PC Random zombie spawning

ZehMatt

ZehMatt

Active member
I finally got around playing the game again and noticed one major annoying thing that was probably introduced in A17 which is zombies spawning behind you. I noticed this in several areas not just where sleepers are supposed to be, was standing outside building my base and suddenly zombie approaches me out of no where, quickly killed him ran around my base to make sure there are no more left and kept on improving the base just to find another zombie walking around the corner. Later I decided to go in a town to loot some stuff, cleared room by room and I was 100% sure they were empty but then I turned around and suddenly few zombies are approaching me in a tight spot, how I'm supposed to have fun with this kind of randomness? I don't mind a good scary moment where a zombie was hiding all along behind some closed door but this is in my opinion is just absolutely annoying to deal with. I don't mind that they respawn at random intervals but this shouldn't be near players, also I wouldn't mind if they spawn a few hundred meters away and are magically aware of my presence that is also fine but not when they just spawn literally around any corner where you are at, this also takes away the immersion of a zombie apocalypse. I would also totally understand if random zombie spawns would be a mechanic with some teleportation effect or them crawling out of hell or something as that allows me to acknowledge their presence instead of being constantly surprised. I don't know if that is a wanted behavior but I think its doing more damage than good to the gameplay. Also I'm not exactly a big fan of how the AI currently reacts, sometimes they even ignore being shot at but that is a fundamentally different issue.

 
It just doesnt happen, its your imagination, according to tfp anyway! There are other threads going back quite a way discussing this very topic and those first seven words are the typical reply.

Despite the fact we all know it happens and see it happen regularly, it doesnt happen because its not programmed to! So there! stop imagining spawning behind you and it will probably stop, depending on how strong your mind is!

 
Some if that is because Zs spawn a bit from the player, but you don't notice it (which is what TFP says all the time), but there are occasions when they spawn right behind you, with no entry points busted.

 
They aren’t supposed to spawn right behind you out of thin air in the open but they can spawn behind you around a corner out of sight. Any place that isn’t in line of sight is fair game for spawning.

Each chunk has a spawning mask that enables after the full number of zombies have been killed for that biome. Once that mask triggers nothing else spawns until the timer finishes. In the forest biome that is 4-5 days.

By comparison the Wasteland biome has a much shorter mask.

But while zombies are still in queue to be spawned because you haven’t fully cleared the area they will spawn out of sight even if that is around the corner of a building a few meters away.

Now, as always, latency can make it so that the zombie suddenly moves rapidly right up behind you. If you take the time to thoroughly clear the surrounding area of all zombies until it is clear that no more are spawning in then you shouldn’t have to worry about something sucker punching you from behind.

I’m playing a mod that increases environmental spawns by 4x and it has really emphasized the need to completely clear the entire surrounding area and a set number of new zombies keep spawning in until you empty the queue and then you have peace for a time.

 
They aren’t supposed to spawn right behind you out of thin air in the open but they can spawn behind you around a corner out of sight. Any place that isn’t in line of sight is fair game for spawning.
Each chunk has a spawning mask that enables after the full number of zombies have been killed for that biome. Once that mask triggers nothing else spawns until the timer finishes. In the forest biome that is 4-5 days.

By comparison the Wasteland biome has a much shorter mask.

But while zombies are still in queue to be spawned because you haven’t fully cleared the area they will spawn out of sight even if that is around the corner of a building a few meters away.

Now, as always, latency can make it so that the zombie suddenly moves rapidly right up behind you. If you take the time to thoroughly clear the surrounding area of all zombies until it is clear that no more are spawning in then you shouldn’t have to worry about something sucker punching you from behind.

I’m playing a mod that increases environmental spawns by 4x and it has really emphasized the need to completely clear the entire surrounding area and a set number of new zombies keep spawning in until you empty the queue and then you have peace for a time.
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Thats the TFP friendly way of saying that they do spawn righ up your butt.. And they do so in your mod to. All it takes is a tree, a stone or whatever. Weird thing is that MM keeps stating that it doesnt happen.

 
*snip*
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Short version:

they do indoors.

Which is absolute bs, but I mean... its 7d2d... Fairness, immersion and gameplay has long been sacrificed to the "artificial difficulty" gods :D

*edit* Someone already did comment that 1 min before me :D

So here something to add onto that:

"sacrificed to the "artificially dumbed down difficulty" gods :D (because nuance and variation is the devils work!)

 
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In my latest attempt to like 17, I was standing in a wide, flat field. There was clear view all around(having cleared the few trees and boulders around me). I did a 360° to make sure I was alone, opened my perks, spent a couple points and was stunned and bleeding by a Hawaiian shirt zed. He would have to have been running while stealthed to get to me like that.

 
So laughable, it happens we all see it happen, we've all been jumped by zs that werent there a second ago, spawning in rooms just cleared, spawning in front of and sometimes on your face!

Yet we get the official party line, dont happen,cant happen,wont happen,never happens. We delusional horde, who have firsthand seen spawns right in front of us,been whacked by z stealth mafia from behind, been savaged by a bear spawn to the head are wrong. Blah blah not programmed, blah blah spawning mask, blah blah not possible. I wonder exactly how many of us need our eyes sorted a la madmole so we never suffer these delusions again.

 
Grass blocks seem offer sufficient visual cover to allow zombie spawns directly in front of the player (Well, at least that works for sleeper spawns and could also be true for regular biome spawns). See screenshot below. The sleeper will spawn if the player comes from the right (red arrow).

8wc2Nty.jpg


Edit:

Hmm could be a bug in A17.4 or an issue with the ingame editor. I don't even have to cover the spawn point with grass blocks to see the sleeper spawn.

Edit 2:

This also happens on a regular random gen map (tested with A17.3 and A17.4 after verifying the game files). The line of sight check might be completely broken.

 
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Grass blocks seem offer sufficient visual cover to allow zombie spawns directly in front of the player
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While that does seem a bit overkill, I can safely say that playing as a kid in waist high grass behind my house there were MANY times when my friends and I would scary the hell out of each other hiding in it with a fair amount of ease.

 
I think these problems could be alleviated if only Zs wouldn't spawn in a specific radius from a player. If a zombie has short distance to get to a player, it has less time to grunt or make any sounds. If it had a bigger distance, it would not only not see the player (due to distance, unless it's gps'ing in), but also make at least one audible sound that would make the player know something's up.

On the other hand, being very focused on something may divert your attention from your senses. Sometimes you might not hear something not so loud, yet a very distinctive "slap on the head" will pull you out of the state of concentration.

 
I think these problems could be alleviated if only Zs wouldn't spawn in a specific radius from a player.
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Problem: Zs dont spawn in POIs unless you go in them.

They should save zombies as dots, while out of sight and respawn them when you get closer than 10 blocks

The reason why they do this weird spawning thing is because they cant load too many zombies when you go around on a street, never going in a poi. But Instead of spawning them, at least keep them in position an dont change spawns if you come back a minute after kiting a horde out of the poi.

 
The whole problem is trying to make the slow tier 1 and 2 zombies more of a threat than they should be. Give the noob players some confidence before you 'game' them into a rage quit.

With the fast Tier 3 and 4 zombies: Now that the players have some confidence and something to fight with, these zombies don't need to spawn that close to be a threat. They are always a threat no matter how far away they appear and that should plenty for all but the hyper shooter junkies.

Maybe make a "Shooter Junkie" game mode and let them Rambo on! :)

 
I once posted a suggestion somewhere about making overall counters of Zs per chunk, where these counters would indicate (apart from POI counters) the amount of Zs there are in there.

- A background process could shift the numbers for migration between (let's say every minute)

= You could even add specific mechanics for migration towards where something is going on, simulating wandering hordes or in general moving of Zs towards less zombie populated areas

= You could add migration from outside of map (constantly adding new counts)

= Differentiate between the types of Zs (or even store specific zombie name into the counter)

- They would shift from a specific counter when spawned, decreasing it

- They would also shift back to the counter when out of range (running from them) and they despawn

- Always spawn Zs in when they cross the distance for spawning, but it shouldn't be too close

As cool as it sounds, huge rework and probably not gonna happen...

 
Quick question though, can't this issue be temporary "fixed" by manually removing sleepers from spawn? I mean, I love the idea of sleepers, zombies spawning "relatively" close to you and walking towards you kinda like a wandering horde, blabla, but the way it's working now kind of bothers me.

I've changed the

Code: 
SleeperGSList Spawner
to something like this in gamestages.xml

Code: 
	<group name="S_-Group_Generic_Zombie" emptyChance="1" decoyChance="0" decoy1hpChance="0">
	<spawner name="SleeperGSList" count="0,0"/>
</group>
<group name="S_-Generic_Zombie" emptyChance="1" decoyChance="0" decoy1hpChance="0">
	<spawner name="SleeperGSList" count="0,0"/>
</group>
Not sure if that will help though but I'll give it a try

 
They aren’t supposed to spawn right behind you out of thin air in the open but they can spawn behind you around a corner out of sight. Any place that isn’t in line of sight is fair game for spawning.
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I think this is the issue right here. They need to fix that. They should not work that way. That description demonstrates a technicality kind of issue. Technically they shouldn't ever spawn out of thin air. They have to be out of line of sight. But if I know for a fact that the rooms behind me are clear because I just came from there and have been thorough in searching them for threats because I'm trying to play smart and make sure I don't get snuck up on, then they may as well be spawning out of thin air whether its from around a corner or not. If I've gone out of my way to make sure something isn't there, and then somehow it is afterwards, it is effectively spawning out of thin air.

They should simply remove whatever code is causing this. Or tweak it to have it only happen if they are pretty darn far away from you if removing it isn't an option. Alternatively, something that would help mitigate the frustration is making sure zombies are a little more audible. It wouldn't be as infuriating if I could hear them coming up behind me and get a chance to do something about them first. But when I'm focused on chopping down a tree because I already looked around and there was no sign of any zombies anywhere near me, and then I just get slapped in the back of the head and start bleeding because a zombie spawned out of thin air behind a rock and snuck up to me like a ninja... I get pretty pissed off. I don't think zombies always need to be audible in principle. I actually think it adds variety if some are quiet. But it would be a way to help mitigate these infuriating incidents of zombies spawning out of thin air and mugging you.

 
The whole things broken, agoraphobic zombies, empty maps, wandering pairs errr hordes. Being outside used to be a real threat at times with big wandering hordes and populated streets.

Now if you see a dozen outside in a day its been a tough day, those you do/dont see are as likely to spawn behind you cause theyre that shy!

Emptiness of maps is really bothersome, packing pois with silly numbers and leaving outside bare is possibly the most bizarre move yet, yes we know they cant generate the numbers needed so moving them all indoors goes against fleshing the game out (so to speak).

Yes it makes some pois briefly a threat, but cant compensate for huge empty maps where the couple of zs are either a mile away or spawning behind you to rob you of the thrill of seeing them close up!

 
I don't mind them being in the house so much what I mind is that when I look in a room and leave and come back in like 30 seconds there might be zombies in it. The problem would go away if the zombies would already exist by the moment I enter a house/chunk/area, when it comes to optimization you can have those invisible zombies in a idle state and the moment they are active you can increase the update rate its not so hard to do really. When I speak about inactive zombies that means they are only updated like lets say every 50 ticks based on the entity id so they will still walk but slowly and they will still be able to update their senses but given that they are out of sight no one cares, let them do their thing in in their own pace during that time.

TLDR:

1. Divide the whole map into segments and assign a respawn timer per segment.

- The segment size should be large enough to avoid observing zombie spawns.

2. When a player enters a segment:

- If the segment has the zombie respawn flag set then respawn "all" zombies in that area.

- Reset the respawn timer back to N minutes before zombies can spawn again.

3. When a player leaves the segment:

- Decay the timer as long no players are active in the segment.

- If the timer runs to zero then flag the segment to respawn zombies upon player enter.

- Put every non-visible zombie back to the idle state, avoids player chasing zombies being suddenly idle.

4. When a player approaches a zombie:

- If the distance is small enough or the zombie is directly visible from the players view they should be put from Idle to Active.

4. Idle zombies

- Slow updated versions, such Update is when: (Game Tick % 128) == (ZombieID % 128)

- Don't play any animations, they are not visible so why bother.

- Can become active by player triggered events such as sounds, smell, heat.

I would suggest that the size of a segment is not bound to the size of the chunks, I think a good size would be something like 512x512x512 meters. Also by this model players can take over areas and not be worried about zombies appearing randomly out of no where, they would need to leave this area for N minutes.

Another thing to perhaps keep in mind is the spawn location, it makes no sense that zombies respawn in a house that is fully locked up that you previously cleared, the spawning rules should consider a path that can be reached by normal means.

 
I would suggest that the size of a segment is not bound to the size of the chunks, I think a good size would be something like 512x512x512 meters.
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Way WAY too big (more reasonable and doable is 50-100 meters, maybe 150) but otherwise nice idea.

 
I would tighten it to something like 25x25x25 blocks, but consider enabling zombies in the segment you are in and all the neighboring ones (or additionally 2 segments apart in a straight line). This way you're sure that the range is sufficient and you don't make a 2 step walk to disable a segment you were in.

EDIT: Add migration of zombies between segments and constant generation of Zs on the borders of the map. We're all set.

 
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