PC Zombies appearing randomly?

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Postmortem

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Last night, I had the following encounter: I was just done clearing out a room, and turned around to leave. It was just a bathroom, so that's small enough to be absolutely certain there were no zombies left in the room.

While I was still standing in the door, facing outwards, something hit me from behind. When I turned around, there was a feral standing right behind me, in the middle of the bathroom I just cleared. Which had no holes in the walls or ceiling, no windows, and I was blocking the only door.

So how did that zombie get in there? I had a feeling for quite some time now that zombies appear randomly where they shouldn't be, but since that would be nonsense and I don't remember it from A16, I always thought it was me and I just didn't see them.

But not this time. This zombie literally appeared out of thin air.

So I have a question for the development team: is this a bug or by design? In other words, will this be changed/fixed or do we have to live with Spock beaming the zombies down from the Enterprise now? If so, I might have to adjust my gameplay style.

 
I've noticed that zombies have been clipping through walls and other barriers. I had a second floor completely blocked off when I saw wandering horde coming by the house. I went down to check the floor for cracks and was met by three zombies at the foot of my ladder. Which they climbed up easily now and then managed to clip through the hatch after I shut it on them. Not sure if that is what happened, but it could explain the sudden appearance.

 
That might explain it.. I will pay extra attention from now on to where and when zombies appear. It's weird one way or the other.

 
^ this happens and they like to hide zeds up high.

It is also possible that it spawned in as well. Sometimes the game spawns zeds in around you. This is particularly true if you are on a threshold where the game would normally despawn or spawn sleepers as you leave/enter an area. If you manage to find the place where that is you can watch them pop in and out as you cross over it. Not normally found in bathrooms though.

 
While playing again last night, I had an encounter that answered the question. I was out in the open and thought I saw something at the edge of the screen, so I turned around quickly. There was a zombie coming at me from behind, nothing special so far. But in the second I turned around, I could watch a second zombie spawn behind the first one, maybe 10 blocks aways from me. It just popped out of thin air.

It did not fall down from somewhere, it did not clip through a wall, and it wasn't a sleeper either because it wasn't in a building and the zombie (it was one of those bullet-sponges in undershirts) was fully awake and attacking me on the spot.

I guess I turned around to exactly the right spot in exactly the right moment to see it appear, something that is probably not supposed to happen.

So the mystery is solved: zombies do spawn right behind you. Which makes sneaking through buildings pretty much pointless because "I've just cleared that room" doesn't count anymore.

So my question to the team stands: is this a bug or by design? Yes, I know that pathing and AI are under development, but to my understanding this has nothing to do with either.

Something else I want to say to the developers: don't mind people (including myself) bitching about the game and pointing out the flaws. We only complain because we care. 7DTD is one the best games ever made, keep at it and make this game the best it can possibly be!

 
I've experienced things like this as well. I cleared the entry room in Aldo's Cabinets, walked outside to the front porch, came back in and the room had respawned.

 
This has to do largely with optimization. Many of those micro stutters we encounter are sleepers waking up or the game placing zombies.

I opened a door to a building and saw several zombies were laying on the ground, and as I charged in I ran smack into a zombie that wasn't there, it spawned in about an inch from my character's face.

Once the pimps can optimize the zombie ai/spawners hopefully we'll have less of these types of encounters, less micro stutter, and a much smoother experience overall.

pimps make 50-80% of the zombie mindless, they just move to sound/smell whatever, make the remaining slightly smarter so there's less problems with ai causing stutters. Might make it more fun and much smoother.

 
This has to do largely with optimization. Many of those micro stutters we encounter are sleepers waking up or the game placing zombies.
I opened a door to a building and saw several zombies were laying on the ground, and as I charged in I ran smack into a zombie that wasn't there, it spawned in about an inch from my character's face.

Once the pimps can optimize the zombie ai/spawners hopefully we'll have less of these types of encounters, less micro stutter, and a much smoother experience overall.

pimps make 50-80% of the zombie mindless, they just move to sound/smell whatever, make the remaining slightly smarter so there's less problems with ai causing stutters. Might make it more fun and much smoother.
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They are working on occlusion for performance so that may make this a little more prevalent but there is also no need to make the zombies less intelligent in order to improve their performance. They are already running optimization on them that has apparently made good gains. We should see that soon.

I can't promise, but I have a feeling you guys will see it in some regard for an A17 patch. It can occlude a lot of different things, some things occlude easily without any noticeable bugs, others take more effort to get it shippable. We're pretty optimistic though. Its death from a thousand paper cuts so it takes time going through everything and optimizing but we're picking up gains left and right as we go. Shawn has a new character controller that is significantly faster than unity's so zombies won't eat near as much CPU pretty soon.
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They are working on occlusion for performance so that may make this a little more prevalent but there is also no need to make the zombies less intelligent in order to improve their performance. They are already running optimization on them that has apparently made good gains. We should see that soon.
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I sure hope you're right. :)

Although, I suppose what I meant by dumb, is they should just keep coming at you. Currently, the AI is... so dumb, that on horde night, when I stand on the ground in front of my horde night base I won't even see a zombie.

I have 24 zombie horde nights, and because I added a 2 blocks to make them jump up two steps before falling to the next level. They won't. They'll drop down to where the first 2 steps are and they'll turn and bang on the concrete wall.

If I hadn't climbed my tower (unfinished) and shot them from a distance they wouldn't have even got to the bottom.

They however DID go all the way to the bottom until I added the two block step. At that point they just figure it's easier to break through the concrete wall facing the opposite direction of me. Makes no sense but that's what they do.

10-12 block drop from 50meters down to bed rock.

base.jpg

 
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Check he other threads where zombies spawning behind you are reported. Supposedly it can not and does not happen despite the amount of people seeing it first hand!

Zombies cannot spawn in thin air, they came from somewhere, you just need to be observant and pay attention. If they do, you need to report this bug, it is not in the design for them to spawn out of thin air.Limbs fly off like crazy if you get the right perks. Yes you are a noob, buy the perks to be a master.

The good news is we're working on a way to play back a save game "recording" so we can reproduce bugs a lot easier. A seed will be identical when re-rolled too in the future. This should allow for 100% reproduction of bugs, benchmarking etc.
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there you go a la madmole.

 
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There are three simple solutions for zombie spawning up close problems:

1. Increase sleeper spawning range from around 10 to 40 blocks. If they spawn way before you even enter a POI it won't be a problem, unless there need to be more sleepers spawned than there is room for them (which means after you kill the first batch, additional spawn in the spawner blocks).

2. Increase zombie spawning range for random zombies and wandering hordes. Similar as above, you won't see zombies spawn up close and they would be visible from further away.

3. Increase the range at which zombies despawn. This means that they will not simply vanish in around 20 blocks range (made up number), but for example 80 block range.

All of this brings up a massive performance hit, because going through the city would spawn A LOT of zombies in the nearby POIs. Now imagine you have a few skyscrapers next to each others. A couple hundred zombies spawned (even if most of them are inactive, they still take up memory) is a lot more than something like 30-60 during bloodmoon. Still, this is something i would love to see and i hope TFP will be able to up the performance for this.

 
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