PC The opponents aren't zombies anymore!

I suspect the problem is that in order to have game challenge, you either need to have "smarter" zombies, tougher zombies (we don't seem to want bullet-sponges...or at least not many of them), or more zombies. I think most of us want that last option....but I'm guessing it's in the realm of "not possible" due to the game's limitations.
I completely agree that smart zombies are meh. I'd love to take refuge up on a roof, and see their masses just keep building below. Sure, they're a turkey-shoot, but how much ammo do I have? The sound of my gunshots bringing still more. They're not smart enough to work together to break down the doors I boarded up, but now and then one of them will crash against the door, making me wonder how long they will hold.

I think our game lacks the "ZPUs" to give us the option we really want.

-Morloc
+1

Also...to make lemonade out of lemons, this new AI seems to hold the groundwork for those mythical NPC bandits.

 
Oh OP, you made the fatal error of criticizing the game and now the forum will come for you and eat your brains.

But seriously, I know how you are feeling. I have been there, and lamented my loss lol. But there is a lot to like about A17 as well and I am hoping that it will balance out in the end. (Not so sure since the latest patch though, Intel 5? Really?)

Anyway, you are always able to play A16 instead and who knows, I may see you there. Time will tell.

 
Alife or not doesn't really make much of a difference anyway if they look the same.Lore doesn't affect the gameplay feeling in the slightest and you have plenty of IPs where regular zombies retain some intelligence.

How was called that one old movie, where people hid from zombies in shopping center and were fighting both, biker gang and zombies with ability to use simple tools and even a gun at one point?

Remember The Last of us?

Also infected, they could just as well be called mushroom zombies and absolutely nothing would change in the game.

Same deal really.

Or The Walking Dead, different groups call zombies in different ways, it doesn't change in the slightest how you feel about them, hell, you cal them zombies instead of walkers as well and it doesn't change anything.

Its just semantics for people who struggle to cope, so if name change will put them at ease, I couldn't care less.
You're thinking of Dawn of the Dead with the shopping mall and fighting zombies and humans but wrong part about tools and gun. That part is from Land of the Dead.

 
Anyone else see the irony of someone called postmortem making a Quit thread?
I thought the same thing!

I suspect the problem is that in order to have game challenge, you either need to have "smarter" zombies, tougher zombies (we don't seem to want bullet-sponges...or at least not many of them), or more zombies. I think most of us want that last option....but I'm guessing it's in the realm of "not possible" due to the game's limitations.
I completely agree that smart zombies are meh. I'd love to take refuge up on a roof, and see their masses just keep building below. Sure, they're a turkey-shoot, but how much ammo do I have? The sound of my gunshots bringing still more. They're not smart enough to work together to break down the doors I boarded up, but now and then one of them will crash against the door, making me wonder how long they will hold.

I think our game lacks the "ZPUs" to give us the option we really want.

-Morloc
So much this!

To the people arguing canon, sure there's multiple franchises with their own rules, and the "infected" argument is a valid way to look at it.

It really comes down to personal prefs, and it seems most of us like 'em slow and dumb, quantity over quality.

I think The Pimps would probably give us that too (or at least the option) if it wouldn't tank game performance to unplayable.

Even Dying Light, which mixes in specials along with a bulk of run of the mill zeds, still has to do a lot of tricks to make it feel like there's a huge horde around you. The bridge is a perfect example where there is just a huge mass of them milling around during the day, but if you observe you'll see that only the group in your immediate area is active. The others just stand there, maybe shuffle around a little, but you can perch on top of a bus and shoot them and they won't take damage, nor activate until you get into range. Now DL doesn't have to do all the voxel world stuff 7D does so while it works perfectly for DL the same probably can't be done for 7D.

 
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Well, this is only one piece of what can happen with a 'total re-write' of the game as they've noted. As most of us have seen first hand - the AI is much, much better and refined. As Roland noted - this is the raw AI. As we're still in alpha and most importantly as we're still in this first iteration of the new and improved AI there will need to be tweaks!!! Just as the skills, etc just got a tweak so too will the AI.

Now - how about this for thought... In PVP mode you can switch back to this RAW AI on top of your PVP'ing lol

 
Plus on MP with most servers setting max zombie population at 100, this doesn't work. How does the game deal with horde night though? Is that why sometimes on high pop servers I have those awkward times where no zeds have shown up? It hit the 100 max?

 
You're thinking of Dawn of the Dead with the shopping mall and fighting zombies and humans but wrong part about tools and gun. That part is from Land of the Dead.
*Just filling out the chronology of the Romero zombie verse*

"Night of the Living dead" was the initial introduction, to the zombies starting to use tools in the Romero's Zombie universe. Short scene that most forget about is the little girl, that died in the basement, then came back and killed her dad with the brick towel.

Bub in "Day of the Dead", was the first zombie in the Romero movies, to use a gun, among other things.

 
AI needs tuning
Yah, it needs work and the bandits will need work too since everyone will just jump back and forth between two platforms and shoot at them as the run back and forth between two ladders, for example.

In fact, zombies breaking through concrete and steel is probably a worse offense then them having some ability to find a short path to a destination that is more efficient. Not sure how that can ever be fixed without making those items rare/expensive and unrealistic to obtain.

Really as someone else said, we just need a ton of zombies everywhere.

 
As for your post [PostMortem] it is mostly just another "I'm bad at the game and wish the devs would make it easier for me" posts. Just turn down the difficulty if you are finding the game too hard. This is by far the easiest build the game has had since I've started playing many patches ago.
Look normally I don't think this kind of comment is necessarily helpful and try to avoid it but.....

... I am having a really, really difficult time arguing with this.

ycJWVNz.gif


I suspect the problem is that in order to have game challenge, you either need to have "smarter" zombies, tougher zombies (we don't seem to want bullet-sponges...or at least not many of them), or more zombies. I think most of us want that last option....but I'm guessing it's in the realm of "not possible" due to the game's limitations.
I completely agree that smart zombies are meh. I'd love to take refuge up on a roof, and see their masses just keep building below. Sure, they're a turkey-shoot, but how much ammo do I have? The sound of my gunshots bringing still more. They're not smart enough to work together to break down the doors I boarded up, but now and then one of them will crash against the door, making me wonder how long they will hold.

I think our game lacks the "ZPUs" to give us the option we really want.

-Morloc

Really good post Morloc!

*Just filling out the chronology of the Romero zombie verse*"Night of the Living dead" was the initial introduction, to the zombies starting to use tools in the Romero's Zombie universe. Short scene that most forget about is the little girl, that died in the basement, then came back and killed her dad with the brick towel.

Bub in "Day of the Dead", was the first zombie in the Romero movies, to use a gun, among other things.
Yes thank you.

That's what I was thinking too.

 
I suspect the problem is that in order to have game challenge, you either need to have "smarter" zombies, tougher zombies (we don't seem to want bullet-sponges...or at least not many of them), or more zombies. I think most of us want that last option....but I'm guessing it's in the realm of "not possible" due to the game's limitations.
I completely agree that smart zombies are meh. I'd love to take refuge up on a roof, and see their masses just keep building below. Sure, they're a turkey-shoot, but how much ammo do I have? The sound of my gunshots bringing still more. They're not smart enough to work together to break down the doors I boarded up, but now and then one of them will crash against the door, making me wonder how long they will hold.

I think our game lacks the "ZPUs" to give us the option we really want.

-Morloc
I've actually been working on something like this in my free time. I wanted to see what 7dtd would feel like if the game was built around making as many zombies as possible. Still working on the rendering framework, but here are the basic design principles I think would do the trick:

1. Making the zombies ant-like, where each one does a only very basic AI calculation every few seconds, but they interact in some way that allows the horde as a whole to act intelligently.

2. Aggressively getting rid of unneeded AI calculations. For example zombies in the center of a crowd don't actually need to think in any way, they just need to go the same direction everyone else is going.

3. Using modified fluid mechanics algorithms to simulate horde behavior at long distance so you can't get rid of a horde(or even slow it down) by making them despawn.

4. Mega potato graphics.

 
I would disagree with the OP. I believe zombie AI got improved in regards to dungeons, really cool sleepers and all that hiding behind the corners and fake ceilings etc... Thumbs up to TFP.

But in regards to horde nights they are like super dumb - since you can exploit their behavior. No need for building base and defending it I just prefer to lead them to the place of my choosing slow them down with some spikes and wires and just dispose of them with arrows and melee ( molotovs are nice as well ). Feral irradiated not much of a problem just takes a little longer. On horde nights "dumb zombies from A16" worked much better IMO, since they just rushed in and just started smacking at the building trying to collapse it.

And for OP give a game a try and learn the new game mechanics - i got comfortable with a game at the very start with b195 when it was quite brutal encountering 3 irradiated ferrals in the back room of Pop'n'Pills for example, but after you get accustomed to their AI you can exploit that for your benefit.

 
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I've actually been working on something like this in my free time. I wanted to see what 7dtd would feel like if the game was built around making as many zombies as possible. Still working on the rendering framework, but here are the basic design principles I think would do the trick:1. Making the zombies ant-like, where each one does a only very basic AI calculation every few seconds, but they interact in some way that allows the horde as a whole to act intelligently.

2. Aggressively getting rid of unneeded AI calculations. For example zombies in the center of a crowd don't actually need to think in any way, they just need to go the same direction everyone else is going.

3. Using modified fluid mechanics algorithms to simulate horde behavior at long distance so you can't get rid of a horde(or even slow it down) by making them despawn.

4. Mega potato graphics.
The biggest thing is going to be lighting.

In A15 and A16 I did something like this with UMAs [which take up even more resources].

I removed torches from every POI and all large POIS were gone as well.

Even things like street signs and clutter that was nice but didn't need to be there I got rid of.

Grass went as well. There was just a little tuft here and there kinda thing.

Even replaced Spikes and Barbed wire with Cube Blocks that did the same thing but rendered with less resources.

It worked!

It was awesome!!!!

I didn't care one bit how it looked [cuz it looked bad]! It was fun!

So... keep at it. It's worth it.

I've always maintained that ANY zombie game should have a Romero version.

It's the honourable thing to do and it's very much appreciated by players.

 
I always remember in one of my all time favorite RPG settings: Lionheart , that the zombies became more intelligent based on how many brains they had eaten in their undead unlifetime.

Personally, I would like some types of zombies having different abilities. Seems like businessman zombie might be a good candidate for good pathing, and the hoodie zombie should have some of the parkour traits (making fort building a different challenge).

Just some thoughts...

 
Overall, I think the new zombie AI is too smart. But another issue is that it seems too consistent.

In my last game, I played with zombies set to jog at all times, with only ferals running. This just felt the most zombie-like to me. To balance this out, I set the bloodmoon to 64 zombies. When the blood moon came, the zombies all bunched up and I ended up just circling them, occasionally poking one vigorously with a sledgehammer.

This might seem like a legitimate weakness of slow zombies, and the strategy would probably not work as well against sprinting zombies, but it trivialized the hordes more than I feel it should have, and it looked bad.

One solution that I thought of, that might also allow for more zombies to be present in any given horde, would be to limit how many of them can actively track the player at once, maybe 80-90%. The other zombies near the player would just continue to walk/sprint in a straight line until they hit an obstacle, they hit a point where their previous path would have had them turn, or they hit the player.

At this point they could steal priority from one of the zombies that was actively tracking the player (maybe one that was among the furthest away), make an awareness check against the player, and start pathfinding to the player again if they see them. This could help to split them up, and reduce the player's ability to simply circle the horde.

It could also potentially serve as a way to naturally dissolve non-bloodmoon hordes if the player can find a way to hide from them for a while.

 
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You complain about zombies not being dumb anymore... Meanwhile I tried to shoot a pig using AK-47 while crouching on the top of the construction that is inside the base made of car wrecks, I've hit the pig with bonus damage for sneaking and it still didn't die, it quickly turned around and ran towards the base and then it disappeared for a while. I knew it will have to go through the only possible way in to get to me, so I immediately aimed at the entrance expecting to see the little piggy to enter the base soon, but at that point it somehow already found a way all the way up to me, it sneaked up on me from behind and it bit my ass!

Player 0, little piggy 1

 
Well this is all i have to say about spawning, doesnt seem to really matter how stupid they are just spawn in more and add a bear or 2 they will get you!

 
Well this is all i have to say about spawning, doesnt seem to really matter how stupid they are just spawn in more and add a bear or 2 they will get you!
Originally the bear just wanted to refuel, but then it got distracted by all those folks inside, so it went in to check out what's going on.

 
I always remember in one of my all time favorite RPG settings: Lionheart , that the zombies became more intelligent based on how many brains they had eaten in their undead unlifetime. ...
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That.... is... hysterical!

I love it!

Well this is all i have to say about spawning, doesnt seem to really matter how stupid they are just spawn in more and add a bear or 2 they will get you!
Daaaang!

Yup! That'll do it!

 
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