PC Who prefers old zombie world deployment over this?

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.
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Threat, no threat, doesnt matter - I just want more non sleeping zombies in the world for pure fun, so the game is more like the walking dead instead of the sleeping dead.

 
I miss the old way but for another reason, the main reason is the fact that there are unrealistic amounts of zombies in many poi's, like i've seen a small square house that had at least 10 sleepers in it. A average family of 4 would probally live in that house. In one hall on the second floor there was 3-4 sleepers almost always spawned in it right after you go up the stairs to the 2nd floor.

I feel there should be more zombies outside roaming in towns, less sleepers inside most poi's and chances for 0 sleepers to spawn at all in some. Its add some more variety on top of being more realistic as not every house is going to have 6-10 zombies inside it. I mean I can go into most poi's I been into once before and I already know exactly how many sleepers its going to have and generally where they are since its always the exact same. In fact early game, I loot poi's not mainly for loot, but to kill the zombies for exp, as there is a better concentration of them in Poi's than there is outdoors.

If you watch the walking dead and such you'll see what I suggest makes sense, the many zombies outside, few sleepers inside and chances for no sleepers to spawn at all. They often find houses to loot in TWD that have little to no zombies in them at all.

I also miss the 0,0 city, with its constantly never ending spawn of virtually every zombie type, meaning you can never actually clear the area it was tense and exciting running into there to loot while avoiding the never ending horde.

 
I don't even think the Fun Pimps even read this thread, I doubt anything will change with this post, but I'll throw in my 2 Cents in here anyways. I 100% agree with the OP that the old outside zombies and wandering hordes were more intense and realistic and that SNEAKING in and out of POIs you loot without getting noticed was essential. This sneaking and looting in 0,0 was crucial unless you want to be overrunned by hordes and zombie dogs for a horrible death. I preferred the older ways the way zombies were implemented because it made sense, it was intense.

Having 20+ zeds in a house doesn't make sense at all, maybe special POI dungeons sure, but not a shack or small house. And whatever happened to converting a POI into your own base using your tools and paint tool Joel ? I mean you encouraged it... now it NOPE sleepers will spawn in MAGICALLY wher your bedroll doesn't cover.... wha ??

Doing quests become pointless and not worth it when you cap out on the encounter threshhold and every indoor zombie a glowing radioactive HULK, I don't know if any of you maxxed out your character level like I do... it's stupid hard and unrealistic - radioactives crazy hard zombies should be only on horde nights IMO.

I dunno, I pretty much stopped playing this 2019 ... might check it out next year or when it's done, it's just these changes has gone sideways for me.

 
Threat, no threat, doesnt matter - I just want more non sleeping zombies in the world for pure fun, so the game is more like the walking dead instead of the sleeping dead.
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I agree with him.

I want zombies outside, like we used to have.. in top of that we can have sleepers

 
Something that just occurred to me that I'm not sure is still possible in a17, is that someplace (I think serverconfig.xml) mentions that animal AI takes up less resources than zombie AI. Many people like at least a portion of the zombies to be the slow, drooling, shambling type. What if a class of zombie was made that used the animal AI and literally just wandered around, and reacted like, say, boars, only attacking what attacks them, or like wolves, attacking anything they see (including each other! Wouldn't THAT be a neat thing to have in game!). Then these animal zeds could be on a more efficient resource level than the "normal" zombie and total count could go up.

 
Like Roland mentioned, sleepers are a new addition (some of us, including me, forgot when they were added) and just like the current perk system will need time to settle, tweak and evolve into something better. Expect more changes when optimizations come in for zombie counts, where we'll be able to have a 100 Zs spawned at a time with ease, not up to 20.

 
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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Maybe it is possible to create spawn points outside of pois (in their own spawn volume) so that they are spawned if you make noise inside when or after clearing the house. They could poise a danger on your escape route.

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. .... Each distance horde as a single object could be like 8 zombies.
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All easier said than done. Remember the player could have a x8 scope and looking through that the single animated object has to look and walk realistically (if you don't want to add distance fog everywhere). Since it is more than one block wide and deep it needs to walk on totally flat surfaces or some of the zombies will be in the air or underground or phasing through objects. For a similar reason the behemoth was scraped, right?

I don't think this is how it works at all...
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You should at least be able to point to the assumption(s) and conclusion(s) that are wrong and why.

 
You should at least be able to point to the assumption(s) and conclusion(s) that are wrong and why.
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You render far more than 8 zombies at a time no matter what your settings are at. The 8 limit is only for BM horde spawns (and that goes up to 64). The whole post was based on that assumption and it is not correct.

 
It’s trivial because the game can’t render enough zombies to make it nontrivial.
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There will never be 100 zombies running around "horde" doesnt exist any more and outdoor numbers will never increase substantially, its a crying shame. IMO sacrificing outdoor numbers for indoor unrealistic numbers is just wrong, but its not my game and TFP make the right decisions for them. I just hope some way can be found to up numbers outdoors enough to feel inhabited again.

 
This sneaking and looting in 0,0 was crucial unless you want to be overrunned by hordes and zombie dogs for a horrible death. I preferred the older ways the way zombies were implemented because it made sense, it was intense.
Having 20+ zeds in a house doesn't make sense at all, maybe special POI dungeons sure, but not a shack or small house. And whatever happened to converting a POI into your own base using your tools and paint tool Joel ? I mean you encouraged it... now it NOPE sleepers will spawn in MAGICALLY wher your bedroll doesn't cover.... wha
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I cannot agree more :) zs are simply spawned in the world and magically created into some specific building.

It would be more immersive doing something like a dedicated distribution logic I think modern pc can do that.

By implementing that TFP would have also a free step forward towards some sort of background story. For example some houses may have 3 4 zs and an house 10. A diary page could explain why. Of course as of now where all houses have 10 is bad.

Even more: zs may be attracted by something and moving and walking to reach that something.

Even the hordes are predictable, too small to be hordes and too frequent. Predictable because they are centered on your position after some time.

Anyway I don't know: maybe we're asking too much. I cannot remove from my mind the idea that TFP originally tought to create a game without not so many expectations whereas they instead created a gem :) now to enrich a gem is a whole different thing of course.

 
I would rather have almost no zombies in unpopulated areas, and when they are there, they should "sleep" and when waking up have a high chance to be feral. Slow walking zombies are easy to spot and avoid. Its just not interesting.

In the outdoors, there should be more a thread of bears, wolves and vultures.

 
I very much prefer outside over inside zombies, though I also do like meeting them inside. A question I had ever since the so called "static spawner" was removed is: Why? That spawner would spawn zombies around buildings when you approach. It was just so much fun to get to a house and you had to fight your way inside. I've never seen a reason why it was replaced with sleepers, but probably it has performance reasons.

Interestingly, you could already have zombies inside buildings in A12, and probably every alpha after that. You can just place them inside prefabs with a prefab editor. A few tweaks to the AI make them pretty much sleeper-esque, they won't wander around and only become active once they see the player. So you could have both: A lot of zombies as general biome spawn, zombies spawning around buildings and zombies spawning inside buildings. Particularly A12 did that with essentially no performance issues whatsoever.

Upsets me greatly.

 
Maybe is my impression but a well organized world is a perfect solution for everyone.

For organized I'm meaning something like zs flooding in some area for a precise reason and empty areas for other reasons. Spawn point should be realistic not just like rain in certain location.

That can be achieved even in random map: zs are generated in certain locations then they wander on a random base+personal life interests. Example: radiated zs may like radiations and look for that. Cheerleaders may look for stadiums or something and the tie guy may look for an office. Of course if an horde meets an animal may attack it and instead if some zs find a bear may flee into an house and that's one reason to have house full of zs.

In the end finding map spawn locations could be some sort of end game or similar. In that way you'll have empty zones and full zones but the best thing is that you don't know where they are :) never. Even more: by doing that if at day 5 some city is full of zs maybe at day 10 it'll be empty because something attracted zs attention.

That would answer to many open points here... in my opinion of course.

 
i agree but we need a huge optimization update :p or if there is alot of zombies on the city roads ++ we will have 0 fps D:

on a17 experimental realese there was a huge amount of zombies on town and when i entered a town i went from 60-70 fps to 20-25 D:

but yea i wish for more dogs zombies on the road and on towns couse now when i go to a town i dont feel threatend D: i encountered only 1 dog in town last time and i killed it easy if it was 2-3 dogs i whould scream like a lil kid :p running to find a high place to climb hehe

 
but yea i wish for more dogs zombies on the road and on towns couse now when i go to a town i dont feel threatend D: i encountered only 1 dog in town last time and i killed it easy if it was 2-3 dogs i whould scream like a lil kid :p running to find a high place to climb hehe
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I had a dog horde the other day, and all I thought was "yes bones". I also go to the Doggos once a week. There are at least 7 dogs in the building and 3 on the roof. The feeling of fear has long since given way to the need for bones :)

 
The city itself should be the dungeon, not the individual buildings
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This is the most important reply in this whole thread. I agree 100%.

The world seems less Zombie Apocalypsey now.

There is a reason so many dislike the new path the game has taken.

 
While the sleeper system is great for adding difficulty and plenty of scares, the world does tend to feel more empty. A balancing between the two could help, though as it is, zombies in the open world don't pose much of a threat. Before sleepers the huge amount of zombies you'd run into in cities was an obstacle more than anything, you could predict what you'd have to face depending on your zombie count setting. So comparatively, sleepers definitely add more to the game while open world zombies are essentially decorative. So what other dynamic could be added?

Personally, I'd like to see more wandering hordes, so maybe, say in bigger cities, your chances of being sniffed out by supposedly unseen, nearby hordes would add more depth and danger to our dungeon delving adventures.

 
I very much prefer outside over inside zombies, though I also do like meeting them inside. A question I had ever since the so called "static spawner" was removed is: Why? That spawner would spawn zombies around buildings when you approach. It was just so much fun to get to a house and you had to fight your way inside. I've never seen a reason why it was replaced with sleepers, but probably it has performance reasons.
Interestingly, you could already have zombies inside buildings in A12, and probably every alpha after that. You can just place them inside prefabs with a prefab editor. A few tweaks to the AI make them pretty much sleeper-esque, they won't wander around and only become active once they see the player. So you could have both: A lot of zombies as general biome spawn, zombies spawning around buildings and zombies spawning inside buildings. Particularly A12 did that with essentially no performance issues whatsoever.

Upsets me greatly.
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I liked those spawners as well but you must remember that if you approached a POI too quickly they would spawn while you were in their midst and you would get zombies around and on top of you suddenly. I don’t think there was a good solution to prevent that from happening. Well...other than sleepers. :)

I actually got in the habit of stopping short of a POI and waiting for the outside guys to spawn and then proceeding forward. Talk about immersion breaking...

 
they would spawn while you were in their midst and you would get zombies around and on top of you suddenly. I don’t think there was a good solution to prevent that from happening. Well...other than sleepers. :)
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What? I thought that was the whole point of ambush sleepers - to recreate the experience of zombies teleporting behind you ;) .

 
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