One irritating habit i’ve noticed of zombies is that if one zombie hits a vehicle it will then respond to the noise it made and keep on hitting the vechile until 90% of the entire thing is completely scrapped, right down to even the framework. This is even more frustrating when that sound attracts even more zombies to start a gang bang on said truck which can strip even a car down to a skeleton in a matter of hours.
Now maybe this is intentional and the zombies are trying to destroy vehicles to cut off their prey’s escape routes, but considering they don’t know how door handles work, I don’t think they have the higher brain functions for such tactics.
In short I think the AI should be fixed so that zombies don’t react to sounds they themselves made similar to how they ignore others footsteps.
But…they aren’t reacting the the sounds that THEY made…they’re reacting to the sounds the zombie next to them made. I feel you’re asking too much of the zombies. How would they be able to differentiate between the sound of a player hitting a car and the sound of a another zombie hitting a car.
I think the real issue is this: Why does that first zombie hit the car in the first place? It’s not a living thing, at most it should be an obstacle they would have to navigate around. They’re certainly capable of it. Why do they blindly attack inanimate objects? It’s never made sense to me. It makes sense for them to smash a window to get at the person inside. It would even make sense for a crowd of zombies to shove another zombie through a window or door…but why do they actively smash through doors and windows and destroy cars? That’s the real core of the problem.
Do they differentiate footsteps? I’ve never seen anything to support this assertion. The sound of a footstep is what? 2 sound? That travels significantly less distance than the sound made when they smash a car. In addition, footsteps wouldn’t matter if they can’t differentiate, since there’s no car to smash when they arrive at the location, so they won’t go into the feedback loop in any case. The AOE of a footstep is just too small.
That’s nifty, I didn’t know that. However, it doesn’t say they differentiate sounds. Their footsteps are only audible to the player, i.e. as far as other monsters are concerned, their footsteps don’t make any sound at all. In my mind, this just brings it back around to my original assertion that the issue isn’t the zombies sound tracking, it’s the fact that they smash inanimate objects by default. If that first zombie didn’t hit the car, the second zombie wouldn’t have come over and joined the party.