So with wander spawn on I tried to run over a few Zs with a car and suddenly zombies were appearing out of thin air around me.
Aren’t zombies supposed to spawn out of the reality bubble ?
I also noticed a lot of error message about trying to spawn a zombie in a spot already occupied by a zombie, i’m currently trying the “very bad day challenge” and it seems that the noise of the collapsing house spawns lots of zombies.
It sounds like some of the bugs from Dynamic Spawn.
Yea, wander spawns are based on the original spawning code, which has all kinds of bugs.
I’m a relatively new player who doesn’t play with wander spawns turned on, but I too observe this behavior (zombies popping up out of thin air). It seems linked to sound/noise: running over a pack of zombies with an APC just seems to make bigger crowds of zombies (and having scoped out the streets first, I know additional packs didn’t wander in—they popped up out of thin air), but any activity (like dismembering corpses) or even killing one zed with a sling causes a few new zombies (sometimes inconvenient ones given the unpreparedness of my character) to spawn … again, out of thin air.
I’ve thus far played with minimal mods (just NPC-needs-off/whatever-it’s-actually-called and boats) and, again, never with wander spawns turned on. I managed a fairly long run in original Danny (before desire for a constructed smoking rack made me seek current builds) and never noticed this behavior.
I’m pretty sure that’s working as intended. If zombies only spawned at the edge of the reality bubble they wouldn’t be much of a threat. Instead they spawn like the Left 4 Dead AI director spawns them, out of thin air when and if needed, though most decent levels are designed so that there is always a wall that players can’t cross or see over that the horde climbs over.
Maybe it could be modded so that spawning favors tiles that the player can’t currently see? Look out, there wasn’t a zombie behind that tree ten seconds ago, but there is now!