PC Who prefers old zombie world deployment over this?

I like the sleepers but I do miss the bunches of random zombies in town as well. It's a tough thing to balance because only so many zombies can be spawned at once :/

 
I'm not finding one nice large cit/town. Tried a few seeds and am tired of looking. Its obvious they took larger areas out. I'm setting the game aside as I for sure liked 16 over 17.

 
I agree with OP but I do like Some sleepers in Some buildings.But not always. Right now you break in the door (They are all locked which is also annoying - you cannot sneak in), then back up for the standard big flood of zombies to flow out. Then move in for the next big flood of zombies which you have no choice but to back away from. It's as tedious as
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Probably you just don't try hard enough to be stealthy if you are always greeted by a flood of zombies. Look at your stealth meter. If it never goes below 40 then likely you are running around with a helmet lamp on (that is easy to overlook at daylight).

I have no problem breaking doors stealthed and not waking up zombies inside. But I have a few points in stealth and I have to switch the mining helmet lights off.

The other thing I've noticed is the AI is still a big problem, compounded with a number of bugs than send zombies "jumping" up the sides of walls on top of each other. It's not quite World War Z mount of zombies climbing, but rather singles leap frogging on each others heads to get to the higher levels.
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Small info: Zombies on top of other zombies is a feature not an AI bug.

 
Probably you just don't try hard enough to be stealthy if you are always greeted by a flood of zombies. Look at your stealth meter. If it never goes below 40 then likely you are running around with a helmet lamp on (that is easy to overlook at daylight).
I have no problem breaking doors stealthed and not waking up zombies inside. But I have a few points in stealth and I have to switch the mining helmet lights off.

Small info: Zombies on top of other zombies is a feature not an AI bug.
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Didn't think headlamps as an attractant were modelled , will try that. Still prefer more open world zombies though and less predictability in all aspects of the game.

Thanks for the tip.

 
TFP probably has a very simple problem: Per player 8 zombies can be in the world simultaneously. That limit is because of the target of max 8 players on a server which means a server needs to be able to animate 64 zombies at the same time.

Now lets assume that a SP player runs through a city and gets 7 world zombies to spawn. If he then runs into a poi he would see only 1 single zombie in the whole building. Even worse, if the world zombies despawn he might suddenly get zombies to spawn inside rooms behind him which he thought were empty. Those zombies could block his exit and get him killed.

Naturally optimizations that allow more zombies would be a solution. But I don't know if those optimizations are not needed anyway to get just those 64 zombies working.

Another possibility would be a dynamic limit. I.e. as long as the hard limit of 64 zombies in the world isn't reached the soft limit of 8 zombies per player can be exceeded by 50%. This soft limit goes down to 0% as more players enter the game. It might also be advisable to have 0% at horde nights so difficulty balance stays the same.

So in a typical co-op game with 2-5 people the actual limit would be 12 zombies per player. With the increased budget more world zombies could roam the world by default. But servers with lots of players might observe suboptimal spawning whenever many players log in or out at the same time.

Note this is just theorizing with lots of guesses instead of hard facts about the inner workings of the game. Maybe the problems are quite different to what I'm assuming.

 
I'm not finding one nice large cit/town. Tried a few seeds and am tired of looking. Its obvious they took larger areas out. I'm setting the game aside as I for sure liked 16 over 17.
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I reverted to A16 a couple of days ago. Will stay tuned for A18 and see how it plays out. A17 just isn't my cup of tea.

 
You start going through city and you see only up to 10 zombies? Like really? That's the apocalypse?

The biggest problem here is optimization of zombies. Some things may influence how the game runs, but when the influence is around 10% and zombies influence in like 60% then you should revise what you're aiming at. Not here shame TFP for not going after this topic or another, simply i'm awaiting the game to be updated so that larger numbers of Zs can spawn.

Whenever i open the console to check the number of Zs currently in it's always below 10, unless i run close to a POI (10-30) or it's a BM and (20-64). I would love for this to be around 15-30 regularly and jumping even up to 100 when around POIs.

 
TFP probably has a very simple problem: Per player 8 zombies can be in the world simultaneously. That limit is because of the target of max 8 players on a server which means a server needs to be able to animate 64 zombies at the same time.
Now lets assume that a SP player runs through a city and gets 7 world zombies to spawn. If he then runs into a poi he would see only 1 single zombie in the whole building. Even worse, if the world zombies despawn he might suddenly get zombies to spawn inside rooms behind him which he thought were empty. Those zombies could block his exit and get him killed.

Naturally optimizations that allow more zombies would be a solution. But I don't know if those optimizations are not needed anyway to get just those 64 zombies working.

Another possibility would be a dynamic limit. I.e. as long as the hard limit of 64 zombies in the world isn't reached the soft limit of 8 zombies per player can be exceeded by 50%. This soft limit goes down to 0% as more players enter the game. It might also be advisable to have 0% at horde nights so difficulty balance stays the same.

So in a typical co-op game with 2-5 people the actual limit would be 12 zombies per player. With the increased budget more world zombies could roam the world by default. But servers with lots of players might observe suboptimal spawning whenever many players log in or out at the same time.

Note this is just theorizing with lots of guesses instead of hard facts about the inner workings of the game. Maybe the problems are quite different to what I'm assuming.
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I don't think this is how it works at all...

 
I dont know enough about programming or unity to say which is more responsible for the lack of numbers, but it is a massive problem. Especially when numbers indoors vastly outnumber those outdoors.

There is very little outdoor threat anymore and it feels very empty until you move indoors. Everyone seems to think optimisation will fix it all, i fail to see how when npcs and raiders are yet to be added further reducing numbers.

It would be interesting to hear from unity programmers/coders with ideas to improve onscreen numbers to reasonable levels so we can have a more realistic apocalypse!

Not hating on a game i invested almost 2000 hours in, genuinely worried/interested in how this will ever be solved.

Bring back the hordes, we miss em!

 
The philosophy is to put the threat at the point of contact with objective: that being the loot. Outdoor Zombies are never going to be a threat unless there were 1000’s and that just isn’t going to happen. Even if we exceeded the old numbers by double it would still be easy enough to go around them, kite them, and generally avoid them.

POIs packed with sleepers gives the players the threat of large numbers in a confined space making the threat real and relevant because they are between you and the loot and not three streets over where you left them in the dust.

I would ask those complaining about this whether you are the type that fights the zombies inside the POI where the threat of being overwhelmed is real or are you the type that leads them outside so you can line them up and kill them easily?

If the latter then trust me that you don’t really want the numbers of outdoor zombies required to actually be terrifying and threatening.

 
I fight them inside and while I do understand the idea behind the current implementation, I think it's too one dimensional and predictable. When they were announced, I thought sleepers were going to put uncertainty into the game by having some corpses be sleepers and others actually dead, while other zombies roamed the world and POIs alike.

As it stands, the threat is stationary until you activate it, and since you know where they can be (unless you're very new to the game), you can control the engagement quite easily (and kiting them in some way, inside or outside, is inevitable if you want to live). It becomes a repetitive scenario in large POIs: activate sleeper cell, kill zombies, loot, move on to the next room to do the same. And so on. The game even gives you audio cues to alert you that sleepers are still present, as if the devs actually wanted to remove any surprise. The mechanics are just way too obviously present imho.

 
I fight them inside and while I do understand the idea behind the current implementation, I think it's too one dimensional and predictable. When they were announced, I thought sleepers were going to put uncertainty into the game by having some corpses be sleepers and others actually dead, while other zombies roamed the world and POIs alike.
As it stands, the threat is stationary until you activate it, and since you know where they can be (unless you're very new to the game), you can control the engagement quite easily (and kiting them in some way, inside or outside, is inevitable if you want to live). It becomes a repetitive scenario in large POIs: activate sleeper cell, kill zombies, loot, move on to the next room to do the same. And so on. The game even gives you audio cues to alert you that sleepers are still present, as if the devs actually wanted to remove any surprise. The mechanics are just way too obviously present imho.
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This.

We obviously can't have dense zombie populations outdoors *everywhere*. Out in the forest, I wouldn't expect to encounter all that many. But in towns and cities (where the loot is) I want zombies in the streets and more in the houses/buildings so that you can control the engagement to an extent (i.e. as long as you keep it quiet) but bring out the guns or ride in on a motorcycle or make some other loud noise and zombies in all of the surrounding buildings come boiling out.

Back in A14(?) - not sure exactly which alpha(s) - we had that, pretty much, and it was a lot of fun.

 
Like i mentioned in some other topic, I would greatly like to have the Zs work more like a zombie migration system:

- Every POI has its own counts for sleepers, just like every chunk has its own counts for active Zs. Think of it as numbers shifting constantly (or at regular intervals, imitating zombies moving in various directions and new ones coming in from behind the radiated zones).

- When you get close enough (bigger range than close to a POI) then Zs are spawned as entities and numbers go down. Going away at a specific distance they despawn and numbers go back into the specific pools.

- If they chased you then these vagrants shifted to different chunks and YOU KNOW you "left them somewhere", but if you didn't gather their attention, they despawn after going away and the numbers reflect that.

- Rework heat generation in a manner of inducing Zs from nearby areas to migrate towards the place you are "making noise". This would influence less Z numbers in further away chunks and influence generated Zs to head towards the source.

As much as it's my fantasy resolution and not going to be implemented, it would simulate a RL situation where Zs outdoors are in big in numbers just as they could be indoors (how i would like it). And yes, i fight inside houses.

 
As developer also, here is my thoughts on how to increase the number of zombies and performance tweaks...

Create distance zombies groups/hordes that can be pathed, controlled as a single object or structure. This will entail making new graphics to make a single object horde. Think the hardest part of this would be making the distance hordes looks right.

With this single object mini-horde group, you can have 4-5 individual normal zombies approaching the player near distance and a group/horde or 2 in the farther distance. Each distance horde as a single object could be like 8 zombies. This way, you to don't have to spend cpu threads calculating pathing for 8 individual zombies in this 8 count mini horde distance group. You only calculating pathing for 1. If the player shoots the mini-horde from a long distance, will have to do some cheesy simulations of reduce the count of zombies in the horde. When the mini-horde gets closer, they break apart into normal individual pathing zombies.

These "distance" mini hordes will give scares to players and simulate the "horde" feeling at least visually.

Other thought I have had is during heavy combat situations with a lot zombies, skip every other code branch thread of calculating block destructions. This might be iffy on working in practice, but worth a shot. I know those block destructions calculations can get expensive on cpu threads.

Lastly, on this topic: "Horde" is the clear stated purpose of the game.. Think that "horde" word needs to be removed from "The crafting survival horde game" statement if TFP don't strive very hard to make more zombies appear with good performance in the gold product.

 
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The philosophy is to put the threat at the point of contact with objective: that being the loot. Outdoor Zombies are never going to be a threat unless there were 1000آ’s and that just isnآ’t going to happen. Even if we exceeded the old numbers by double it would still be easy enough to go around them, kite them, and generally avoid them.
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Sure, it's easier to deal with zombies by running away from them rather than killing them in close quarters. That's a pretty common sentiment in zombie fiction.

However, it feels like A17 is emphasizing close-quarters combat over strategic avoidance.

Why is that? Your post seems to suggest that it's because avoiding zombies (that aren't in front of your face) is so trivial it's not even worth formally treating as a game mechanic.

I would argue that it's only trivial because it isn't being treated as a game mechanic.

 
Sure, it's easier to deal with zombies by running away from them rather than killing them in close quarters. That's a pretty common sentiment in zombie fiction. However, it feels like A17 is emphasizing close-quarters combat over strategic avoidance.

Why is that? Your post seems to suggest that it's because avoiding zombies (that aren't in front of your face) is so trivial it's not even worth formally treating as a game mechanic.

I would argue that it's only trivial because it isn't being treated as a game mechanic.
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It’s trivial because the game can’t render enough zombies to make it nontrivial.

 
I fight them inside and while I do understand the idea behind the current implementation, I think it's too one dimensional and predictable. When they were announced, I thought sleepers were going to put uncertainty into the game by having some corpses be sleepers and others actually dead, while other zombies roamed the world and POIs alike.
As it stands, the threat is stationary until you activate it, and since you know where they can be (unless you're very new to the game), you can control the engagement quite easily (and kiting them in some way, inside or outside, is inevitable if you want to live). It becomes a repetitive scenario in large POIs: activate sleeper cell, kill zombies, loot, move on to the next room to do the same. And so on. The game even gives you audio cues to alert you that sleepers are still present, as if the devs actually wanted to remove any surprise. The mechanics are just way too obviously present imho.
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I agree with this and I would also like there to be more uncertainty. I hope that there are still plans for that. Remember that A17 is only the second iteration of sleepers. It seems like more because of how long A16 and A17 development took but we can hope for more refinement still

 
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