A+ 

INDIVIDUAL HORDES: A+

ENDLESS HORDES:????

So in short, love the mod, love the idea of the mod. 

The individual hordes are great.

The frequency...is problematic.

My group just got hit with what I call an ENDLESS Horde. In truth it was 8 hordes on the edge of a city, just at 23:00. 8 Hordes, back to back.
Over 200 shells spent by our shotgunner, our M60 guy dropped about 3-4 belts. I went through 8 first aid bandages and 4 first aids (im group doc btw), and our archer dropped a bunch. We all gained 2-3 levels, and we are in the 60's range.

Now mind you, right before this, we had just dealt with 4 back to back hordes. 

When we finally dealt with the 4, we had about 30seconds-1minute before the next horde was on us and then we could see 2more hordes heading our way before the first one was done; and then 3 more heading our way, etc.

We ended up logging, stopping the server, and removed the mod temporarily.

Again, I love it and its awesome, but horde after horde after horde. This was during day and night.

At day, in our base emptied about 4 stacks of shotgun shells and about 5 stacks of 9mm.

Requests:

  • Add some reasonable delay
  • Make it so that multiple hordes dont target in on you like someone just told the USA that you have oil in your back pocket.
 
Cypherdiaz said:
Trying out the newest version; 4.

CONCEPT: A+ 

INDIVIDUAL HORDES: A+

ENDLESS HORDES:????

So in short, love the mod, love the idea of the mod. 

The individual hordes are great.

The frequency...is problematic.

My group just got hit with what I call an ENDLESS Horde. In truth it was 8 hordes on the edge of a city, just at 23:00. 8 Hordes, back to back.
Over 200 shells spent by our shotgunner, our M60 guy dropped about 3-4 belts. I went through 8 first aid bandages and 4 first aids (im group doc btw), and our archer dropped a bunch. We all gained 2-3 levels, and we are in the 60's range.

Now mind you, right before this, we had just dealt with 4 back to back hordes. 

When we finally dealt with the 4, we had about 30seconds-1minute before the next horde was on us and then we could see 2more hordes heading our way before the first one was done; and then 3 more heading our way, etc.

We ended up logging, stopping the server, and removed the mod temporarily.

Again, I love it and its awesome, but horde after horde after horde. This was during day and night.

At day, in our base emptied about 4 stacks of shotgun shells and about 5 stacks of 9mm.

Requests:

  • Add some reasonable delay
  • Make it so that multiple hordes dont target in on you like someone just told the USA that you have oil in your back pocket.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the feedback.

It would be difficult to implement a delay as hordes are now roaming (no longer spawned randomly like in the past), so after they spawn the AI decides which cities to go to (each horde has a different AI controller). What might be beneficial is tweaking horde populations depending on the biome, such that the forest has fewer roaming hordes and the wasteland has more. I'm currently working on this, so any towns or the wilderness in the forest will have fewer and smaller hordes which should align more with the linear progression of difficulty.

Horde targeting happens if you're generating lots of heat by making loud sounds (with guns) or a screamer screams. I've lowered the cool-down on this in the past and it seems better, but again the problem might be too many hordes present in easy biomes.

I may look to introducing a initial world population delay of hordes when starting a game for the first time, to try and balance out hordes in the early game.

 
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Oh my. Installed this on the server I've got going with a couple friends on the morning of day 7, and come 10pm we ended up with hundreds of zombies. Brought my decent rig with a 3080 to its knees, ended up CTD.

Was a great mod up until then, the wandering hordes were terrific, but come horde night... something very broken with this one. Blood moon count set to 64, no other mods installed.

 
FilUnderscore said:
Thanks for the feedback.

It would be difficult to implement a delay as hordes are now roaming (no longer spawned randomly like in the past), so after they spawn the AI decides which cities to go to (each horde has a different AI controller). What might be beneficial is tweaking horde populations depending on the biome, such that the forest has fewer roaming hordes and the wasteland has more. I'm currently working on this, so any towns or the wilderness in the forest will have fewer and smaller hordes which should align more with the linear progression of difficulty.

Horde targeting happens if you're generating lots of heat by making loud sounds (with guns) or a screamer screams. I've lowered the cool-down on this in the past and it seems better, but again the problem might be too many hordes present in easy biomes.

I may look to introducing a initial world population delay of hordes when starting a game for the first time, to try and balance out hordes in the early game.
Click to expand...
My pleasure.

So the targeting of all these hordes were cause we were making heat? Ok that sounds fair.

My question is then...how far are we drawing them from?

We were in Desert Biome, edge of city (not the downtown area). It was just horde after horde after horde.

If they all happen to be in the wider area and its our heat thats pulling them...from..how far?

It felt like we pulled them from all over the city, based on what youre saying.

I looked through your settings but didnt change anything, were would one dictate how many active hordes are present at any given time?

Hoping that wasnt the 500 number i saw, cause that might explain it since while we are on a server, its only 8 people and we base and run missions together.

The hordes we saw were all 5-25ish, not sure if thats useful info or not but they were not small.

Based on another thing you said, the # of hordes per biome, where would one alter that?
 

Im all for tuning.

 
IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.5 for A21 EXP b317 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-alpha.5/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip


Changelog



Added


  • More settings

    horde_biome_sparsity_multiplier controls the sparsity of wilderness hordes in biomes. A lower number means less sparsity between hordes (more hordes in an area). This is divided by the biome difficulty as defined in the game's biomes.xml file.
  • event_chunk_radius controls the influence events have over nearby chunks (i.e. spreading shared interest within a few chunks).
  • event_interest_distance_multiplier controls the distance at which an event is reported at depending on the current area interest. The default distance is based on map size (e.g. 6144x6144 has a max distance of 400, applying the multiplier of 0.25 means a max distance of 100).


Changed


  • Lowered event_interest_distance_multiplier from 1.0 to 0.25. Events are now reported at a distance of 4x less, so less hordes should be attracted to you in large areas.
  • Lowered the max_world_density from 500.0 to 200.0.
  • Less hordes should now populate world zones and the wilderness due to the above changes.

Known issues


  • Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
  • Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.
Venturai said:
Oh my. Installed this on the server I've got going with a couple friends on the morning of day 7, and come 10pm we ended up with hundreds of zombies. Brought my decent rig with a 3080 to its knees, ended up CTD.

Was a great mod up until then, the wandering hordes were terrific, but come horde night... something very broken with this one. Blood moon count set to 64, no other mods installed.
Click to expand...
The mod does follow the max number of zombies that the game allows to be spawned, so I'm not sure what could have caused hundreds of zombies to spawn. You were using the previous version (2.0.0-alpha.4)?

Cypherdiaz said:
My pleasure.

So the targeting of all these hordes were cause we were making heat? Ok that sounds fair.

My question is then...how far are we drawing them from?

We were in Desert Biome, edge of city (not the downtown area). It was just horde after horde after horde.

If they all happen to be in the wider area and its our heat thats pulling them...from..how far?

It felt like we pulled them from all over the city, based on what youre saying.

I looked through your settings but didnt change anything, were would one dictate how many active hordes are present at any given time?

Hoping that wasnt the 500 number i saw, cause that might explain it since while we are on a server, its only 8 people and we base and run missions together.

The hordes we saw were all 5-25ish, not sure if thats useful info or not but they were not small.

Based on another thing you said, the # of hordes per biome, where would one alter that?
 

Im all for tuning.
Click to expand...
New update (2.0.0-alpha.5) has been pushed that adds a setting for the biome spawns as a multiplier (lower = more hordes, higher = less). I've nerfed the heat distance for now and added a multiplier for that should you want to further nerf or buff the changes. Also nerfed the number of hordes in the world quite hard this time.

As for number of zombies in the hordes, this is based on game stage (and a bit on the horde density), but do remember that a new change in A21 is that game stage now scales with your biome (and this is very true for snow/desert/wasteland). This will in turn reflect on the hordes you get with the mod. The goal is to have pine forest's be easy and wasteland be hard, though being near a city will guarantee you more horde encounters, I don't want it to be feeling anywhere near horde night.

I would much prefer I get complaints about not enough hordes than too many hordes, haha.

 
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Fantastic. Will have to give it a test.

My server has no 7day hordes (I find them arbitrary and annoying and predictable) so boosting thr scariness of random hordes keeps up the pressure.

And by the way, I have to give credit where due. Instead of just addressing folks issues, the integration of user options is fantastic! Wish more mods would do things that way so you can tailor a mod to your desire.

EDIT:

One other piece of feedback from the previous alpha.4 version, though I fear its also in the alpha.5 version.

Our base is a POI (Rural_Wedding_Lake or whatever). Next door is the new T5 Corrections.

During the craziness I described prior, we noticed that A LOT of zombies were spawning in one of the Corrections Towers. See pic.

Like they spawned up there and ended up trashing the railing to get out.

Is there a way to prevent the hordes from spawning IN a POI? Could be problematic.

20230622151751_1.jpg

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Cypherdiaz said:
Fantastic. Will have to give it a test.

My server has no 7day hordes (I find them arbitrary and annoying and predictable) so boosting thr scariness of random hordes keeps up the pressure.

And by the way, I have to give credit where due. Instead of just addressing folks issues, the integration of user options is fantastic! Wish more mods would do things that way so you can tailor a mod to your desire.

EDIT:

One other piece of feedback from the previous alpha.4 version, though I fear its also in the alpha.5 version.

Our base is a POI (Rural_Wedding_Lake or whatever). Next door is the new T5 Corrections.

During the craziness I described prior, we noticed that A LOT of zombies were spawning in one of the Corrections Towers. See pic.

Like they spawned up there and ended up trashing the railing to get out.

Is there a way to prevent the hordes from spawning IN a POI? Could be problematic.

View attachment 28208
Click to expand...
I’ll see what I can do about this, may need to improve the poi detection algorithm.

 
Just got myself a Red Error wondering what it is. Did I get this error from reducing the thread? game was stuttering too often on default settings I changed <max_horde_threads> from 4 to 3 also keep getting the yellow Error "Calling Animator.GotoState on Synchronize layer" whenever the character panel is opened though don't know if it's from this mod or not.

2023-06-24T07:41:23 5288.777 ERR [Improved Hordes] [WorldEventReporter] <Update>b__1(Task): UpdateTask was terminated due to a fault.
2023-06-24T07:41:23 5288.789 ERR [Improved Hordes] [WorldEventReporter] <Update>b__1(Task): #1 - An exception occurred during UpdateTask: The given key '19, -36' was not present in the dictionary. 
Stacktrace: 
  at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue].get_Item (TKey key) [0x0001e] in <03bd9b261dff4c2b8b568aca27f561b2>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Event.WorldEventReporter.UpdateAsyncVoid (System.Single dt) [0x00127] in <38ddc35aab0145e4abba4134f2213af6>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.Threading.MainThreadSynchronizedTask.UpdateAsync (System.Single dt) [0x00001] in <38ddc35aab0145e4abba4134f2213af6>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.Threading.MainThreadSynchronizedTask`1+<>c__DisplayClass7_0[TaskReturnType].<Update>b__0 () [0x0000d] in <38ddc35aab0145e4abba4134f2213af6>:0 
  at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.InnerInvoke () [0x0000f] in <03bd9b261dff4c2b8b568aca27f561b2>:0 
  at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Execute () [0x00000] in <03bd9b261dff4c2b8b568aca27f561b2>:0 
2023-06-24T07:41:23 5288.792 ERR [Improved Hordes] [WorldEventReporter] <Update>b__1(Task): UpdateTask was terminated due to a fault.
2023-06-24T07:41:23 5288.793 ERR [Improved Hordes] [WorldEventReporter] <Update>b__1(Task): #1 - An exception occurred during UpdateTask: The given key '19, -36' was not present in the dictionary. 
Stacktrace: 
  at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue].get_Item (TKey key) [0x0001e] in <03bd9b261dff4c2b8b568aca27f561b2>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Event.WorldEventReporter.UpdateAsyncVoid (System.Single dt) [0x00127] in <38ddc35aab0145e4abba4134f2213af6>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.Threading.MainThreadSynchronizedTask.UpdateAsync (System.Single dt) [0x00001] in <38ddc35aab0145e4abba4134f2213af6>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.Threading.MainThreadSynchronizedTask`1+<>c__DisplayClass7_0[TaskReturnType].<Update>b__0 () [0x0000d] in <38ddc35aab0145e4abba4134f2213af6>:0 
  at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.InnerInvoke () [0x0000f] in <03bd9b261dff4c2b8b568aca27f561b2>:0 
  at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Execute () [0x00000] in <03bd9b261dff4c2b8b568aca27f561b2>:0

PS: Don't know if this was the correct place to put this or make a post on your Github page about it.

 
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CrimsonKing said:
Error "Calling Animator.GotoState on Synchronize layer" whenever the character panel is opened though don't know if it's from this mod or not.
Click to expand...
Yes this is not mod related, vanilla game also has this.

CrimsonKing said:
Just got myself a Red Error wondering what it is. Did I get this error from reducing the thread? game was stuttering too often on default settings I changed <max_horde_threads> from 4 to 3
Click to expand...
No, the error seems to be harmless unless it's spamming your console. Seems like I might've missed some checks, the error is related to the chunk heatmap decay feature (not thread related). I'll get this fixed next patch so it doesn't spew errors in rare cases.

Update on the POI issue: might've been exacerbated by a typo I made while coding up the zoning algorithm - the zones while debugging appeared smaller than they actually are and could've been the cause of getting lots of hordes in cities because of the size being misreported (lots of things depend on the zone sizes, so this is sort of a big issue, mainly the density of cities being misrepresented by their size). I've ended up rewriting most of the zone logic while trying to figure out what was causing the issue (and tidying up since it was quite messy), so the next patch should have much more accurate spawns (including a fix for hordes spawning in POIs).

 
Would you consider making an "add-on" for this mod where the air drop works like a screamer. Calling in a horde to the spot the air drop lands. Not sure if that's possible.

Also with the new version release I've noticed less zombies in the hordes. I'm at game stage 92 and friend at about the same. We only get probably 10 zombies in a horde. We are in the pine forest but I'd think at that game stage you would quite a bit more. As well see much less horde activity.

I did change max_entities_spawned_per_player to -1 to try and spawn all in horde per player at once.

would increasing the max density from 2.0 - 4.0 increase the horde size?

Also I see this under hordes.xml, am I to understand changing the min-max count to a higher number increase zombies per horde? such as the lines listed in red.

            <group name="Zombies">
                <gs min="0" increaseEvery="5"> <!-- 3 zombies @ GS 0, 20 zombies @ GS 55 (1/3 of 165), 10 zombies @ GS 110 (2/3 of 165), 0 zombies @ GS 165+ -->
                    <entity time="day" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWasteland" minCount="3" maxCount="8"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWastelandNight" minCount="3" maxCount="8"/>
            
                    <entity time="day" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="ZombiesAll" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="ZombiesNight" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                </gs>
                
                <gs min="70" increaseEvery="8">
                    <entity time="day" biomes="wasteland" group="IHZombiesAllFeralWasteland" minCount="1" maxCount="10"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWastelandNight" minCount="1" maxCount="10"/>
                
                    <entity time="day" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="IHZombiesAllFeral" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="IHZombiesAllFeralNight" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                </gs>

Or have I just created a monster with these edits?

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Picklefart said:
Would you consider making an "add-on" for this mod where the air drop works like a screamer. Calling in a horde to the spot the air drop lands. Not sure if that's possible.

Also with the new version release I've noticed less zombies in the hordes. I'm at game stage 92 and friend at about the same. We only get probably 10 zombies in a horde. We are in the pine forest but I'd think at that game stage you would quite a bit more. As well see much less horde activity.

I did change max_entities_spawned_per_player to -1 to try and spawn all in horde per player at once.

would increasing the max density from 2.0 - 4.0 increase the horde size?

Also I see this under hordes.xml, am I to understand changing the min-max count to a higher number increase zombies per horde? such as the lines listed in red.

            <group name="Zombies">
                <gs min="0" increaseEvery="5"> <!-- 3 zombies @ GS 0, 20 zombies @ GS 55 (1/3 of 165), 10 zombies @ GS 110 (2/3 of 165), 0 zombies @ GS 165+ -->
                    <entity time="day" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWasteland" minCount="3" maxCount="8"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWastelandNight" minCount="3" maxCount="8"/>
            
                    <entity time="day" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="ZombiesAll" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="ZombiesNight" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                </gs>
                
                <gs min="70" increaseEvery="8">
                    <entity time="day" biomes="wasteland" group="IHZombiesAllFeralWasteland" minCount="1" maxCount="10"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWastelandNight" minCount="1" maxCount="10"/>
                
                    <entity time="day" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="IHZombiesAllFeral" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                    <entity time="night" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="IHZombiesAllFeralNight" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                </gs>

Or have I just created a monster with these edits?
Click to expand...
Great idea for an add-on, I'll look into it after all the issues have been fixed. I did hard nerf the hordes for now (sizes and numbers) to try and figure out what should be balanced and temporarily fix the out of hand hordes others have been experiencing. Increase the density will increase the horde size, as well as tweaking the entity min-max counts. You can also look to tweak the increase every X gamestages on how quickly you want your hordes to grow.

Survinator said:
I don't know why, but the hordes just run somewhere, ignoring me...
Click to expand...


CrimsonKing said:
Yup getting the same problem don't know what's causing it I can shoot at them or make as much noise as possible but they still ignore me running to where ever their destination lies.
Click to expand...
Looking into this!

 
Thanks for all the hard work.

Looks like the POI issue uncovered a more serious issue from your post about it.

As for others reports of the horde just doing their thing, one thing I noticed in version4 (we haven't added version 5 yet) was similar. Our base turrets would rip into them but never caused them to target thr base. Like they'd run by and as long as they didn't spot a player. They'd keep going (which I'm totally fine with) but if they ran near my base, it would light them up and they wouldn't react to suddenly multiple mp5 and shotgun turrets engaging them. Always found it weird. 

 
For my situation in the new version. 

It seems random that the zombies will react to gunfire or proximity. Though it happens outside of the wandering hordes. I had it happen with a cop car alarm as well. The zombies that spawned from the car alarm going off did not seem to 100% react to me some would and some wouldn't.

Also now that I increased the density and the min-max zombie count I am now receiving nice size wandering hordes. It is pretty glorious. I may have to alter the density back down though because them roaming zombie dog hordes are no joke, and the bears, oh the bears. 😂

 
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