Okay, so, this is kind of embarrassing.
But I’ve been digging around the code and can’t find the “sound creates zombies” stuff at all. But it’s also not in the list of recent changes to sound code.
I confirmed my walking around the center of a city with non-static spawn turned on, firing a shotgun and setting off mininukes while checking the game state, and it never spawned additional zombies.
Did someone sneak this change in to another patch? Did nobody notice because most people just play static spawn? It seems like there is code to re-spawn when an area is loaded when static spawn is turned off, so…