FilUnderscore

June 30, 2023

3 minutes ago, Agame said:

Thanks, does it work in A21 b324? I thought I would try out A21 but the mod is giving me an error.

Yep, you'll need to download the A21 version if you were previously running A20.

Let me know if you're still getting an error and post a log of it. You can find the log by opening the console then clicking "Open Logs Folder" in the top right of the window.

June 30, 2023

10 hours ago, fnfear said:

I feel like silencers don't seem to work with your mod? Whenever I shoot with silenced weapons I get endless hordes coming just as much as I would if I shoot without silencers.

Might be heatmap related, I’ll have to check how the game is handling silenced weapons regarding that and see if I can make any changes.

4 hours ago, Agame said:

An update, I finally started seeing hordes around day 20, not sure why it took so long, I like the dangerous cities concept but I agree that hordes are actually a much better solution. It feels way more 'real' and dynamic to have empty blocks with a few stragglers and then see one zombie come around a corner and not know if twenty more are behind him. I have disabled dangerous cities for now and will see if the horde rate keeps up then it will not be necessary as I have enough zombies to fight.

Btw will this mod keep supporting A20? I dont really want to upgrade my game now and loose all progress.

A20 version will always remain available under the previous releases GitHub link as well as on Nexus Mods.

3 hours ago, khromosone said:

Interesting, went from having no dramas to the hordes being ful of rads and not even being able to start a quest lol.

Gamestage scaling 😉

3 hours ago, Picklefart said:

Loving the way this is running now. I did make a twerk on amount of zombies that spawn per horde and its just what we were looking for. We had a horde show up today of around 60 zombies and it is glorious. Haven't had an issue with large amount of screamers appear again. No stuttering at all.

Most my large hordes appear at night.

Good to hear, mod’s getting there. Few more things to patch up and should be good for a near stable release.

June 29, 2023

MPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.8 for A21 EXP b323 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-alpha.8/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Added

Setting to enable additional AI player sensing. This will default to being off.
- Set ai_player_sensing to true to enable.

Fixed

Hordes being able to sense you through walls when ai_player_sensing option is enabled.
Multiple instances of threads present when opening other games in the same session.

Known issues

Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.

June 29, 2023

23 minutes ago, Cypherdiaz said:

Also running dangerous cities.

Would love to know if there's a mod incompatibility issue here before loading up thr newest version of improved hordes.

(To me, the dangerous cities is a simplistic approach to the issue so I wouldn't mind loosing it in favor of improved hordes)

Shouldn't be any incompatibility, the mod uses a custom spawning system and just tells the game "put a zombie here". You may find cities more overwhelming with dangerous cities on top of Improved Hordes in terms of zombie count, since my understanding is that the mod boosts the game's town spawns by altering the vanilla spawn system.

Compared to the A20 version, Improved Hordes no longer alters wandering hordes and instead adds in a new roaming horde system that simulates hordes not nearby and spawns them in when you're close. This approach allows you to encounter wandering hordes much more frequently if you're moving around the map, otherwise you'll have to wait for a horde to stumble upon you (unless you get a vanilla wandering horde which is just spawned in at random intervals). I hope to expand this system in the future to introduce more custom hordes into the world that can maybe do more than just wander around.

I am looking at ways to increase the chance of having hordes come at you through some kind of heat system where hordes can identify paths that have not been visited as frequently, so as to not overwhelm players by having hordes feel like they're locking onto you for no reason. Another way this can also be achieved is by slightly randomizing each horde's pathfinding so that they may run into you by chance more frequently.

During my tests I have found that as the horde simulation progresses, there are some patches throughout the map that naturally never get hordes unless by random chance or player intervention, while other spots on the map get lots of hordes. I'm looking to minimize this.

June 29, 2023

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.7 for A21 EXP b323 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-alpha.7/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Added

Horde Biome Decay
- When hordes cross over from their initial biome, they will start to decay until eventually ending up at a density of 0. If they return to their initial biome, the decay stops.
- This will prevent, for example, lots of harder biome hordes (i.e. wasteland) overrunning easier biomes (i.e. pine forest).
improvedhordes flush command that will flush (reset) all hordes in the world and their respective populators.
Rough implementation of hordes detecting players nearby on sight.
- Expect this to be ironed out in future updates. You may encounter a few minor issues like hordes being able to detect you through walls when nearby.
Some changes to player grouping for a future update to limit multiple nearby spawned horde entity counts.

Changed

Multithreading system changes
- Moved from a task-based approach to a traditional thread approach. Each core system runs on its own thread assigned with a prefix of IHThreaded-.
- This means that the horde threading settings are no longer relevant and thus have been removed.
- This is an attempt to fix micro-stuttering that is present during gameplay.
Zone horde density tweaks to ensure that a zone cannot spawn hordes greater than the biome it is in allows.
Wilderness horde sparsity was previously affected by biome difficulty. This is no longer the case for animal and screamer hordes, but for standard wandering hordes still applies.

Known issues

Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.

June 29, 2023

10 hours ago, MrSamuelAdams said:

No heat generated.

Just was happening...

We only have one camp fire.

But was happening in the town and at our base.

Also the stuttering wasn't happening with the other update.

Just the latest one.

Thanks for the update, I'll be releasing a new one in a short while that switches from a task-based system to one that uses 3 dedicated threads. I'm hoping it will be a lot more consistent performance-wise.

1 hour ago, Agame said:

I have finally spotted a few hordes while roaming around and as someone else was saying they seem to ignore me which is strange, riding around them and even through the group they keep marching somewhere and do not attack.

Looking into this. They should get your attention if you make some sound, but I need to get their sight working properly.

10 hours ago, MrGrim said:

Some friends and I have been using this mod on a private server for a few days now, and overall we're having a great time with it. The world feels much more alive and dangerous now. It's especially great when out and about in the world. Cities are dangerous, the wilderness feels properly infested, and it's a great time. The one issue everyone on the server is having, however, is the hordes are _relentless_ when working at your base. Each person ends up spending 90% of their time at base fighting them off. It's become a losing war of attrition as nobody is able to mine resources and repair fast enough to keep up.

I'd appreciate some suggestions on how to tune settings to maintain that sense of danger when exploring and looting while allowing players at their bases some relief. If it matters, a lot of player bases are in converted POI locations.

One thing that might come into play is that we have feral sense on during the day. We do this because vanilla zombies are so passive that to get any action at all you need it on. We've become so accustomed to it that it almost feels like cheating to turn it off, but perhaps with this mod we should?

Are your POI locations near towns? That could be part of the issue.

Are you finding these hordes coming from a common direction, perhaps from another town somewhere in the distance? Still looking at the option of slightly randomizing their pathing so they don't go directly from point A to point B. AI could be much more improved however recently I had been fixing bugs, so I hope to get back to it soon.

You could in the meantime increase the zone repopulation days setting to a higher number which will prevent hordes from respawning in towns just a bit longer.

Just to confirm, you're also using the latest version?

June 28, 2023

3 hours ago, Agame said:

Just started using this as I have been looking for mods to spice up the threats in game, as vanilla world feels EXTREMELY empty when you are roaming around.

Anyway I am at day 7 and I have yet to see any hordes, I typed in the 'show horde' command but I have no idea what the info there means. I am running KHA20-DangerousCities mod which is clearly working, maybe it is incompatible with this mod? Are the hordes supposed to spawn in near the player or could they be on the other side of the map and I am just not seeing them?

The hordes are roaming throughout the world and may not be passing by your location very often, if you head to towns you may be able to catch them more frequently. Still working on getting the spawning numbers right.

3 hours ago, MrSamuelAdams said:

Also updated to the latest version, unfortunately. getting like 3-4 wandering hordes a day which is super rough and still a bunch are just running right by us even with feral sense on ALL.

Are you generating any heat or just relying on them to see you? If the latter, this functionality isn't present just yet while I look for a good way to implement it, but they should be reacting to any heatmap activity happening nearby.

5 hours ago, MrSamuelAdams said:

with the latest version i'm getting some strange hitching every second or so... only last like a millisecond, but annoying nonetheless.

Is this still happening as you're playing or only initially, and it wasn't present last update?

June 28, 2023

9 minutes ago, EpicSpire said:

Are the hordes Game Stage locked? like would the hordes that spawn on day 1 be consistant with what a palyer would expect to see on day 1 are is it going to be radiated cops and wights and bikers and crap (just an example).

Yes that is a core feature of the mod. On day 1 unless you go into a harder biome which raises your game stage, you can only expect to see some small and medium sized hordes with basic zombie types depending on whether you enter a city or you’re in the wilderness.

June 27, 2023

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.6 for A21 EXP b317 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-alpha.6/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Added

Feral sense support
- If you enable feral sense options for your game, hordes will be able to sense you up to a slightly greater distance.

Changed

Reworked zone horde spawning
- Improved the POI zoning algorithm to more accurately determine towns and cities through proper POI clustering.
- Also tweaked some parameters to spawn hordes better depending on zone size and POI count.
Multi-threading changes
- Slightly tweaked how data between threads is shared.
Increased event_interest_distance_multiplier from 0.25 to 0.5.
- This is also in part to fix hordes not being interested in nearby activities.
- Additionally, increased the weight of heatmap activities which should make hordes interested much more quickly.
Increased max_world_density from 200.0 to 350.0.
- This is mainly so that wilderness hordes can properly populate throughout the world. City hordes are much bigger than wilderness hordes, but there are less of them.
- Depending on your world size, you may choose to increase/decrease this number.
Reduced roaming horde speeds to be more inline with the game's entity walk speeds.
Increased wilderness wandering horde sleep chance from 0.3 to 0.7.
Increased zone wandering horde sleep chance from 0.3 to 0.5.
Renamed horde_biome_sparsity_multiplier to horde_biome_multiplier.
- Increasing this number will increase the number of hordes populated throughout the world (in zones/wilderness).
- Reducing it does the opposite effect.
Hordes will now wander around areas of interest for sometime depending on the amount of interest accumulated.

Fixed

Biome-specific horde population rules not being applied to unloaded chunks.
Horde AI interrupt commands not being properly processed.
- Hordes should now be better attracted to nearby heatmap activities.
NullPointerException when attempting to fetch previous heatmap event data in chunks.
Screamers not being able to merge with wandering hordes in certain cases.

Known issues

Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.

22 hours ago, m4ntic0r said:

This does not change the stutter.

I tried 1, 2 or 8

I dont see any % more cpu load with the mod. only the stutter. fps are ok, the dont drop.

I dont have a "weak" system, 5600x, rtx 3090

With mod every second there is a short stutter, not every 2-3sec, this was wrong.

Without loading the mod no problem, tried it again.

New update I've tweaked some things to try and reduce this stutter, let me know if it works.

8 hours ago, MrSamuelAdams said:

What's up with the zombie wandering hordes just booking it and not coming to you even with feral sense? lol

Been fixed in the latest release.

6 hours ago, Dragonchampion said:

Your upcoming changes have me super excited. I can't wait for your full-scale dynamic traveling horde system.

This has already been running since the first update, but with the bugged POI detection hasn't really been that noticeable. City hordes should be more balanced now, might need to do a bit of tweaking still but it should be much better now. There are still some things I'd like to add in like horde decay in different biomes so hordes don't get out of hand (size-wise) when moving between them.

June 26, 2023

39 minutes ago, m4ntic0r said:

there is a really annoying stuttering with this mod in a21 latest version 5 (never tried older)

even from the beginning of a new game.

after ~1-2min i have all 2-3sek this stutter.

i tried lowest video options etc.. but its not the problem

same savegame/world without mod -> butter smooth

default mod settings, i did not change anything on mod or game in any file.

Try reducing the number of threads that the horde simulation uses, https://github.com/FilUnderscore/ImprovedHordes/wiki/Settings#threading

Inside the file:

Mods/ImprovedHordes/Config/ImprovedHordes/settings.xml

Try lowering the horde threads to 2 to begin with.

55 minutes ago, wolverine576 said:

I had to edit the world max spawned zombies <max_world_density>100.0</max_world_density> because i had 544 zombies spawn in the area. Not sure if i had a setting wrong

I was the only one on the server. execpt for the max spawn going to 544, mod seems really good

Currently a bug with horde populating, expect a fix next update (should be ready in the next day or so).

June 26, 2023

On 6/26/2023 at 2:32 AM, Cypherdiaz said:

As for others reports of the horde just doing their thing, one thing I noticed in version4 (we haven't added version 5 yet) was similar. Our base turrets would rip into them but never caused them to target thr base. Like they'd run by and as long as they didn't spot a player. They'd keep going (which I'm totally fine with) but if they ran near my base, it would light them up and they wouldn't react to suddenly multiple mp5 and shotgun turrets engaging them. Always found it weird.

22 hours ago, Picklefart said:

It seems random that the zombies will react to gunfire or proximity. Though it happens outside of the wandering hordes. I had it happen with a cop car alarm as well. The zombies that spawned from the car alarm going off did not seem to 100% react to me some would and some wouldn't.

Looked into it, seems to have been a bug regarding how the AI processes interruptions and was slightly affected by the event distance nerf as well. They seem to be reacting much better in the dev build for next release.

Update on the POI: I've tweaked and improved the detection algorithm, for comparison here is what we had so far (10k pregen map for reference):

vs what's coming:

The yellow squares are individual POIs, I've managed to get up to separating the city POIs from rural/wilderness POIs, and now that's left to do is correctly group the squares to form bigger simpler squares that represent town/city zones.

EDIT: Further update, here's the grouped city zones from the above picture:

These zone outlines will allow the spawning system to deduce the density of these zones by knowing the size and number of POIs within these zones. Still need to test that it works properly in other RWG maps, then I can begin to tweak the spawns within the zones.

Compared to the first picture (2.0.0-alpha.5), the picture above is what it should look like.

June 25, 2023

12 hours ago, Picklefart said:

Would you consider making an "add-on" for this mod where the air drop works like a screamer. Calling in a horde to the spot the air drop lands. Not sure if that's possible.

Also with the new version release I've noticed less zombies in the hordes. I'm at game stage 92 and friend at about the same. We only get probably 10 zombies in a horde. We are in the pine forest but I'd think at that game stage you would quite a bit more. As well see much less horde activity.

I did change max_entities_spawned_per_player to -1 to try and spawn all in horde per player at once.

would increasing the max density from 2.0 - 4.0 increase the horde size?

Also I see this under hordes.xml, am I to understand changing the min-max count to a higher number increase zombies per horde? such as the lines listed in red.

           <group name="Zombies">
               <gs min="0" increaseEvery="5"> 
                   <entity time="day" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWasteland" minCount="3" maxCount="8"/>
                   <entity time="night" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWastelandNight" minCount="3" maxCount="8"/>

                   <entity time="day" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="ZombiesAll" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                   <entity time="night" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="ZombiesNight" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
               </gs>

               <gs min="70" increaseEvery="8">
                   <entity time="day" biomes="wasteland" group="IHZombiesAllFeralWasteland" minCount="1" maxCount="10"/>
                   <entity time="night" biomes="wasteland" group="ZombiesWastelandNight" minCount="1" maxCount="10"/>

                   <entity time="day" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="IHZombiesAllFeral" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
                   <entity time="night" biomes="pine_forest,snow,desert,burnt_forest" group="IHZombiesAllFeralNight" minCount="10" maxCount="20"/>
               </gs>

Or have I just created a monster with these edits?

Great idea for an add-on, I'll look into it after all the issues have been fixed. I did hard nerf the hordes for now (sizes and numbers) to try and figure out what should be balanced and temporarily fix the out of hand hordes others have been experiencing. Increase the density will increase the horde size, as well as tweaking the entity min-max counts. You can also look to tweak the increase every X gamestages on how quickly you want your hordes to grow.

4 hours ago, Survinator said:

I don't know why, but the hordes just run somewhere, ignoring me...

3 hours ago, CrimsonKing said:

Yup getting the same problem don't know what's causing it I can shoot at them or make as much noise as possible but they still ignore me running to where ever their destination lies.

Looking into this!

June 24, 2023

22 minutes ago, CrimsonKing said:

Error "Calling Animator.GotoState on Synchronize layer" whenever the character panel is opened though don't know if it's from this mod or not.

Yes this is not mod related, vanilla game also has this.

23 minutes ago, CrimsonKing said:

Just got myself a Red Error wondering what it is. Did I get this error from reducing the thread? game was stuttering too often on default settings I changed <max_horde_threads> from 4 to 3

No, the error seems to be harmless unless it's spamming your console. Seems like I might've missed some checks, the error is related to the chunk heatmap decay feature (not thread related). I'll get this fixed next patch so it doesn't spew errors in rare cases.

Update on the POI issue: might've been exacerbated by a typo I made while coding up the zoning algorithm - the zones while debugging appeared smaller than they actually are and could've been the cause of getting lots of hordes in cities because of the size being misreported (lots of things depend on the zone sizes, so this is sort of a big issue, mainly the density of cities being misrepresented by their size). I've ended up rewriting most of the zone logic while trying to figure out what was causing the issue (and tidying up since it was quite messy), so the next patch should have much more accurate spawns (including a fix for hordes spawning in POIs).

June 24, 2023

11 hours ago, Cypherdiaz said:

Fantastic. Will have to give it a test.

My server has no 7day hordes (I find them arbitrary and annoying and predictable) so boosting thr scariness of random hordes keeps up the pressure.

And by the way, I have to give credit where due. Instead of just addressing folks issues, the integration of user options is fantastic! Wish more mods would do things that way so you can tailor a mod to your desire.

EDIT:

One other piece of feedback from the previous alpha.4 version, though I fear its also in the alpha.5 version.

Our base is a POI (Rural_Wedding_Lake or whatever). Next door is the new T5 Corrections.

During the craziness I described prior, we noticed that A LOT of zombies were spawning in one of the Corrections Towers. See pic.

Like they spawned up there and ended up trashing the railing to get out.

Is there a way to prevent the hordes from spawning IN a POI? Could be problematic.

I’ll see what I can do about this, may need to improve the poi detection algorithm.

June 23, 2023

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.5 for A21 EXP b317 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-alpha.5/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Added

More settings
- horde_biome_sparsity_multiplier controls the sparsity of wilderness hordes in biomes. A lower number means less sparsity between hordes (more hordes in an area). This is divided by the biome difficulty as defined in the game's biomes.xml file.
- event_chunk_radius controls the influence events have over nearby chunks (i.e. spreading shared interest within a few chunks).
- event_interest_distance_multiplier controls the distance at which an event is reported at depending on the current area interest. The default distance is based on map size (e.g. 6144x6144 has a max distance of 400, applying the multiplier of 0.25 means a max distance of 100).

Changed

Lowered event_interest_distance_multiplier from 1.0 to 0.25. Events are now reported at a distance of 4x less, so less hordes should be attracted to you in large areas.
Lowered the max_world_density from 500.0 to 200.0.
Less hordes should now populate world zones and the wilderness due to the above changes.

Known issues

Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.

3 hours ago, Venturai said:

Oh my. Installed this on the server I've got going with a couple friends on the morning of day 7, and come 10pm we ended up with hundreds of zombies. Brought my decent rig with a 3080 to its knees, ended up CTD.

Was a great mod up until then, the wandering hordes were terrific, but come horde night... something very broken with this one. Blood moon count set to 64, no other mods installed.

The mod does follow the max number of zombies that the game allows to be spawned, so I'm not sure what could have caused hundreds of zombies to spawn. You were using the previous version (2.0.0-alpha.4)?

1 hour ago, Cypherdiaz said:

My pleasure.

So the targeting of all these hordes were cause we were making heat? Ok that sounds fair.

My question is then...how far are we drawing them from?

We were in Desert Biome, edge of city (not the downtown area). It was just horde after horde after horde.

If they all happen to be in the wider area and its our heat thats pulling them...from..how far?

It felt like we pulled them from all over the city, based on what youre saying.

I looked through your settings but didnt change anything, were would one dictate how many active hordes are present at any given time?

Hoping that wasnt the 500 number i saw, cause that might explain it since while we are on a server, its only 8 people and we base and run missions together.

The hordes we saw were all 5-25ish, not sure if thats useful info or not but they were not small.

Based on another thing you said, the # of hordes per biome, where would one alter that?

Im all for tuning.

New update (2.0.0-alpha.5) has been pushed that adds a setting for the biome spawns as a multiplier (lower = more hordes, higher = less). I've nerfed the heat distance for now and added a multiplier for that should you want to further nerf or buff the changes. Also nerfed the number of hordes in the world quite hard this time.

As for number of zombies in the hordes, this is based on game stage (and a bit on the horde density), but do remember that a new change in A21 is that game stage now scales with your biome (and this is very true for snow/desert/wasteland). This will in turn reflect on the hordes you get with the mod. The goal is to have pine forest's be easy and wasteland be hard, though being near a city will guarantee you more horde encounters, I don't want it to be feeling anywhere near horde night.

I would much prefer I get complaints about not enough hordes than too many hordes, haha.

June 23, 2023

13 hours ago, Cypherdiaz said:

Trying out the newest version; 4.

CONCEPT: A+

INDIVIDUAL HORDES: A+

ENDLESS HORDES:????

So in short, love the mod, love the idea of the mod.

The individual hordes are great.

The frequency...is problematic.

My group just got hit with what I call an ENDLESS Horde. In truth it was 8 hordes on the edge of a city, just at 23:00. 8 Hordes, back to back.
Over 200 shells spent by our shotgunner, our M60 guy dropped about 3-4 belts. I went through 8 first aid bandages and 4 first aids (im group doc btw), and our archer dropped a bunch. We all gained 2-3 levels, and we are in the 60's range.

Now mind you, right before this, we had just dealt with 4 back to back hordes.

When we finally dealt with the 4, we had about 30seconds-1minute before the next horde was on us and then we could see 2more hordes heading our way before the first one was done; and then 3 more heading our way, etc.

We ended up logging, stopping the server, and removed the mod temporarily.

Again, I love it and its awesome, but horde after horde after horde. This was during day and night.

At day, in our base emptied about 4 stacks of shotgun shells and about 5 stacks of 9mm.

Requests:

Add some reasonable delay

Make it so that multiple hordes dont target in on you like someone just told the USA that you have oil in your back pocket.

Thanks for the feedback.

It would be difficult to implement a delay as hordes are now roaming (no longer spawned randomly like in the past), so after they spawn the AI decides which cities to go to (each horde has a different AI controller). What might be beneficial is tweaking horde populations depending on the biome, such that the forest has fewer roaming hordes and the wasteland has more. I'm currently working on this, so any towns or the wilderness in the forest will have fewer and smaller hordes which should align more with the linear progression of difficulty.

Horde targeting happens if you're generating lots of heat by making loud sounds (with guns) or a screamer screams. I've lowered the cool-down on this in the past and it seems better, but again the problem might be too many hordes present in easy biomes.

I may look to introducing a initial world population delay of hordes when starting a game for the first time, to try and balance out hordes in the early game.

June 22, 2023

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.4 for A21 EXP b317 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-alpha.4/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Added

Settings to control wilderness horde populations.
- wandering_animal_wilderness_sparsity controls how sparsely populated the world is with wandering_animal hordes. Higher number means more sparse.
- wandering_animal_enemy_wilderness_sparsity controls the sparsity of wandering_animal_enemy hordes in the wild.
- wandering_enemy_wilderness_sparsity controls the sparsity of wandering_enemy hordes.
- wilderness_horde_repopulation_days controls the number of days before hordes can repopulate in the wilderness.
- zone_horde_repopulation_days controls the number of days before hordes can repopulate in POI zones.

Changed

Lowered the sparsity settings to lower the wilderness horde spawns.
- Number of hordes in POI zones have been lightly increased to compensate. There will be fewer hordes in the world with the new default settings.
Lowered entity counts in hordes and changed some game stage requirements. Game stage calculations for player groups within view distance have been re-done to be more closely aligned to the way the game calculates game stage for partied members.

Fixed

World horde state is not saved. Hordes respawn every time the game is started.
- Data is now saved residing in the same folder as the game data, in ImprovedHordes.bin.
- Hordes will now be saved to their last known locations and resume doing whatever they were doing when you last played.
- Clearing areas out of hordes is also saved until the next time the world is repopulated with hordes (default setting is after 7 days).

Known issues

Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.

June 21, 2023

17 hours ago, Picklefart said:

This release is definitely more tamed than the previous versions. I seldomly have screamers around the house maybe 1 a day. I do run into clusters of zombies frozen in place waiting for me to approach the activation range.

Good to hear. Zombies frozen in place might be a bug with sleepers / the AI lagging behind, I'll look into it.

June 20, 2023

4 hours ago, Dragonchampion said:

REALLY want to use it but most horde mods just don't have the oomph that I want, Is there a way to edit the amounts of the mod to make it have x10 the zombies?

Yeah, edit the hordes xml file in the Config/ImprovedHordes folder in the mod folder and play around with the entity counts to get bigger hordes. You can check out the wiki (linked in main post) to find out what everything does.

There will be more settings in a later update for customising how hordes are populated throughout the world.

53 minutes ago, fnfear said:

Day 28 horde was a cluster fk. There were probably 200+ zombies at all times and at the end of the horde suddenly like 100 radiated screamers spawned lmao, here's a screenshot of the screamers coming in, idk why the screenshots became white like this but I kept trying to take new ones and they all got like that 😕

Huh. Are you running the latest version of the mod? Screamers should be much more reduced now, but never seen this o_o

June 19, 2023

28 minutes ago, Picklefart said:

Not sure if this information helps but I was having a little fun and went into DM mode and got my gamestage up to 89 sat in the house with a forge going inside and set time lapse to the 40-50 speed range. Two days may have passed and ended up with what seemed to be around 12-15 screamers as well a massive amount of zombies.

Zombies seems to just linger back and forth once they reach the point of where the screamer sent the alert out. I was in a dense city in the pine forest in the suburban outskirts. Again not sure if this information helps but thought I'd share the experience.

This mod was a staple in my alpha 20 gameplay it's definitely a must for me. Can't wait to see it in its final stage.

New update should be more balanced now, there should be less screamers popping up and less aggressive hordes.

June 19, 2023

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.3 for A21 EXP b317 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-alpha.3/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Added

Horde biome splitting
- Hordes now split when crossing into another biome of a lower difficulty into multiple hordes, that then choose to go different paths.
- This prevents wasteland hordes from crossing into pine forests and being 1.8x more dense (by default settings).

Changed

Increased world event decay rate so that heatmap events decay much faster, this should prevent hordes/screamers from being attracted too often.
- If you fire a gun non-stop, then expect hordes to show up, otherwise if you carefully shoot your gun on occasion you shouldn't be attracting far away hordes.
Screamer zone radius has been reduced.
- Screamers often wandered the outskirts of a city zone, now they should stick close to the center, so you shouldn't be running into them too often outside of town.
Screamer zone density spawn requirement increased from 0.5 to 0.75.
- This should spawn less screamers in densely populated towns/cities.
Tweak horde group wandering_enemy game stage entity counts.

Fixed

#10 - Sleeping hordes do not awaken if you get close. Now sleeping zombies wake up if you get within 15m.

Known issues

Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
Some horde entities may not despawn properly when quickly teleporting around.
World horde state is not saved. Hordes respawn every time the game is started.

June 19, 2023

24 minutes ago, ZombieMikeG said:

I had to take the mod out for now. Screamers bring in 2-3 hordes, which brings in screamers, and if I wasn't already at my horde base, it wouldn't have been survivable (like if it happened at my home). And my horde base is nowhere near a city (though it IS in the wasteland, on the edge near forest). I just had my 3rd blood moon and that was easier, lol.

Hordes get bigger depending on the biome difficulty, so in your case you might be getting big hordes because of being near the wasteland.

Next update should see big hordes split when they enter a different biome if they are too dense/hard for the biome they are in. Additionally, heat intensity is being reduced and will expire much quicker which should attract less hordes/screamers unless you're rapidly firing a gun at a horde within a couple of seconds. I'm also reducing the screamer wander radius outside of cities so they stick closer to the center, because as of right now they like to wander around the outskirts a lot.

Hope you'll give the mod another try at stable release, should be a lot better by then.

June 19, 2023

25 minutes ago, ktrain said:

Will the addons be updated to work with the new version?

Yes, expect add-ons to be updated closer to the stable release of 2.0.0. The experimental phase is mainly balancing out the base systems and adding in any additional large features.

Based on add-on downloads, users seemed to enjoy having larger hordes on average, so the A21 version includes a mix of horde sizes to make each horde feel slightly different (some bigger, some smaller) on top of the game staged horde sizes. You can expect to find a lot more hordes near towns/cities, with their size varying on the size of the area, while hordes in the wild will be on the smaller side. You can on occasion, come across a large horde wandering toward a town in the wild. There will be an updated bigger hordes add-on that should work quite nicely with this feature.

The random hordes add-on was also quite popular, so an updated random hordes add-on with this new system would mean even more random hordes.

June 19, 2023

17 hours ago, Picklefart said:

Just to add, I have set up my base in a large dense city in the pine forest. I have been occuring some pretty massive sized hordes when the 3 screamers appear (2-3 times a day on 60 min days). Testing out the new release you just provided. I noticed you changed the merge distance from 100 down to 50. Do you believe they were just coming in from to far off?

I'm thinking there's still too much merging going on when hordes get too close, which results in more unevenly distributed hordes where you get huge ones in zones instead of multiple clusters within a zone. I'm going to be tweaking the parameters to prevent this from happening too often, because it's not meant to feel like a blood moon horde all the time.

June 18, 2023

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-alpha.2 for A21 EXP b317 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-alpha.2/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Changed

Horde unload merge distance reduced from 100 to 50 m.
WorldZoneHordePopulator player/cluster radius check reduced from POI zone size to view distance.

Fixed

Exception thrown when a GS tag within a defined group does not have a max or increaseEvery attribute. Now randomizes entity counts instead.
max_entities_spawned_per_player setting does not spawn any entities if set below 0 (i.e. -1 to disable horde entity spawn limit).

Known issues

Horde respawning of same type/number of entities inconsistent.
Some horde entities may not despawn properly when quickly teleporting around.
World horde state is not saved. Hordes respawn every time the game is started.

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