As you can see:
Very Dark. Tough Zombie. He can see me.
Fairly sure Toughs aren’t supposed to see you, much less considering the fact they are in a lit up environment, which should hamper their vision, not extend it?
are you sure he can see you and isn’t just following the sound of your footsteps and your scent?
Red “!” is the first sign.
[V] “Can See to your current Location” is also very much indicative of that.
You can see that it’s also 3 seconds past 8. I moved to make sure it wasn’t the game just giving weird info to me. He can definitely see me. I also have light step, so no way he could’ve heard me move either way.
Use “？” to set the new button “smell view map” option
Add: This is a tip, does not mean that I am sure or deny that “zombies can see you” point of view, please more senior players to answer for you.
I’m not entirely positive, but I think ‘Can see to your current location’ means that there is a clear line of sight from the zombie to you, but doesn’t actually mean he can currently see you. Whether he can actually see you is dependent on his visual range and lighting conditions.
In this case however, the ‘!’ does seem to suggest that he can in fact see you, which the lighting you are standing on doesn’t seem good enough to allow, unless you’re personally lit by goo or a reading light or something (but that’s usually visually indicated). Even if he was homing in on you by sound or scent, he still wouldn’t get the ‘!’ unless he could actually see you directly.
As far as I’ve seen so far in all my playthroughs, the “Can See To Your Current Location” often means they can see where I am and that I am, indeed, there.
In that situation I posted, it was a brand new start, and 2 or 3 moves (left, up) and a “5” press.
It made the Tough Zombie go from the spot south of him towards the one he stopped at. Spawing more zombie nearby would yield the same result, and with robots it would mean they’d shoot me immediately too.
I am aware that variable lighting has been an issue for quite a while, but I thought that it was just for Robots “because reasons”. I was never presented with this situation until then.
The variable lighting issue is not specific to robots…it’s just the most dangerous when bullets are involved. Likely happens regularly with ‘normal’ enemies which you don’t even notice, but you REALLY REALLY notice when you take a bullet to the head despite being far far back in a ‘very dark’ area.
I’ve demonstrated and warned about this ‘variable lighting’ issue many many times during live-streams over the last couple years.
If there are different levels of light between you and enemies during an encounter and bullets are involved then NEVER trust the interface info regarding YOUR status. Always assume you can be seen and shot.
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i mean yeah… theres been times where i’ve been hidden (full on stealth cloak) from everything, taken a pot shot at a turret and had it return fire… not that it knew where i was, but that it knew where i shot from and was shooting back in that general direction.
as far as zombies are concerned, i’ve always seen it as ‘they can see where i am, but that doesnt always mean they can see me.’, because i’ve had instances where i thought a zombie was following me because it could see me, only to loop back around it and have it continue straight forward or move upward to follow my footsteps/scent, not moving directly at me.
I’m not talking about either of those situations. Turrets returning fire in the direction they were shot from is standard behavior now (to prevent them from being total pushovers with their 2 spaces of night vision) and happens regardless of other detection circumstances.
The zombie examples I demonstrated were very simple and direct with the zombie seeing me (verified on the HUD with the !) and moving directly at me (or shooting me with a shock blast) with no chance of sound, smell, or other influences being involved. In several of the cases I paused the Twitch live-stream gameplay, saved the game, and then save-scum tested the circumstances a few times to rule out other factors and ‘prove’ the issue for the audience.
It’s a thing. It’s been a thing for a long time. It requires a fairly uncommon set of circumstances and is hard to reproduce reliably but it does happen. Those of us playing stupid-hard-mode perma-death CDDA in front of a live audience really hate this kind of inconsistent and unpredictable behavior so it’s very memorable when it happens.
TLDR: Be wary of enemy bullets in variable lighting conditions.