Sooo Wander Spawns

Game Talk The Bunker
1

seems a little OP, i was very quickly outnumbered when almost solid walls of zombies began spawning just inside sight range and i could not get away from multiple spitters and dogs… they were not static spawns

so a few questions…
why do they spawn cold inside your sight range? i thought they would like at least spawn out of range and moving towards you or something…
is there supposed to be so many? at least two dozen per 20 or so traversed tiles (i was moving) kept spawning continuously and there was a crapload by the time i died. none of these were static spawns, i wasnt quite in sight of a house, though i was just outside of town.
and why do they just keep spawning? it seems as soon as i get close to any town they just begin spawning all around me and i cant get away quickly enough
finally, is this just in/around towns, or do they wander through the wilderness too?

making good progress

2

The answer to most of these is that it is using the dynamic spawn system to do stuff. The same imbalance that makes animals overspawn makes zombies spawned dynamically overspawn. Also I think there’s an override that slows down dynamic spawns that is disabled for hordes, it probably shouldn’t be. Zombies spawning where you can see them is an unfixable problem with dynamic spawn.
No worries though, I’m planning a static version of hordes. Most of it works just like you’d expect it to, basically just taking groups of static zombies and allowing them to move around on the overmap.
Finally, they start out in cities, but they’ll wander around kind of randomly, so after a while you’d start running tinto them outside of cities as well.
I’m planning on making them prefer to hang out in cities, and return to them over time if pulled away a short distance. Also they’d tend to spread out evenly-ish in cities and go kind of dormant if not proviked.

This is still a very experimental feature, the balance is right out the window. That having been said, thanks for the feedback, we need it.

3

Yeah… I’ve tried a couple of embarks with wander spawns myself, and while I don’t mind the massive spawn rate, it’s more the difficulty in losing the pursuing zombies. They’re like… super persistent, and will follow you far into the countryside. There’s also some difficulty in knowing where a hoard might be, since there’s no way to detect them beyond suddenly having hundreds of zombies land on top of you. Flesh seeking missiles, natch. Thanks for working on hoards, though :slight_smile:

4

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:2, topic:5462”]The answer to most of these is that it is using the dynamic spawn system to do stuff. The same imbalance that makes animals overspawn makes zombies spawned dynamically overspawn. Also I think there’s an override that slows down dynamic spawns that is disabled for hordes, it probably shouldn’t be. Zombies spawning where you can see them is an unfixable problem with dynamic spawn.
No worries though, I’m planning a static version of hordes. Most of it works just like you’d expect it to, basically just taking groups of static zombies and allowing them to move around on the overmap.
Finally, they start out in cities, but they’ll wander around kind of randomly, so after a while you’d start running tinto them outside of cities as well.
I’m planning on making them prefer to hang out in cities, and return to them over time if pulled away a short distance. Also they’d tend to spread out evenly-ish in cities and go kind of dormant if not proviked.

This is still a very experimental feature, the balance is right out the window. That having been said, thanks for the feedback, we need it.[/quote]

Hordes?
HORDES? … Well this sounds neat. Will hordes be triggered (by event/circumstances) or random? Or is it waaaayy too early for that question?

5

ahhhh I can’t fucking wait! gonna be sooo cool, I’ll play some more and try it out in a bit

6

I would seriously suggest you use slow zombie mode if you turn on wandering hordes.

7

Wait, they are on toggle? And I stopped updating my version to avoid untimely dead by their yet unbalanced hand…

8

They default to off since they’re so unbalanced right now.
If you DO want to play with them you need to turn the option on and generate a new world, the groups are created at map generation time.
Nothing creates hordes right now, and I’m not planning on them appearing out of thin air for the most part. Some exceptions might be a mausoleum or mass grave type thing.

9

Hordes seem pretty cool so far, great work. The zombies spawning where you can see (from where I just came from) threw me off for a minute, but if you were given some indication that there is a horde nearby or that you are in the middle of one it would be a little more manageable. That way you know to flee. Also, checking the horde locations in debug I noticed they start spawning even when you are not within the blue radius. If there were, for example, two levels of radius. Upon entering/ seeing the farthest from the center and you are given an indication. (“There is a horde of hundreds upon hundreds of zombies to the North!” or “The horde is close!” if you don’t want to indicate direction). Once within the closer radius they start spawning.

Or if there are three levels and some way to restrict which direction the zombies spawn in. Outermost level, you may be given an indication depending on your perception and actual visibility. 2nd level, zombies spawn, but are restricted to spawning towards the center of the horde. Innermost circle, they come from all directions.

10

Sounds like good ideas.

11

So is there any limitation to the number of hoards and area can spawn? Because I tried porting an established (and pretty OP) character over to a world with wander spawns enabled, and they pretty much just seem to keep coming. I know you said they were created at worldgen, but is there any limit on the distance a hoard will cross to reach you yet? Because if you so much as sneeze on a vehicle, it feels like every hoard on the presently generated map (and beyond) will gravitate to your general area, and never leave you alone until they’ve annoyed you to death. Fighting them in open terrain is okay, but I’m now curious to see what will happen if I set up shop in a lab with my laser turrets and solar charge rifles, and then just make one hell of a racket to draw them in…

As it is, though, they seem way too dogged, more than anything. It doesn’t feel like a zombie apocalypse with Wander on, so much as it feels like someone cloned Liam Neeson eleventy billion times and then broadcast that you’d kidnapped his daughter.

12

hahaha nice. i think they are pretty much akin to something like having static spawns at world gen, as well as moving areas where dynamic spawns occur, but dont quote me on that. there is a debug option for seeing where they are, for now. it is a developing feature :stuck_out_tongue:

13

uh about the hordes on/off option at world creation

i downloaded the experimental on the 17th and actually had that option off (wander spawns right?) when i genned a world

however when i went to the debug menu and decided to investigate that shiny new “show hordes” option i found that their were hordes in each city in the area

though i also had static spawns also off so that may have also been a factor

14

YAY! HORDES OF ZOMBIES TO EAT ME! CANT WAIT!

I am hoping for huge hordes of zombies that come when you make HUGE noises (when your in the area) and spawn in areas of interest (i dont know if its like that now i am behind on the newest version). I also am hoping for base attacks (horde “o” Zs following you home).

15

Oh yeah, they will follow you.

I had to abandon my vehicle after driving ~50map squares SW with a horde following along behind me and updating their point of interest sporadically with my location as I drove (in the dark, with only 1 headlight driving a 75% loaded 3-wheeled armored troop transport I had just found in and managed to break through the double-rock wall of a hazardous waste receptacle) when I started to attract the hordes ahead and to the north of me.

I veered off onto a side street that eventually led to a farm and tried to be as quiet as possible with my whatever-ton truck.

I creeped into the farm and, after eating a heartyily disgusting mre, was planning to hole up for the night when I spotted a shocker zombie from afar.

Abandoning the farmhouse seemed the wisest course of action as I had managed to scavenge a couple of weapons but only ~two clips of 9mm bullets for my mp5 and along with possessing only a newly acquired, and still unfamiliar, combat knife and aching torso damage, a horde of zombies was not looking very palatable.

I jumped into the truck, flicked on the remaining dimming, cracked headlight and started circling back the way I came as the night erupted in shuffling zombies surrounding me from all directions. I plowed through a few of the undead with the remnants of my spiked armor yet before I could get back to the main road encountered another smaller horde.
I was forced off the road unless I wanted to risk looping back around the way I had originally came and drive through the center of the huge horde I had just fled. After a few minutes of off-roading I encountered another road, drove a short distance and ran into the beginnings of a city or a small town, it was too dark to tell which. I abandoned my vehicle there as I could debuggily sense all of surrounding hordes still attracted to the sound from my engine or my headlights and stumbled through the forest for about an hour before I was able to circle around the initial horde I was fleeing from and finally access the military bunker, LOE shelter and town NE of my starting location I had noticed while fleeing from the horde that surprised me right outside my initial shelter.

The hordes seemed to have an ability to detect noises/ lights from at least a 10-15 square distance from the edge of their blue border in debug - maybe it is dependent upon the red +?

If there were 3x more hordes, but they were a smaller (denser too) it would be a little more manageable, in my opinion.

Or utilize the z-from-b-origin in the canon to its fullest and state that each horde is controlled by its own b consciousness, or some such, which is exerting its influence over said horde area. Each b consciousness is able to generate (technically reanimate the long-buried dead) within its sphere of influence. This would result in mostly skeletal zombies (or skeletal animals in the wilderness) and should probably be accompanied with another branch of z-b evolution to mostly skeletal creatures. (But probably at that technical point in b-reanimation it would be easier just to grab a bunch of branches (Zombie Trees?!) and rocks and use them as body-structures then it would be to create a whole musculature/ locomotion system from nothing around a frame - maybe include a numDeadBodiesBuried per mapsquare and after all dead bodies in a square have been reanimated the horde can only generate blobs or make, I dunno, rotten tomato creatures or something)

For some cool ideas on hive-mind creature-societies and interesting mechanics check out the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton. I have a love-hate relationship with that guy and his stories, but the alien antagonists in those books were truly awesome (as long as you can overlook the mystical-magical-from-the-beginning-of-time-elves aliens who live on magical spirit-journey find-yourself,finally-planets and al capone’s criminal space empire).

16

That’s a cool idea, Polpoint, but what you’d actually get from reanimated trees would actually be triffids, afaict. And small trees would be triffid sprouts D: . Triffids were zombie trees before it was cool.

Edit: on topic… I’d say that making hordes smaller and more numerous would be a good idea, but their detection skills need to be toned down a little, too. Either that, or overhaul the way the noise system works, because they can apparently hear the average character walking around from literally miles away.

17

How about having a bunch of small hordes (not hoards, for the love of god!) at the beginning of the game, but make it so that they can link up with each other, growing in size. This way, a horde would be manageable in the early game, but in the later game they would naturally tend to be larger (if less numerous, and thus perhaps less tedious?), providing more of a challenge for the late game character/base.

18

yes just to clarify horde = zombies, hoard = gold (or bananas) hehe

19

How to enable wandering spawns? I’ve downloaded last stable version but there is no such an option.

20

Stable = old, forgotten, and outdated.

You’re better off with the experimental most days.