kemor: Pulping by smashing, butchering, and burning* zombie corpses will all prevent zombies from raising.
“active” corpses’ names will be highlighted in yellow when you look at them (I think in all the different interfaces, but not sure). I think your best bet when a fight is over is to use ‘V’ menu to look around, and this will tell you where all the still-active corpses are.
PRODUCTIVE SOLUTIONS:
What I keep seeing is that people don’t like pulping rather than that they have a problem with zombie revival in general. I am planning on streamlining the pulping thing so it isn’t tedious, and also I’ve been considering making it reflexive, like if there is nothing dangerous in the area, and you step next to a zombie, you’d just whack it and finish it off.
Pulping is s probably harder than it should be, basically representing completely smashing the body to bits (which would take a LOT of work, think of the zombie dismemberment scene near the start of TWD) rather than a targeted coup de gras type thing. One good whack with a nice solid weapon should get the job done as long as your character isn’t hopeless (melee 0 might have issues, but that’s it). If you’re running around with an xacto knife or something, expect issues, but if you use a machete or sledgehammer, it should just be one whack per corpse.
Also there are some other things that should pulp zombies, such as explosions and running over them with a car.
The reason I’m so resistant to disabling the revival thing is that this mechanic is completely central to our type of zombie. Romero and many other zombie types are “pierce the skull” type zombies, but in our interface, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make that happen. Instead, you can take zombies down with completely conventional methods, but they heal anf get back up unless you take extra steps to prevent it. Without this mechanic they aren’t zombies at all, they’re just reskinned goblins or something.
*Be aware that for the time being you have to wait around for the corpses to actually burn if you’re going that route, if you leave the area for a while then come back, the fire and respawn code interact badly, possibly resulting in zombies respawning and getting back out of the fire. They’ll likely be on fire and just fall over again, but now they’re out of the fire and might successfully reanimate the next time. I think your best bet in this case is to use highly flammable stuff like gasoline instead of e.g. wood, the main thing is to have just corpses and fuel in the pyre, and make sure it’s a “raging fire”, not just a “small fire” or “fire”. It actually helps to generate a “raging fire” to have a larger fire, so if you have a pile of 50 corpses, you might want to evenly distribute them across a 3x3 area or so, splash some gasoline around, and then light that sucker and watch it burn. You shouldn’t have to wait around for the fire to die down completely, just long enough to really get going, I’m pretty sure a corpse isn’t going to last long in a raging fire.
