Questions about altering monster spawning

[Wayfarer]

Edited title

Hey! I saw on the Cataclysm forum it had pretty much been finished with but instead had been continued as Dark Days Ahead…and that’s great! The new features I’ve discovered so far are pretty awesome, and the extra items and stuff.

Anyway, the first thing I’ve noticed is that right off the bat…zombies…zombies everywhere. And not normal ones, haven’t come across any normal ones, instead I run into lots of Cops, Hulks, Masters, Shockers, that sort of thing. It’s kind of a bit much for what I want to play In the original game I reduced the frequencies a bit in the mtypedef.cpp but with this code I see that there is no value for freq. So I assume spawning is handled differently?

Has anyone reduced or tweaked spawning and would care to share their code? Or otherwise could anyone tell me where to look to change that, if I can?

Cheers

[Nopkar]

2 things:

what mode are you playing on? static or dynamic?

also, check your surroundings when you spawn. a bad spawn can leave you having a bad time. especially when you’re evac shelter is on the ‘edge’ of a suburb filled with former inhabitants.

[Soron]

You can turn on classic zombie mode (in the options menu) to get rid a lot of the scifi-ish stuff. At present, classic zombie mode is easier than normal mode, although that may change as we tweak balance.

There’s also the fact that zombie spawning was changed around 0.2 or so of DDA - zombies now exist at game start, rather than spawning in response to noise. This means that you need different tactics - zombies don’t magically appear in already-cleared areas, but you also can’t stealth around quite as readily.

And lastly, the monster frequency you’re looking for is now in data/raw/monstergroups.json. The “frequency” field controls frequency relative to other monsters in the group, and the “multiplier” field indicates how many spawns are used up by spawning one of that monster (e.g., if the game requests 50 zombies, it could spawn 4 brutes (multiplier == 15), but would stop at that point, because 4 * 15 > 50).

Hope that helps!

[Nopkar]

[quote=“Soron, post:3, topic:1399”]You can turn on classic zombie mode (in the options menu) to get rid a lot of the scifi-ish stuff. At present, classic zombie mode is easier than normal mode, although that may change as we tweak balance.

There’s also the fact that zombie spawning was changed around 0.2 or so of DDA - zombies now exist at game start, rather than spawning in response to noise. This means that you need different tactics - zombies don’t magically appear in already-cleared areas, but you also can’t stealth around quite as readily.

And lastly, the monster frequency you’re looking for is now in data/raw/monstergroups.json. The “frequency” field controls frequency relative to other monsters in the group, and the “multiplier” field indicates how many spawns are used up by spawning one of that monster (e.g., if the game requests 50 zombies, it could spawn 4 brutes (multiplier == 15), but would stop at that point, because 4 * 15 > 50).

Hope that helps![/quote]

sure, what that guy says.

[Wayfarer]

Ah ok cool thanks, that does help. I have Static spawn on and Classic zombies off. When I got it the other week I saw classic zombies mode but didn’t consider it since it said it would disable some of the buildings, and I wanted to see what was different and new.

It is cool how it seems to work, then. Just lots to contend with when you’ve just started and are running around with nothing but a stick Accurate to the situation, I suppose hehe.

Oh and yeah, all my spawns have had a town very close to the evac shelter, so that stands to reason too.

With regard to the frequencies, though, where is it specified how many spawns the game requests? I had a quick look but didn’t find anything obvious.

[system]

Starting with the training actually makes a world without zombies, so debug some explosives and gtfo. Good practice for newbs. Not sure if it spawns new buildings though.

[Misha]

the trick is zombies only spawn in the tutorial if you reload

[Wayfarer]

Changed the title of the thread to better refer to what it’s about.

First I found there were too many zombies, it was because I was playing with Static Spawn option enabled. Didn’t realise == I didn’t read properly
I turned that off and am enjoying the game far more.

Now though, I keep coming across Zombie Cops. That’s cool, in this apocalypse scenario I would expect cops and soldiers would be common among the infected. But there’s no Joe Citizen zombies, which I’d like to have as a majority. I’d like to change that, without using the Classic Zombies option if I can.

I’ve looked in the code and the monstergroups.json. mon_zombie is still there, and also as the default for the zombie group. I added it as another line as well, just above the mon_zombie_cop (first in the list) and left the freq and multiplier the same. Though I’m not seeing any in the game. Sorry if I’m being dense, I just don’t get it. There’s the spawn count of 1000, yes? And the multiplier is the amount each particular monster takes from that, yes? And the frequency is a number relating to the other monsters in the group…but by how? A percentage?

Am I right in thinking if you edit the JSON files in folders data -> raw, you don’t actually need to recompile? It’s simply just a data source the code reads to handle what to spawn and how many etc?

Sorry, I’m not trying to be difficult, just trying to understand and tweak it a bit.

[KA101]

Are there a lot of Police Stations nearby? The spawn code’s supposed to base spawns on the buildings around, so if your town was a little overfond of the PD, there may be a lot of Zombie Cops.