I have a decided to create for the first time to play with wander spawn on. My question is, is it possible to clear off a small area in town to establish a little community? Cause in static spawn it was easy to erase z presence from a complete town. I keep posting questions for your annoyance guys 
Wander spawns draw from a “pool” of enemy spawns. Eventually the spawns will deplete and monsters will no longer spawn. I could be wrong however.
Also, refrain from posting questions as a seperate thread, instead post it in the “Tips, Tricks, and Newb Questions.” Thread. Your questions will be answered more quickly that way.
Thanx for the answer! I thought this is newb questoning area so if i deplete the pool will the monsters get back to a cleared city
Over time, zombies in a fairly wide radius will wander about (as green Z on the map), so to make an area truly and completely safe requires killing all the zombies in a VERY large area (I’m not sure how big it has to be, but I’m never quite gotten there).
That said, once you’ve wiped out any nearby cities and cleaned up anything obvious, zombies showing up starts getting pretty rare. The main problem is that Zs travelling on the map don’t actually encounter anything, so they can walk over any defenses and be inside when you get back to the reality bubble there… it’s a bit of a problem, but not one with any easy solution.
So you say, if i build a fortress with a defense perimeter, there can be zombies in the fort??? :o that can be a nasty suprise… is there any solution on the way?
Sorry for the lame questions, but i would really love to contribute to this game somehow
[quote=“Justin Case, post:5, topic:13163”]So you say, if i build a fortress with a defense perimeter, there can be zombies in the fort??? :o that can be a nasty suprise… is there any solution on the way?
Sorry for the lame questions, but i would really love to contribute to this game somehow[/quote]
I’m not aware of any solution coming for this, and really, a solution for this problem that is not very expensive in terms of processor time would be VERY difficult.
A partial solution that wouldn’t put zombies inside unreachable places that are entirely unreachable inside the single map time should be TOO hard, but anything else… yeah, the math behind that is daunting.
One possible solution would be to calculate “safe” areas (really, tagging each individual tile) based on certain events (like construction/destruction of terrain, so that it’s not happening all the time), and then not putting zombies in those, and that’s not TOO hard (though there are some difficult edge cases)… but I don’t think anyone is working on it.
Understand, I’m not a dev, so it’s quite possible that I’m wrong on what people are working on, but I am a programmer, so I do have some idea of what I’m talking about in terms of difficulty.
Thanks for the insight. The tagging solution also came to my mind, but since my computer skill is 0 i dont know the background work behind it… is there a thread where there is a work in progress outlined? I mean, what they want to change and stuff…
And a serious question… is there some juicy post apocaliptic suprise coming from the owen?
I’ve been thinking about how I would go about implementing this sort of thing, just theoretically, and I think some kind of intentional action on the part of the character would be best - say, something in the zone menu, perhaps.
The player would need to designate some kind of “this area large area contains a secure area inside it” box, and then the program could attempt to path out of that box from each square within it. Any square that could not path out would be “secure” - that is, wanderings zombie would not spawn there.
Now, that’s not to say that zombies passing by couldn’t BASH their way in, of course, but that would probably only need to be handled when in the reality bubble (and the zombies are actually spawned, not part of horde off-screen).
That brings up the issue of what makes something “secure”, and that is that all solid squares that border it would be marked “securing” or some such, and when one of them is destroyed (or left OPEN, in the case of door), the secure space would lose it’s secure status.
Adjoining “secure” spaces could still turn this into a big mess. Ick. Perhaps instead of marking individual squares, create some kind of pseudo-vehicle-type creation in memory that holds the “secure” squares and the “securing” squares all as one, with the possibility of overlapping secure areas? That way, if you open a door between two secure rooms, the individual rooms are now unsecure, but the secure area that represents the entire building would still be secure (doors closed), and thus everything is still secure.
Yes, that would be abusable in certain ways, but it does avoid being a massive processor drain AND it manages to keep zombies form spawning in locked closets (houses could by default have certain square marked “secure”).
Anyway, you get the idea of why it’s hard - anything too flexible quickly becomes a massive processor drain from all the pathing.
Seems like you are on the case no pun intended…
I was thinking to implement the bulletin board as well… that thing is only set up in safe spaces. I cant get into tech details, but can we make the game look for solid borders? And if it passes the check it will exclude all spawn points (z, npc etc)
Yeah, that’s the idea, but when the terrain can be changed (and you want be able to have doors, and take open/closed into account…), then that’s what I’m talking about, it gets very expensive, in terms of how much processor it uses.
That’s why I was suggesting it be implemented only as a manual, player-induced thing, basically saying, “I think I have secured this area - check it, and behave accordingly”.
Sounds more simple… i guess there would be ocasions when a horde would try to overtake the safezone.
Could it be a way that we would force one spawnpoint in the middle of the cities. It could generate huge numbers of critters. It could be in a graveyard, a mourge or anywhere.
That is exactly why it’s hard to do without being crazy expensive. Every time there’s a blocking piece of terrain (like a wall) smashed by the horde, it would have to be rechecked.
I seeeee… well i guess I will try to come up with an idea. Though I have limited knowledge.