Max Horde Night Zombies Hard Capped at 30

[Temreki]

Version

2.0

Platform

Windows

The maximum spawned zombies during horde night will not exceed 30 despite the max alive setting from gamestage being higher than 30 and the bloodmoon count setting also being set to 64. This has been confirmed by at least 3 other people and occurs with and without mods. It's been confirmed to occur in multiple worlds/save files and I have observed it in b294 on a livestream last night and I also loaded b285 and the same issue was present.

 

[Jugginator]

This isn't a bug and is intended. Instead, the game scales the difficulty of spawns based on that setting. Faatal has discussed this. I did bring it up again though that the setting/description should be changed.

 

[Space4Ace]

Not a bug. Faatal explained it a long while ago about it being capped to 30 (because of performance issues). To compensate for the 30 max zombies (when you choose 64), the level of the zombies goes higher to make it more challenging.
I hope I'm explaining it properly; I couldn't find Faatal's original post on this.

UPDATE: Just found Faatal's post:

"Bloodmoon parties (which is now players within 80m of any other player added to the party) now cap the amount of enemies spawned at one time to 30 (subject to change) to improve FPS. An 8 player group with the default setting of 8 per player, would have gotten 64 active enemies. To compensate for less enemies, the game stage increases based on the ratio. The game has global enemy caps and game stage maxAlive caps, but this helps with the specific case of FPS tanking during blood moons for a BM party."

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

Another dumbing down due to cross play. Are the few copies sold that only sold because of crossplay really worth it?

 

[Riamus]

Another dumbing down due to cross play. Are the few copies sold that only sold because of crossplay really worth it?

That isn't due to crossplay. It might be due to consoles, but that would have been done even if they weren't doing crossplay unless they wanted to have two different versions of the game - one for PC and one for console, which is something they didn't want. However, this also improves things for a lot of PC users with poor computers. There have been a lot of posts over time about how FPS tanks on horde night. I've never experienced it, but a lot of people have. So it may have still been done for them even if console wasn't a factor.

That being said, I still think it should be an option and not forced.

* Max zombies for horde night that actually sets max zombies and only that.
* Scale zombie difficulty for horde night that lets you set the difficulty. So if you set max zombies to 64 and scale to 128, it would have a difficulty like you'd see with 128, but only have 64 there.

You could then adjust the combination of the two settings to handle performance while also handling difficulty.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

@Riamus The timing is not suspicious to you? We get cross play and suddenly they listen to complaints that are going on for years? I was actually already waiting for that knowing that this needs to run on a Xbox Series S which can only have 2 player MP and 6K maps.

Those people on PC that complained didn´t want a reduction. They want optimization. Otherwise those players would have just turned down the number of Z´s. Zombies should be dangerous due to their numbers and not because they are bullet sponges. It makes horde night easier, you can funnel them way easier that way.

You don´t need two versions. A warning in the menu if you crank the numbers up would have been enough. Best is ofc options. But TFP somehow is allergic to more options.

 

[Riamus]

The cap was changed back in about 1.0 -- I can't find where in the patch notes. In any case, I am fairly certain it was before crossplay. And even if it wasn't, what does crossplay have to do with anything? The change might have been made for consoles (though PC benefits), but crossplay doesn't matter unless you made it do different things on console than on PC, which would be a bad choice.

Anyhow, I didn't say it was a good decision. As I said, it would have been better to be two options and not forced.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

@Riamus It has to do with cross play because they have to make sure everything runs fine on a Xbox Series S when they join a server with cross play. The Series S is a weak piece of hardware. As said, can´t go higher than 6K and 2 players in peer to peer. It´s the benchmark of what we can have in the game. We will never get a spawn rate slider back, because it couldn´t handle it at 200% spawn.

It´s 99% since V2, Temreki aka Guns Nerds and Steel would have made that report already for V1 otherwise and i am also sure we still had 64 in V1

What about POI´s? There is a bunch where you get way more than 30 at once. Like Pop n Pills T5. Why is it ok there? @Jugginator You usually spend more time in T5 and T6 than doing hordenights. Not sure what the max size for screamer hordes is in V2, but before they could also be way more than 30.

TFP should announce if they plam on having crossplay in their future games right at release if it is early access again.

 

[Space4Ace]

It´s 99% since V2, Temreki aka Guns Nerds and Steel would have made that report already for V1 otherwise and i am also sure we still had 64 in V1

The message from Faatal I posted in my earlier reply is from December 7, 2024 (V1.2):

Faatal's post:

"Bloodmoon parties (which is now players within 80m of any other player added to the party) now cap the amount of enemies spawned at one time to 30 (subject to change) to improve FPS. An 8 player group with the default setting of 8 per player, would have gotten 64 active enemies. To compensate for less enemies, the game stage increases based on the ratio. The game has global enemy caps and game stage maxAlive caps, but this helps with the specific case of FPS tanking during blood moons for a BM party."

Temreki (GNS) didn't notice it until 2.0, that's all.