Zombie evolution

[Miloch]

Sounds interesting. I’d say that instead of a across the board sameness to the evolution you could always do a % chance for the zombies to get worse as and you spawn new sections you could base the new spawn on that. This should also apply to wild life and what not and how nasty the areas are becoming. This would work well with and macro tile system if that goes into effect.
Also, as for adding new zombies, we could always have a wandering monsters type check where monsters are wandering outside their normal zone. Be interesting to get one of the giant herds from Walking Dead.

[Sheb]

About the Zombie Lab: since all labs are closed at start, Zombies shouldn’t be spreading. As soon as you open the door however…

[Weyrling]

About the Zombie Lab: since all labs are closed at start, Zombies shouldn’t be spreading. As soon as you open the door however…

This would be pretty interesting, finally get an ID card and open the door only for a bunch of zombies to come pouring out. Might give some reason to blast the doors open, as you could both destroy the immediate inside and trigger the turrets, which would hopefully focus on the zombies before gunning you down.

Of course, if one of the zombies evolved into a Zombie Hulk, the puny metal walls would serve as negligible deterrent, so some labs should perhaps be broken open from the inside before you get there.

[Slax]

Note that labs tend to open up into sewers. Should even be something about it on the in-game computers.
Unless that’s been changed.

[Binky]

As (pretty much) only a vanilla player, it really does become an issue after a week or so - as soon as you can one or two hit zombies and have a few extra tools for when it gets hairy (grenades, lots of first aid, shotguns) you become pretty much invincible, even if you do turn up the spawn rate. Furthermore, as soon as you’ve cleared out one small town, you’ve got pretty much all the material you need to build stuff at leisure. As such, I think it would be a fair lore vs gameplay argument to add some extra difficulty later on.

My idea would be to mix a lot of your ideas:

Firstly, zombies getting faster and stronger as time progresses (because the virus/whatever grows) would be a big plus, especially if they became quite a lot more damage resistant (this would put the ‘fear’ back into it) - I doubt it’d need much explaining, and the faster/stronger progressions could be called something different to point it out.

For re-population, roving hordes that come from ‘off the map’ to repopulate areas (they could be draw to the centre of towns, leaving some along the way) would be interesting (I know this has been discussed many times) and could be coupled with ‘dormant’ zombies in sewers/labs/enclosed areas which could rise up and move about after a week or so (or earlier if the player wakes them). This would make no areas ‘safe’, which might also help with stopping players simply driving a truck down the main street and mulching zombies - as too much noise would wake TONS of dormant zombies.

[infectedmochi]

This would make no areas ‘safe’, which might also help with stopping players simply driving a truck down the main street and mulching zombies - as too much noise would wake TONS of dormant zombies.

+1
I’d like to add my own suggestion is that butchering/pulping a dormant zombie may have a chance to wake nearby dormant ones (due to the sounds or the zombie’s corpse releases “pheromone”, we can work on the lore about this). This makes player to consider actually butchering/pulping zombies to eliminate potential threat or just leave them there a haul his ass out with the loot but may face them as enemies later.
Butchering should be “quieter” because it’s longer, while pulping will be quick but carries a higher chance to wake nearby dormant zombies.

[Inadequate]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t spawning zombies based on noise already covered by dynamic spawn mode?

[infectedmochi]

Yeah, but I’m talking about static spawn and dormant zombies here. Zombies that “wake up” upon hearing noise or triggered by phenomenon, not just spawning zombies from thin air.

[Inadequate]

Yes, but once the player gets strong enough, priority one would be to kill any zombie that appears, hostile or not, to save time. So they wouldn’t be much of a credible late-game threat. The alternative would be to keep them invisible to the player and spawn them in with loud noises, which is basically identical to dynamic mode spawning.

I just think spicing up static mode shouldn’t be a matter of turning it into dynamic mode.

[infectedmochi]

I don’t know about the loud noise spawns monster thing, I think there are plans to merge some aspects of dynamic spawn into static?
The noise waking up zombies is mainly to add a risk to disturbing dormant zombies when the player is still weak, all dormant zombies will eventually wake up regardless, except maybe some kind of permanent “frozen zombies” in ice lab.

[Inadequate]

Are you talking about wandering non-hostile zombies, or are you talking about human corpses that turn into zombies when you try to butcher them?

[kevin.granade]

I can’t ephasize this enough, I have no plans of spawning zombies out of thin air. This was my biggest problem with dynamic spawn.

Having the zombies “evolve” semi-randomly is exactly what I was planning. Each monster type can have a decay rate and a list of different things it can evolve into (with different probabilities of different outcomes). It’ll establish a heirarchy of different ways monsters can develop. The same system would handle animal populations, so an animal might “evolve” into a copy of itself AND a young version of itself to represent population growth, then the young version will age into the mature form. Might just skip the young version and have animals split instead of bothering with aging.

As for butchering/pulping every zombie you come acoss, you can certainly do that if you want, but is it reasonable? If you’re going to clean out an area to try and live in it makes total sense, but if you’re just trying to get to a gun shop to loot it, are you going to butcher every zombie you come across, or just the ones you have to? Your call.

All the dormant zombies would still have a large impact when entering new areas, giving a lot of differentiation between quiet and loud exploration. You can make noise, but if you do you’ll need to keep moving.

[Fetasajt]

For me zombies were always like this:

-Fighting one or two is no problem
-Fighting a small group is tricky. You have to think where you fight them, you have to use the enviroment or a small weapon a pistol or a pipebomb maybe.
-But fighting a big horde is where the fun comes in. Where no matter how skilled you are in c.q.b. you don’t have a chance no matter how much you’ve cut down. Once you chop ones head of another two step into it’s place. Where you can’t reaload your magnum quickly enough or you run out of arrows. You have to use high grade weaponary military grade weapons, explosives, armored vehicles. Clearing out the town carefully so you don’t ger overwhelmed.

What I’m trying to say is this: I’d much preffer if zombies would stay the same forever but make it so that they are much harder to fight in big hordes. So first you have to go to small towns whit maybe 7-10 buildings in it to get better gear so you can fight bigger hordes. or you can try to sneak into cities but if you alert the horde you are basically fucked. you are probably thinking now that this looks like you are doing linear mission, like “Congratulation you’ve completed the farm now you can advance to the town” but it’s really not like that. Beacause you have so much freedom of how you want to handle the situation. For example you do night raids into the city with an empty backpack and a silent weapon if you have to take out a zombie if it noticed you (this would require the stealth system to be implemented of course) or you could go all guns blazing with your armored semmitruck raming through the hordes stoping only for short times near high value loot like a gun shop or a hospital. This way the good old zombies would be still intresting in the late game. But they wouldn’t become super zombies. In my opinion zombies should be the “lowest grade enemy” for more difficulty we always have the nether creatures and such nonesense. Tell me what you think.

[kevin.granade]

That’s a good point, my proposal isn’t to make most zombies evolve into epic boss battles, just a bit faster, tougher, and stronger as time goes on.

When you start and have a improvised weapon of some kind and no skill, single zombies are pretty easy, especially since you can kite them pretty easily, pairs and larger groups require steadily more work as the numbers increase.

Later on you have a decent weapon and have built up some skills, most zombies will still take a wack or three to take down, whereas if they hadn’t evolved, they’d be one-hits. (unevolved weak zombies will still be mixed in, they’ll go down very easily) Also they prevent a bit more challenge in that while they still move slower than you, if you’re a bit encumbered it might tip in the other direction.

Far down the road, you’ve got really good armor and weaponry and can dispatch ordinary zombies with ease, or even outright ignore some of them if you’re dealing with something more important, but more and more of them are specialized tougher or faster variants, or have special attacks, so you’ll have to deal with the ones that are actually a threat first.

[Fetasajt]

So first there will be ordinary zombies (normal, child, police, soldier and dog) than some would evolve into shockers and such? Also some of the normal ones would get a bit tougher? I like that if it’s the way I think it is…

[Brian_Lefler]

+1 for Dormant zombies. Make 'em grey, so you’d see nearby zombies flare into color as you attract attention.

I always find it the most tense when I have a pack of zombies tailing me and I’m looking for a good place to fight them, so if sleeper zombies created more of that, I’d be thrilled. Possibly the wake-up chance would be small for walking past, but high if they see or hear fighting nearby. So walking through a horde would often attract a handful of zombies but you couldn’t just smack them when they woke up without snowballing. Instead, you’d want to find an empty house or alleyway to lure them into, attracting a bigger and bigger trail of zombies the longer you waited.

How does a persistent world and difficulty-over-time interact, though? If you make a new survivor and the world now taken over by superzombies, you’re going to have a bad time. I guess difficulty-over-time is more important.

[kevin.granade]

How does a persistent world and difficulty-over-time interact, though? If you make a new survivor and the world now taken over by superzombies, you’re going to have a bad time. I guess difficulty-over-time is more important.

That’s a good point, we need to address the new character time warp somehow when we have map content changing like that. Um… I don’t have an answer, and I agree increasing difficulty is the more important concept overall. Possibly this would have an override of some kind in order to allow for the “massively single-player” shared world thing. I can think of a system where each zombie has its progression path predetermined from the start, so we could actually roll their state forward and back as you load them into games at different dates, but… yipes that would complicate the hell out of things… but allow time travel. Will require some heavy-duty thinking.

[GlyphGryph]

KevinGranade - We might also consider spawning new characters in different maps (perhaps adjacent to a map discovered by a previous character). This is an elegant solution to both the problem at hand, and some other problems people have complained about.

When a new map is discovered, it’s ‘time’ difficulty could be based on the time relative to the character discovering it, neatly resolving the issue. A map would only update it’s critters and time processed stuff if the character entering it was older than the last character to enter it, meaning that a map would be ‘frozen’ at a certain difficulty until a sufficiently long lived character decided to go there.

It also fixes the issue of players constantly spawning in the same place, and it means to retrieve their previous stuff they will have to enter an area that is more difficult depending on how far along that previous character was.

Long lived characters would only ever roll an individual map “forward”, essentially, but when creating a new character the immediate area and any newly discovered areas would be based on their current status.

[kevin.granade]

Not a bad solution, possibly with a threshold for how “old” an overmap needs to be before it’s played out, you can play quite a few characters if they only last a week or so, but if you have a really long-lived character you could run into crawl’s ghost problem where the dungeon is crowded with OP enemies of your own creation. Might also have some mechanic to prefer spawning players away from the areas where long-lived players were previously, though that might require excessive bookkeeping.

[GlyphGryph]

Even if the character is short lived, it might be worth creating a new map for them. Even now people “start scum” equivalent simply by creating a bunch of characters with different professions and relying on the game to keep spawning them in the same spot.

The main argument against this sort of approach would be that our underlying code for handling the overmaps is kind of really bad, since (I believe?) they all get loaded and saved whether you ever actually enter them or not, which is why the game crashes for larger maps, instead of just having your local map active.