Zombies have uncontrolled hatred towards random cars?

[James]

I’ve seen several cases now of zombies all grouping up and smashing a car totally. Possibly it’s part of infighting feature, like they are chasing an animal or vermin that’s in/under the car? Though I’ve never seen an animal there or any reason for the behaviour.

(It looks like zombies are set to by_mood relation with vermin, which seems weird. I would think they should be neutral and not chase vermin around.)

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[ramesesniblet]

One zombie tries to path through the car, it makes a big sound.
Other zombies come to the sound and try to path their way through the car, creating more sound.
Repeat.

That’s what it seems like to me anyway.

[i2amroy]

[quote=“ramesesniblet, post:2, topic:8998”]One zombie tries to path through the car, it makes a big sound.
Other zombies come to the sound and try to path their way through the car, creating more sound.
Repeat.

That’s what it seems like to me anyway.[/quote]
This right here. It’s a side effect of making zombies willing to bash things in their road.

[James]

Ah right, so it’s been happening before too. I suppose it’s working as intended? They just aggro to sound. Or should they be able to decipher the sound as not interesting.

[Pandromidal]

This sounds like a feature not a bug. I would suggest “By Design” for this.

[i2amroy]

It’s kinda a halfway measure. The fact that zombies occasionally bash random cars is closer to a feature. The fact that sometimes large groups of zombies will get together to just totally annihilate a particular vehicle isn’t really intended, but it’s rather a really low priority bug since it doesn’t really have any bad effects.

[Metekillot]

Well, it does have the undesired effect of forcing you to run to the rescue of a car that may possess parts that you’d like to not be smashed into useless pieces when you would rather just keep walking by.

[Coolthulhu]

Possible solution: add faction ids to sounds, make factions ignore sounds from own faction (except for signaling sounds, like shrieks and howls).
This would also make it possible to make monsters hear non-player footsteps.

[kevin.granade]

I don’t see a problem, “that thing made a noise, I’ll check it out” + “something in my way, smash it” seems like perfect zombie logic to me.
If they see something else more interesting, they’ll stop smashing the car and go after it.

Well, it does have the undesired effect of forcing you to run to the rescue of a car that may possess parts that you’d like to not be smashed into useless pieces when you would rather just keep walking by.

That sounds eminently desirable from my point of view. Pushing the player into conflict with zombies is something we need more of.

[Catfoodbob]

i could see zombie masters having zombies loot the entire city and put it in one building for there to be millions of zombies in .

perhaphs smashing cars apart to shove against the entrances and around the building for fortification…

if zombie master is in x radius zombies should be smart enough to not walk onto difficult terrain and to stay in large groups to surround the player if they challenge it

[EditorRUS]

It's kinda a halfway measure. The fact that zombies occasionally bash random cars is closer to a feature. The fact that sometimes large groups of zombies will get together to just totally annihilate a particular vehicle isn't really intended, but it's rather a really low priority bug since it doesn't really have any bad effects.

It's hilarious. Imagine that you left your car to rob yet another bank and some random zombie decides to make its way through car of yours. So when you are back you see some !!FUN!! things happenning.

[StopSignal]

I love zombies destroying cars, i totally consider that a feature!

[Valiant]

I don’t see a problem, “that thing made a noise, I’ll check it out” + “something in my way, smash it” seems like perfect zombie logic to me.

I always thought of zombies’ logic as “that thing made a noise, I’ll check it out” + “something in my way, I don’t care, let’s try to walk through the obstacle as if it is not here.” At least for regular zombies. Smartest of them can try to go round the obstacle. But smashing something that’s not food? I think that they have to be far more intelligent to make logic chains like “obstacle is interfering? then get rid of it by smashing it to pieces”.

[kevin.granade]

There’s a problem there, which is if that was their behavior you could stop most zombies by simply closing a window or door.
That’s simply not a reasonable way for them to work, so the default is if something gets in their way they try to smash it.

[Coolthulhu]

Their car hate could be greatly diminished if their wandering behavior was a tiny bit more sensible.

At the moment they have a binary switch: “could I bash it down before the heat death of the universe?”.

By making it more like “could I bash it down in sensible time?”, zombies would start going around obstacles like walls and cars. By making it semi-random, they could still retain some of the old behavior (bashing down cars and walls if there’s nothing better to do), but without the part where they get locked up bashing cars that don’t even really stand in the way.
Plus, it would address the issue of zombies magically understanding that a rock/concrete/metal wall is harder than regular wall and that reinforced military vehicle is softer than concrete wall. Magically, because if their intelligence doesn’t allow going around obstacles, it certainly doesn’t allow rating wall toughness.

Technically: making monster::wander_next compare bash_rating with some random number (say, rng(-1, 5) ) instead of hardcoded 0 would make them occasionally bash rock walls and usually not-bash regular walls and cars, instead “sliding” along them.

[KA101]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:15, topic:8998”]Their car hate could be greatly diminished if their wandering behavior was a tiny bit more sensible.

At the moment they have a binary switch: “could I bash it down before the heat death of the universe?”.

By making it more like “could I bash it down in sensible time?”, zombies would start going around obstacles like walls and cars. By making it semi-random, they could still retain some of the old behavior (bashing down cars and walls if there’s nothing better to do), but without the part where they get locked up bashing cars that don’t even really stand in the way.
Plus, it would address the issue of zombies magically understanding that a rock/concrete/metal wall is harder than regular wall and that reinforced military vehicle is softer than concrete wall. Magically, because if their intelligence doesn’t allow going around obstacles, it certainly doesn’t allow rating wall toughness.

Technically: making monster::wander_next compare bash_rating with some random number (say, rng(-1, 5) ) instead of hardcoded 0 would make them occasionally bash rock walls and usually not-bash regular walls and cars, instead “sliding” along them.[/quote]

The goo can tell if it’s more likely to smash its host body than the target. Not sure what they’ve got to do that’s more pressing than smashing random obstacles, so “sensible time” leaves something to be clarified.

[kevin.granade]

Something else that might be reasonable is having them bash at things totally at random, but giving up after a while (blacklisting that square for movement for a while).
I think that balances how dumb they’re supposed to be with how we’d like them to act.

[tivasyk]

personally i love this bug/feature! it’s so sweet going out to the nearest crossroads and burn ten Z’s in one go by just lobbing a molotov right in the center of a group of Z’s gathered on the remnants of a car =)

[jcd]

personally i love this bug/feature! it’s so sweet going out to the nearest crossroads and burn ten Z’s in one go by just lobbing a molotov right in the center of a group of Z’s gathered on the remnants of a car =)

i love this too, but for the reason Kevin stated a bit back: It makes perfect zed logic to smash obstacles + move to any sound.

Cool’s semi-random bashing + pathing around hard obstacles makes perfect sense too, simplified to only look the current (first in line) obstacle’s ‘toughness’ so as not to make pathing expensive.

[Wally-kun]

It still leaves the question if this is something that is worth keeping. I understand that zombies are simple-minded and are both aggressive and drawn to noise, and can possibly work themselves into a frenzy over the noise they themselves are making, but aren’t they also…y’know, kinda dim? On the one hand you could have them tunnel-vision in and beat this car down into nothing as long as it makes noise when they hit it, but on the other hand, you can have them just get bored after a while.

I guess it comes down to what kind of personalities you want to give them. I think the hyper-aggressive frenzying behavior suits their role and the nature of the Blobs, but there are some small things that come into play, like a zombie spending 50 years beating on a concrete wall or something that is TECHNICALLY destructible, albeit in a disgustingly long time frame.