I don’t know how the current zombie spawn works, but there was mention of wanting a system to recall where spawned zombies were. I was thinking perhaps you could implement a relatively simply system where zombie spawns are remembered in a per tile basis. Each tile would be spawned with so many zombies in it and if they chase the player they will eventually lose site and despawn in another tile and would be saved in this new tile. Of course you wold have new spawns for wandering zombies and what not, but I think it’d be a relatively simple answer to the want to static zombie spawns. This way you could generally deplete the spawn in an area over time.
Spawns are depleted over time, and setting a static spawn point just makes for camping/avoiding that point.
You didn’t really read what I wrote, did you…
Well, right now I think that once spawned they stay active on the map. Maybe not moving around if you completely leave an area but if you go back they should start shambling about just fine while trying to hunt down your scent. I may be completely wrong (quite likely) since I haven’t been playing for very long and haven’t had a chance yet to poke around in the source too much.
Half this idea is based off some things said by coders and what not. About wanting persistent zombies. The feel I get from the game now is that the zombies de-spawn after you get far enough away.
[quote=“Miloch, post:5, topic:239”]Half this idea is based off some things said by coders and what not. About wanting persistent zombies. The feel I get from the game now is that the zombies de-spawn after you get far enough away.[/quote]For me, it seems more like they go another direction, or regroup somewhere nearby. They don’t follow for waaay too long, but returning to the general, not quite exact nearby area from where I left them, I notice that ‘spawns’ seem to absolutely explode, and if I don’t hightail it quickly I get caught in the dead center of all the spawnzones. Scary stuff.
The mobs “defuse” back into the larger group, or pool, from my understanding. BUT there is actually static spawns, at least for some things, like hospitals, megastores, and I use them in my new areas.
Miloch: you hit the nail right on the head, this is exactly what I’m planning. And yes, the current system places “groups” at various locations (for towns, it’s the center of the town) and spawns monsters in a certain radius, if you lose the monsters they rejoin the original group, but it has a very wide range (an entire town). The proposal would track monsters in much greater detail, as each 12x12 map tile is unloaded from being active, the monsters on it would go into stasis* and thaw when that tile comes back in range again.
*A secondary goal would have these small groups slowly move around on the overmap so they don’t always stay exactly where you left them.
That’s exactly what I was thinking.
Also definitely agree that you need to move them from grid to grid on occasion. In the walking dear zombies have a tendency to follow zombies. So if a zombie walks through a tile occupied by another zombie maybe he’ll get up and follow the other zombie? Something to consider.
Also, what about small rover bands of zombies? They could wander the country side. Your noisy construction may attract them. Your base will have to be even more secure.
If you have them move about on the overmap would they attempt to interact with and destroy smashable objects (furniture, player constructions, etc) in the path of the group’s movement? I think it would be kinda cool if a group moves through my safe house area while I am gone and ends up smashing up the place without my needing to be there for them to interact with stuff 
Run off to collect supplies, come back and see my place smashed up and maybe some zombies in the pits for those that didn’t evade them…
Roving groups would be GREAT, although I’d prefer them not to randomly smash stuff up - mainly because there is no real reason for them too (unless to get at an npc?) and also as I feel it might get a bit annoying. Although, it could be more of an incentive to build traps/fortify more.
Being able to depopulate an area would be fantastic (although would probably need a lot of balancing). I suppose to keep it interesting (and so that you don’t get too complacent) roving groups could randomly deposit members/smaller groups around the place? I’d prefer that to having a sort of constant low rate of spawning (as if it was too low, you could easily deal with them/they’d become annoying, or if it was too high it’d just be the same as it is now).
[quote=“Miloch, post:9, topic:239”]That’s exactly what I was thinking.
Also definitely agree that you need to move them from grid to grid on occasion. In the walking dear zombies have a tendency to follow zombies. So if a zombie walks through a tile occupied by another zombie maybe he’ll get up and follow the other zombie? Something to consider.
Also, what about small rover bands of zombies? They could wander the country side. Your noisy construction may attract them. Your base will have to be even more secure.[/quote]
Once this is implemented there will probably be various groups, some that tend to just reform into a particular area, some that wander around, some that follow other zombies, etc. All kinds would ov course drop everything to try and get at your sweet, sweet, grey matter.
hmm, that’d be kind of cool yea, and yes, it’s doable with a good bit of work.
[quote=“Binky, post:11, topic:239”]Roving groups would be GREAT, although I’d prefer them not to randomly smash stuff up - mainly because there is no real reason for them too (unless to get at an npc?) and also as I feel it might get a bit annoying. Although, it could be more of an incentive to build traps/fortify more.
Being able to depopulate an area would be fantastic (although would probably need a lot of balancing). I suppose to keep it interesting (and so that you don’t get too complacent) roving groups could randomly deposit members/smaller groups around the place? I’d prefer that to having a sort of constant low rate of spawning (as if it was too low, you could easily deal with them/they’d become annoying, or if it was too high it’d just be the same as it is now).[/quote]
You can already depopulate an area, this would just put a finer granularity on it, so you could depopulate part of a town instead of trying to wipe every zombie in it out.
Bringing this back to add something. Right now I still feel like the static spawn is based on the city… As you can pretty much roam free in a residential areas of the maps I’ve played on. I was thinking that maybe we should reduce the generic city spawn and add some more tile specific spawn. Such as spawning some zombies inside houses. A normal house could have 0 to 5 adult zombies scattered through the house with 1 or 2 being much more likely then 5. Also 0 to 2 child zombies. Of course you should still have some generic city spawn that are spawning on the roads inside a city. Or maybe just do tile spawn that checks to see how many buildings are in range. Anyway, I feel this would give you a better overall spawn. Maybe keep most of the special zombies to a city wide starting spawn. Dunno on that front. I now need to dig up my zombie recreation thread. 
I really like the static zombie spawn option, so far, but it seems much harder to get started. I like sneaking into the most isolated house I can find, to avoid the horde of… pretty much everything in the city proper. If I run into the occasional zombie outside, I can avoid it, go elsewhere, or lead it off to kill somewhere quietly.
But if these houses started having zombies inside, what’s a beginning character to do? You might have nothing but a rock, and noise is likely to attract other zombies. (Maybe it’s my imagination, but I used to find doors unlocked in earlier versions of the game, and now I almost never do. That means it’s especially hard to start without the Mechanics skill, and I hate having limited choices.)
I don’t know. It would be nice to have difficulty options, because long-time players always want to make the game harder, while it’s usually hard enough for me (and I get bored playing the first couple of days over and over again). If this were one of the options, that wouldn’t be a problem at all. But I don’t know how difficult that would be to implement.
PS. One other thing: I raided a city at night, finding lots of zombies already inside businesses (gun store, military surplus, etc.) I wanted to loot. At one store, I was able to lead them off around a big area of craters, looping around so I could come back to the (now empty) business again.
That was great! I really enjoyed how that worked. But I was gone a long time, since I had to make quite a long journey to get back. It worked out great as it is, but I wouldn’t have wanted the zombies to spawn back inside the business, or even near it, just because they’d lost my trail. Not that night, anyway.
Just thought I’d mention that. I haven’t been able to play for long, since the game keeps breaking for me on Day 2 or 3. But so far, I like the static spawns.
Just to clarify something, static spawns means if you lead zombies away, they will stay wherever you lost them. The won’t respawn in the area where they started.
And Re: Miloch’s suggestion. Yes we’re looking at that too. The way it works now was a big shift, so I just made it work that way with relatively dumb defaults so we could play around with it. Now we’re going back and tweaking it to work better to e.g. have zombie “families” in houses, and try to adjust density to work better in general.
Kevin that just game me a great idea… time to see if it works or I’m just crazy.
It actually worked! Ripped the muffler off my motorbike and trolled it through town gathering the hoard before leading them all to the north end and loosing them. Now the south end of town is (relatively) zombie free.
In truth it was surprisingly eazy. Just needed a handgun to shoot fast zombies that got too close.
[quote=“TaintedHolyWater, post:16, topic:239”]Kevin that just game me a great idea… time to see if it works or I’m just crazy.
It actually worked! Ripped the muffler off my motorbike and trolled it through town gathering the hoard before leading them all to the north end and loosing them. Now the south end of town is (relatively) zombie free.
In truth it was surprisingly eazy. Just needed a handgun to shoot fast zombies that got too close.[/quote]
I wish I could put a brick on the gaspedel. Would make it alot easier.
[quote=“Jihelu, post:17, topic:239”][quote=“TaintedHolyWater, post:16, topic:239”]Kevin that just game me a great idea… time to see if it works or I’m just crazy.
It actually worked! Ripped the muffler off my motorbike and trolled it through town gathering the hoard before leading them all to the north end and loosing them. Now the south end of town is (relatively) zombie free.
In truth it was surprisingly eazy. Just needed a handgun to shoot fast zombies that got too close.[/quote]
I wish I could put a brick on the gaspedel. Would make it alot easier.[/quote]You’d have to put a club on the steering wheel to make it not spin into a house and even then no guarantees. Unless you’re driving it manually in which case just use cruise control. I wonder if a cruise control vehicle keeps going when abandoned at high speeds?
Could we not cross the two system somewhat, static spawn is nice in that on a loaded submap we can have actual positioning of zombies for updates and the like, however It would be nice for when a map is unloaded the statics are pulled into the overmap and we can still have group movement.
When some of a group moves onto an active submap we static spawn them at the edges and let the submap updating take over again.
This also allows for fun things like large wandering groups moving across the map.
I realise this isn’t fleshed out at all, and has probably be considered but just in case thought I should add it.
I just want to say… Kevin you are awesome! 