Since at some point giant hordes will be a thing, hopefully, it would be neat to be able to track them and know where they are. And electronics could use some usefulness too, no?
It would be even more neat if it was up to the player to make it happen.
For that I suggest:
Radio Transmitter - use it on a zombie to attach it to it and see its position at all times on the map so long as you have a receiver.
Radio Transmitter dart - same as above but shoot it with a dart gun from safe distance.
Radio Transmitter arrow/bolt/bullet - you know, you know.
I don’t think hordes work like that. I believe that the Zs floating around on the overmap are spawn points. The zeds move around at an overmap level by despawning after a time, and respawning elsewhere, so each time one spawns, it’s actually a different monster than when it disappeared.
In order for that to work, the game would have to persistently keep the existence of that one monster, which seems like a lot of overhead, including keeping it from despawning with the rest of the horde, if that is the case.
I could be wrong, though. If the damage on a zed stays even after it moves around in a horde, then it can probably be tracked like that.
This is the current implementation, but the next implementation is going to store each monster, so the tracker thing would be feasible.
You can get direction to a radio tracker and a rough measure of distance with a portable system, but for location you need triangulation, which means multiple tracking systems spread out on the map. Thats good though, it gives us multiple tiers of tracking hardware.
That sounds fantastic. It would open up the possibility of a monster that is simply too tough to kill the first time you encounter it; something you would need to whittle down little-by-little across several engagements until it finally drops, like the Ur-Dragon from Dragon’s Dogma. That would really give a reason to track the monsters. It also sounds like it would be a lot of work for the computer rendering it, though. I’m not sure my craptop would be able to keep up.
Question; Is the damage a monster takes persistent, or does it reset when they disappear?
Are monsters linked to hordes? That is, if a monster spawns as part of a horde, does it have any information stored that connects back to the horde it spawned from?
If so, what if placing a tracker on the monster simply let you track the horde it’s linked to until killed?
When the mob is killed, killing it would stop the horde tracking.
When despawned, it adds a flag to the horde saying “spawn a random monster of this type with a tracker in it”.
With this there wouldn’t be a need to keep the monster itself persistent.
That still requires keeping the monster data around, but that’s ok, plenty of things are going to make small numbers of monsters persistent. It won’t be a problem unless it hapoens a lot ( and a lot here is tens if thousands of times).