Well, as eye see it all they are doing is responding to a alarm and reporting just about any random “Citizen” to be beaten to death by a copbot, and they don’t even see that far even though its the future and futurey things happen…right now i just see it as a bad case of police brutality.
but i do have some suggestions for the eyebots.
-Eyebots don’t just respond to anyone that walk near it rather they respond to "acts of Felony"
For example like if someone were to per-say, break a window, get caught picking a lock, or assaulting the eyebots.
-Eyebots taking pictures of zombies attacking someone who is running away, giving them zombies assault charges
-Eyebots taking pictures of “wanted” individuals, which could be a starting condition, profession, or be acquired in certain towns from “angering” the local authoritys
-Eyebots trolling around city’s with a Patrolling condition, it isn’t ignoring you but it won’t go out of its way to attack you
Electronic cop badges/ Sherif badges-Eyebots will wind up giving you quests if there is some sort of “felon” in the area AKA, zombies or npcs marked at certain locations. where you are sent to kill and or detain them.
The reason this happens is the same as the reason that police bots and other robots attack on sight, and is a lore-valid reason.
Basically somebody screwed up when attempting to do an update to make the robots actually target zombies and set the threshold of a “lawbreaker” way too low. The end result was that the robots still don’t recognize zombies as lawbreakers (since they don’t appear as humans on their scanners), but that they now recognize any human as a lawbreaker. This then caused the near immediate collapse of the interpolice and army robot network (as the robots turned on all of their handlers) and each bot reverted to working individually, meaning there’s no easy way to just go and update them all with a fix.
would it be acceptable to add a lore related reason for why they continue running after a month of the Apocalypse started, because as far as i can tell they run off of batteries and should shut down after a few hours of operating
(since they don't appear as humans on their scanners)
That’s not a great explanation. The robots would target zombies by default because they are so similar to humans. You would probably have to go out of your way to program them to not attack zombies.
I’ve always taken the lore for the cop bot hostility to be fairly poorly considered. If someone fucked up that obviously you’d just revert to a previous software version within minutes. Besides that the bots not recognizing zeds as human at all strikes me as fairly complex sensor specifications for what’s essentially a civilian robot class as pointed out
Now obviously the real justification to this lore is that adding opposed enemy factions was/is somewhat difficult on the AI code.
However I could suggest out, a much simpler scenario for cop-bots to fail to appropriately contain a zombie apocalypse (even if set to kill rather than attempt to arrest rampaging zeds) is because they could not account for zed resurrection and thus, would be perpetually losing any cleared areas as their kills just stand back up after they’ve passed.
The police Stations likely would likely have replenishing/service stations for their police bots, but even their emergency generators are likely to go down within a couple of weeks (unless being maintained by survivors.) Inevitably the end of any drone force in the hazard zone that lacks the orders to maintain or replicate itself would be eventually being overcome by wear, lost energy, and expended munitions.
I’ll give you the fact that the zombies not being recognized is pretty weak, and will almost certainly be updated lore-wise once we get working different fighting factions in. Once that goes in I’ll probably vote to switch over to a “bubbled area” around police stations where the bots have managed to maintain some sort of order by clearing out the zombies, but are still on kill-on-sight orders for most people. If anything I’d say the problem should probably be the opposite, that the bots were unable to tell the difference between people and zombies and as such applied the “zombie” template to everyone, living or dead.
But the time required to do a rollback on software isn’t necessarily something you would have when you have just set yourself as the enemy of an entire building full of robots. It’s not that a rollback wasn’t possible (up until the network collapsed, at least), it’s just that the people who were able to do so weren’t able to get one up prior to being eliminated by their own robots.
Imagine this scenario:
[hr]
The bombs have started to fall seemingly randomly, strange creatures have appeared and are killing everything they come in contact with, rioters that don’t seem to stay down are springing up everywhere, and there are even whispers of a potential biological attack on the US. You’ve heard that the army might be on it’s way to help support the local police structure, but can’t know for sure. Any contact with the higher command structures that you and the handful of other human police officers present manage to establish seems sketchy, and what word you have received advises police forces to consolidate around the stations and maintain what order they can. Panic is imminent and morale is low even among your officers, when a new update suddenly comes down from above, promising to help the bots deals with the many problems successfully.
As precinct leader you type your password in to verify the update, scan your police ID, say your name into the microphone, and then enter your password one more time. The screens go still as all the robots around the city pause for a few seconds while updating, then continue their work. A few seconds later Joe (who was getting some more coffee from down the hall) bursts into the room followed by about a dozen police bots that appear to have gone berserk, and all hell breaks loose. You quickly click on the rollback button and begin to type in your password to verify, but it’s too late and the bots come down on you before you are able to finish, leaving your last view of the screens showing the same thing beginning to happen all over the precinct.
Similar situations are happening in the other precincts as well. A few of them manage to successfully perform rollbacks and hold as bastions of order for a handful of hours more, but are unable to propagate the rollback throughout the rest of the network without administrator approval from above, which is unable to be obtained. Eventually, the inability of the rolled back bots to deal conclusively with any of the strange rioters proves to be their doom and they collapse under the weight of enemies that just won’t stay down.
I’ve been thinking that we need a grisly scene in police stations for precisely this purpose. (I’d envisioned more than one console, and a turret or two involved. Blood’s splattered the door and some has leaked out, just so people know that the room isn’t safe.)