FilUnderscore

What actually seems to be happening is the new horde limit spawn system is kicking into action and preventing smaller sized hordes from fully spawning. I'm making slight adjustments to it now to remove the setting and make it work alongside the max entity setting instead. To temporarily fix it currently, you can set the "max_hordes_per_player_group" setting to -1. You might be coming across lots of screamers if you're near a town (particularly in the wasteland) and generating lots of heat, thus attracting them. After killing them, you shouldn't get any spawning in for a while. I haven't altered screamer spawn behavior yet but I plan to do so within the next (and final) beta update, as that's one of the only things left to adjust before going stable.

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-beta.2 for A21.1 EXP b12 released. This is an experimental release of Improved Hordes. If you encounter any bugs/performance issues regarding the mod, report them in the Issues section of the repository with the experimental label. Download: https://github.com/FilUnderscore/ImprovedHordes/releases/download/2.0.0-beta.2/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip Changelog Added Player Group Horde Spawn Limits Can be controlled via the max_hordes_spawned_per_player_group setting (default is 3, -1 to disable). This applies to all horde types as of right now, but in the future it will be more configurable. It ensures that each player group gets a fair share of hordes, particularly on populated servers. Variable AI walk speeds for horde entities. Zombies will no longer sprint and destroy blocks when wandering unless they are targeting heat/a player. This required a slight adjustment to how entity AI works, which now switches between EAI (the vanilla AI system) and Horde AI (Improved Hordes' system) depending on what's going on at the moment. Another change was made to the way the game schedules AI pathfinding to integrate null checks with thread safety. With the vanilla scheduler, it would attempt to pathfind for an unloaded entity and throw an error, leading to entity AI lockup for the rest of the session. Startup mod chat message now shows additional info about any mods that interface with Improved Hordes through XML or DLL (in other words, add-ons). Startup console message for experimental builds that print the current version. This is to make it clearer which experimental version of Improved Hordes you are running, since ModInfo V2 no longer supports additional version details. POI and Land Claim Block spawn check to prevent horde entities from spawning in POIs and player bases. Hordes should now spawn outside POIs and player bases most of the time. max_spawn_capacity_percent setting to cap the number of horde entities active in the world as a percentage of MaxSpawnedZombies/MaxSpawnedAnimals game prefs (default is 0.8 or 80%). This should allow screamers and POI sleepers to spawn properly. thread_tick_ms setting to control how frequently threaded systems tick per second. A larger value means that threads will tick less times a second. This should have no effect on gameplay, but improve performance if you are finding that the threads are ticking too often. A correction is applied to ensure the threads keep the horde simulation system stable. Changed Startup mod chat message will only show up the first time the mod is initialized in a world. It will also show up every time the mod is reinitialized when new add-ons are installed/removed so the roaming hordes can be properly updated. POI zone town weight is now calculated as the minimum of either the average POI weight in the world or the default value of 3.0. This aims to fix some maps not having zones due to a lack of city sized zones. Reworked some of the horde entity spawning and generation code. This fixes an issue where hordes would attempt to complete entity spawns while despawning. This should also fix horde entities popping in while spawning. Some optimizations have also been made, so gameplay should be running much smoother now. Hordes will lose interest in events over time depending on the intensity of the events that have occurred. wandering_animal_enemy hordes will now be attracted to nearby events, but at a lower sensitivity of 0.5 (for comparison, a standard wandering zombie horde has a sensitivity of 1.0). Slightly reduced the default setting of horde_biome_curve_multiplier from 2.0 to 1.5 for slightly fewer hordes in the wasteland. Other biomes should still have roughly the same number of hordes as before. Wandering Horde AI changes Hordes can now run between zones, but will wander while within them when pathing through various parts of town. This gives them a more "wandering horde" feel. Hordes should leave zones much sooner now and not roam around too long. There was a bug preventing this behavior, keeping hordes indefinitely within zones. Fixed POI zone stats throwing error when running improvedhordes stats through the dedicated server console. POI zone stats can only be seen by admins running the command through the in-game console. Multiple player groups with varying number of players created instead of creating one group of nearby players. Modified collection error when exiting the world. Screamers screaming while a game is paused. Horde wander count being reset every time a location in a zone is reached. Horde entities stopped from investigation during wander time. Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned. Should be fixed as a result of the AI scheduling change. Horde entities respawns ignore the spawn cap. Horde entities pop in when spawning. Horde entities targeting spectating (invisible) players when the "Invisible" setting is toggled on in the debug menu.

A21.1 experimental changes have been a bit chaotic to adjust to. I've fixed a couple of issues that have popped up with the update and I'm hoping to release the next beta soon. Still got a bit of a bug with hordes not respawning properly after unloading after rewriting some of the code that handles the zombie spawns. The change has fixed spawns occurring past the game's entity caps and reduced some stutter during spawns, so I can say that the game appears to be running a lot smoother with the mod now.

Just to confirm, you are using the latest versions of Mod Manager and Backup Mod?

Seems like the mod is failing to detect POI zones. Is this a RWG map by any chance? If you could share the world seed and generation settings, it would be useful to try and replicate this error as it might be a bug with the detection algorithm. The error isn't game breaking but will prevent cities from being properly populated with hordes. UPDATE: I've got a fix implemented in the next update that should resolve this.

No worries, the thread is meant for help/feedback regarding the mod so don’t worry about it. There shouldn’t be any issues with upgrading to the new version since the mod doesn’t add anything into the world other than spawning zombies. You can make a backup of your world if you want to be sure, though it’s usually not needed. The map-roaming hordes are reset when you update though (since I’ve added new features since) so you may find hordes spawning nearby a bit earlier than usual, but that’s fixed by clearing them out again.

Huh, super odd because the code that’s throwing the error in question no longer exists in the latest version. Have you tried deleting the mod folder and downloading a fresh copy? There’s no worry about not being up to date, however it just means you might encounter some bugs that have been patched in an update.

2.0.0 is currently in beta, but I can’t easily put a separator to distinguish the version like in A20 due to The Fun Pimps changing how mod versions are checked in A21. You could check Manifest.xml (same folder as ModInfo) for the specific alpha/beta version however. Sorry if this causes any confusion, looking at ways I can reduce this.

2.0.0-beta.1 was released approximately 3 weeks ago, so you should be on the latest one. 2.0.0-beta.2 will be releasing soon with more bug fixes and minor AI improvements. Stable release should follow after 2.0.0-beta.2 if all goes well. You can check which one you’re running by checking chat when you load in-game, though I might add a console message at startup as well.

Are you running the latest version 2.0.0-beta.1? It looks like you might be using one of the older versions where a bug that was fixed in future versions is still present.

Could you provide a snippet of the error from the log file? It will help to identify what could be causing it.

That's roughly how it works. Issue with postponing the spawning is that would just make the pop-in more obvious and the spawn distance can't be adjusted since chunks/entities are unloaded beyond view distance and distant terrain takes over (which has no collision). The only alternative would be to not spawn the horde, but these bad spawns happen quite often so it would be noticeable. The system isn't perfect but it's usually acceptable if the chance of a bad spawn occurring is less than 1%.

Ideally not. I'll need to add a few more spawn checks to prevent this from happening as the game code doesn't have a way to check for all of these conditions at the same time. Currently it's only checking if the spawn point is 'valid' by the game's rules but not more than that.

Working on AI tweaks, animals currently aren't affected by events however I think hostile ones should be more curious so I'll look to adjusting that. Just a question about this, are the zombie spawns bypassing the MaxSpawnedZombies game pref by any chance? I had a similar report on another site and it could be a bug if so. Part of this might be the zone wander AI instruction update in beta 1. As I just replied to someone on Nexus, "I agree that AI pathing around POIs could be less aggressive. Right now it selects a random location outside of a POI and wanders there, however I could look to targeting town zone corners instead so they could go along the borders and across the middle. The new AI changes as well should stop them from hitting blocks when not attracted to events nearby. " This should reduce the chance of hordes targeting specific POIs that you might happen to be nearby.

Is your base a converted POI or near town? Are you also generating any heat at your base while you're away? I've gotten similar reports on Nexus and I'm looking into it. I suspect that the new wandering AI change might be the culprit, and I could look to toning it down with a slightly simpler implementation.

Thanks for bringing it up, fixed for next beta release.

To add, you could change the GS entity count increase number to a lower value if you haven't already (it supports decimals, e.g. 0.5). increaseEvery increases the count by 1 for all entities within the <gs> tag every X gamestages.

I should add, each world is laid out differently with towns so hordes will naturally path differently in different maps with different settings. Right now they’ll be most common in areas between towns. Looking into further ways I can improve horde AI to visit less frequent paths more often. Also want to add more impact to feral sense in the future.

Currently revising my approach with it, needs more testing and hopefully more could be done with it. No ETA on when it will be coming back for now. Doesn’t cause any issues, but there were skeptical claims made that had every right to be skeptical. If you do find any performance benefits from it though let me know, could be useful info. I think it could be a potential fix to one of the bugs Improved Hordes currently has with frozen zombies but it doesn’t look like it will be a simple fix. Just thought about adding some way to detect the setting changes and flush it automatically, might see that added in next beta release. You will need to flush it manually until then.

Looking into how I can bring back some of the screamer horde spawning functionality without overdoing it, something like adding a cooldown timer in an area so that screamers will still primarily notify hordes but spawn a decent sized horde first time round. I'll look into the screamers screaming during paused game, might be an oversight on my end.

Are you running the "improvedhordes flush" command when tweaking the density and populator settings? It resets all the hordes and applies the new settings instantly, otherwise you'll have to wait for the next re-population event to take place (by default 7 days in the wild and POI zones). Lowering the populator sparsity values from "32" to "16", for example, will spawn 2x more hordes in the wild. Consider also increasing the horde_biome_multiplier and density_per_km_squared settings if you want more hordes in every biome throughout the world, but be warned the number of hordes will quickly increase after resetting the hordes with the command. Screamers don't spawn hordes anymore but rather notify any hordes within a couple hundred meters distance of your location (you can adjust this through the event_interest_distance_multiplier setting to increase/decrease this distance). When coupled with the modifications above, it will be truly menacing I can assure you. When you finally figure out how each setting impacts the roaming horde spawns in the world, you can achieve a lot more than in the A20 version. I've kept the settings relatively easier for the default version of the mod, however when the add-ons release later this week, you can expect similar experiences as I've described above.

Mods that alter the UI in any way are usually not EAC friendly. Mods that alter gameplay may/may not be EAC friendly, depends on whether they are C# or XML based, but they usually don't matter for servers unless they introduce new models or sounds. Read each mod's instructions before downloading and it should tell you whether it supports client-side EAC or not, and whether it's server-side EAC compatible.

Yes it is client-only at this point in time. Looking into adding possible support for access on servers in the future, but I'm not sure it would be EAC friendly however.

Good to know that it works now, I'll see if I can try replicate this bug in the meantime. List of mods would be appreciated so I can try to replicate this issue and figure out what could be causing the error.

Started working on the add-ons since last update - expect the first round by the end of this week.