Alpha 19 (A19) WalkerSim - Enhanced roaming zombies

[Cork55]

7 hours ago, Reckis said:

I love the sound of this! How hard is it to get up and running?

For a dedicated server, you simply copy the mod into the Mods folder. That's it. The viewer would need to be set up to work with the server, so I did not try that.

 

What was neat was seeing the initial "wave" of zeds slowly appearing on the horizon. I felt like I needed to keep moving or risk getting surrounded by too many zeds. 

 

 

[ZehMatt]

Update 8/27/2020, Version: 0.2.1

- DMT support, you can now play this mod without a dedicated server.

Download: https://github.com/ZehMatt/7dtd-WalkerSim/releases/tag/0.2.1

 

 

[mr.devolver]

6 hours ago, ZehMatt said:

Update 8/27/2020, Version: 0.2.1

- DMT support, you can now play this mod without a dedicated server.

Download: https://github.com/ZehMatt/7dtd-WalkerSim/releases/tag/0.2.1

 

 

This should be fun!

 

EDIT:

Oh man, why does something like the following always has to ruin the fun?

 

Mod Launcher says:

Failed to compile Mods.dll
Build failed

process exited with error code -1

 

Edited August 28, 2020 by mr.devolver (see edit history)

[ZehMatt]

30 minutes ago, mr.devolver said:

This should be fun!

 

EDIT:

Oh man, why does something like the following always has to ruin the fun?

 

Mod Launcher says:

Failed to compile Mods.dll
Build failed

process exited with error code -1

 

Make sure you use the latest DMT, I've been testing this with DMT 2.1.7533.22426

[mr.devolver]

26 minutes ago, ZehMatt said:

Make sure you use the latest DMT, I've been testing this with DMT 2.1.7533.22426

I'm using Mod Launcher and it looks like it's downloading and installing DMT automatically. I'm not sure if I can just update its files where Mod Launcher is storing it. You know, Mod Launcher may be editing those files to make DMT work within itself, so if I downloaded a new version of DMT manually and just replaced the files, I would probably break it.

[mr.devolver]

So I managed to manually switch Mod Launcher's own DMT with the newer version of it, but Mod Launcher doesn't seem to like it, it gives me some error, but it actually does build the mod correctly with that new DMT version. So the game with this mod seems to work, but I have another issue. Every time I quit the game and go to main menu, console shows up and it's full of red NRE errors.

Edited August 28, 2020 by mr.devolver (see edit history)

[xyth]

I poked Sphereii to update the DMT version used by the launcher.

[mr.devolver]

21 minutes ago, xyth said:

I poked Sphereii to update the DMT version used by the launcher.

Thank you, I just hope it will not break NPCs and other cool DMT mods.

[ZehMatt]

19 hours ago, mr.devolver said:

So I managed to manually switch Mod Launcher's own DMT with the newer version of it, but Mod Launcher doesn't seem to like it, it gives me some error, but it actually does build the mod correctly with that new DMT version. So the game with this mod seems to work, but I have another issue. Every time I quit the game and go to main menu, console shows up and it's full of red NRE errors.

If you can provide a log for when it happens that would be great, I'm unable to reproduce this here.

[danielspoa]

guys, Im giving it a try and I have a few questions. Basically Im LOVING the "outside", going to the city is cool as f. But entering two houses I noticed no zombies inside, and a clean way to a safe. Is there a way to keep the sleepers working or - even better - have a few zombies walking in the house replacing the sleepers?

My other two questions are:
1 - how does it interact with wandering hordes and screamers? are those removed?
2 - I saw it doesn't keep the gamestage in mind when spawning the zombies, as said by preference. Is it hard to make gamestage affect it? Im just starting with harmony and all this coding stuff , quite a noob still

thank you

[mr.devolver]

5 hours ago, ZehMatt said:

If you can provide a log for when it happens that would be great, I'm unable to reproduce this here.

I can do that, but I must wonder if it has something to do with the way I installed it, by forcing Mod Launcher to use that new DMT version. Maybe doing it that way wasn't the best idea.

Edited August 29, 2020 by mr.devolver (see edit history)

[xyth]

The launcher should be updated now to use DMT 2.1

[mr.devolver]

1 minute ago, xyth said:

The launcher should be updated now to use DMT 2.1

Thank you, I will try this again and see if it behaves better this time.

[mr.devolver]

So I let Mod Launcher update DMT normally, builds it fine with no errors this time and this is weird but the errors in game console are gone too today lol

[mr.devolver]

@ZehMatt, I was playing with it, trying to reproduce it and it happened again. Looks like it happens after some longer time spent in game and then returning to menu.

output_log.txt

[ZehMatt]

On 8/29/2020 at 4:02 PM, danielspoa said:

guys, Im giving it a try and I have a few questions. Basically Im LOVING the "outside", going to the city is cool as f. But entering two houses I noticed no zombies inside, and a clean way to a safe. Is there a way to keep the sleepers working or - even better - have a few zombies walking in the house replacing the sleepers?

My other two questions are:
1 - how does it interact with wandering hordes and screamers? are those removed?
2 - I saw it doesn't keep the gamestage in mind when spawning the zombies, as said by preference. Is it hard to make gamestage affect it? Im just starting with harmony and all this coding stuff , quite a noob still

thank you

Screamers are still unaffected as far as I know, you might have not seen any sleepers wake up if you exhausted the maximum zombies that can be alive. I need to look into a potential issue here. I might need to reduce the maximum zombies that are outside by preserving a certain amount for sleepers or something. Regarding game stage, it might be a bit overwhelming when you are at a game stage like 300 and have about 4k zombies roaming, I need to experiment with this.

 

13 hours ago, mr.devolver said:

@ZehMatt, I was playing with it, trying to reproduce it and it happened again. Looks like it happens after some longer time spent in game and then returning to menu.

output_log.txt 1.94 MB · 0 downloads

Thanks, ill look into it.

[danielspoa]

sleepers work in quests, if thats relevant 😁

[mr.devolver]

Ok, so I played with this mod a little bit and here are my thoughts...

 

Do you remember the neverending hordes that used to be in the cities in vanilla game? I always loved that idea of world full of zombies, but then I realized how flawed the original vanilla implementation was. The problem was that the hordes were never ending to the point that it was impossible for single player to loot the city. This led to frustration of many people including myself, because no matter how good I was at shooting, no matter how good weapons and armor I had, no matter how much ammo I had when I entered the city, once the zombie hordes sensed me, they kept spawning and chasing me infinitely, no matter how many of them I killed.

 

This mod kinda reminds me of that era. Not in a bad way though, because with this mod, I see a chance to get the implementation of the original vision right. While I'm a fan of bigger amount of zombies, I'm not a fan of never ending hordes, because they may be realistic, but not fun and not viable for a long term gameplay. After long years of feedback, TFP came to a conclusion that their implementation of realism with many zombies was a bad idea and unfortunately, rather than trying to find ways to improve it, they decided to dramatically change the whole system of zombie spawning that would no longer produce huge groups of zombies in the cities. While that solved the problem with never ending hordes in the cities, in the same time it made the world feel empty, with occasional zombie here and there which is not the ideal middle ground zombie game fans would expect to see in games like this.

 

What I'd love to see is world full of zombies, but with the ability to clear out an area to make it safe for base purposes, safe looting, etc. Zombies should be dumb, so killing the horde of say 30 shouldn't necessarily mean that 5974 other zombies will immediately go after me to avenge their fallen friends and this is where the original vanilla implementation of big hordes failed at. I wish this mod could fill up that gap for us, but please don't feel under pressure here. This is just my opinion, this is your mod and I will respect if your vision is different.

Edited August 30, 2020 by mr.devolver (see edit history)

[ZehMatt]

9 hours ago, mr.devolver said:

Ok, so I played with this mod a little bit and here are my thoughts...

 

Do you remember the neverending hordes that used to be in the cities in vanilla game? I always loved that idea of world full of zombies, but then I realized how flawed the original vanilla implementation was. The problem was that the hordes were never ending to the point that it was impossible for single player to loot the city. This led to frustration of many people including myself, because no matter how good I was at shooting, no matter how good weapons and armor I had, no matter how much ammo I had when I entered the city, once the zombie hordes sensed me, they kept spawning and chasing me infinitely, no matter how many of them I killed.

 

This mod kinda reminds me of that era. Not in a bad way though, because with this mod, I see a chance to get the implementation of the original vision right. While I'm a fan of bigger amount of zombies, I'm not a fan of never ending hordes, because they may be realistic, but not fun and not viable for a long term gameplay. After long years of feedback, TFP came to a conclusion that their implementation of realism with many zombies was a bad idea and unfortunately, rather than trying to find ways to improve it, they decided to dramatically change the whole system of zombie spawning that would no longer produce huge groups of zombies in the cities. While that solved the problem with never ending hordes in the cities, in the same time it made the world feel empty, with occasional zombie here and there which is not the ideal middle ground zombie game fans would expect to see in games like this.

 

What I'd love to see is world full of zombies, but with the ability to clear out an area to make it safe for base purposes, safe looting, etc. Zombies should be dumb, so killing the horde of say 30 shouldn't necessarily mean that 5974 other zombies will immediately go after me to avenge their fallen friends and this is where the original vanilla implementation of big hordes failed at. I wish this mod could fill up that gap for us, but please don't feel under pressure here. This is just my opinion, this is your mod and I will respect if your vision is different.

First of all I'm grateful about the feedback, this is the kind of stuff I need to have the default configuration enjoyable. Most of the simulation is parameterized so I can just tweak the values for what it needs adjusting for. Right now the default population density size is 125 per square km, this is a huge density. You can change this to to a lower number lets say 35, which is about what the United States has. To do so you need to copy the "WalkerSim.xml" into "%7DaysToDiePath%\Mods\WalkerSim\WalkerSim.xml", there you can change "<PopulationDensity>120</PopulationDensity>" to "<PopulationDensity>35</PopulationDensity>", this should create a new simulation when you change the parameters.

 

Also clearing areas should be no problem for as long you dont shoot around, silenced weapons have a really small radius of who gets notified. Also with the reduced density this should feel way more natural, what you are playing against right now is probably something like Hong Kong where a lot of people are close to each other

 

Also feel free to mess around with the other parameters and use the viewer to inspect whats going on.

[Yakov]

Might have to change some defaults myself. 50fps on a 2080ti isnt a good sign haha. testing this mod to use on my server

[Cork55]

I love this mod. Been running this on my test server and here are my observations:

 

Initial server settings - Insane difficulty, walk-walk-sprint-sprint, 80 zombies plus vanilla walkersim settings

 

This was very very intense. After a few minutes there were zeds everywhere. We had to continuously run to avoid getting overwhelmed. It was difficult to do much non-killing activities due to the constant throngs of zeds.

 

Tried a different set-up.  

 

Second server settings - Warrior difficulty, walk-walk-sprint-sprint, 64 zombies plus vanilla walkersim settings except that I lowered the Population density to 70 from 120.

 

Still very intense, but just slightly. A bit easier to kill the zeds so I might up the difficulty to Survivalist. Still have to move a lot to avoid getting overwhelmed. I did see sleepers inside buildings so they appear to be working fine on my server.

 

Performance has been silky smooth with a lot of zeds on screen and they appear to exhibit a nice range of behavior. Some wander aimlessly while others seem to head right to me once the "notice" my presence. As someone else mentioned above, is there a way to allow the player to temporarily "clear out" an area to be able to have a tiny break from the zeds.

 

Picture below is with a Population density of 70. There are 9 zeds in front of me and another 6 to 8 on my sides and behind me.

 

Edited August 31, 2020 by Cork55 (see edit history)

[mr.devolver]

49 minutes ago, Cork55 said:

As someone else mentioned above, is there a way to allow the player to temporarily "clear out" an area to be able to have a tiny break from the zeds.

It was me, I still haven't found a real way to clear out an area. The mod is nice, but with no chance to clear out an area of zombies, there's no way you could easily set up a base and defend it for a long time...

 

I decided to try some extra settings not existing in base mod, to "dumb" the zombies down a little bit by reducing their vision, so that they will have harder time to see you - frankly with such a high amount of zombies this totally makes sense as the vanilla settings that make the zombies much more sensitive are meant for much smaller groups of zombies. It seems to help a little bit, but it's still impossible to build a base without the place getting constantly crowded with zombies.

Edited August 31, 2020 by mr.devolver (see edit history)

[Cork55]

Perhaps a delay in re-spawning the zeds at the edge of the map after they are killed. This might create a ripple effect where the zeds wander in waves. How low have you set the population density mr.devolver?

[mr.devolver]

15 minutes ago, Cork55 said:

Perhaps a delay in re-spawning the zeds at the edge of the map after they are killed. This might create a ripple effect where the zeds wander in waves. How low have you set the population density mr.devolver?

I'm currently testing density 10. I know it's low, but I'm playing this solo right now, I figured that it'd be best to find the best number for one person and increase it accordingly when more people join and I noticed that when you shoot couple of times, you're soon surrounded by the whole horde of zombies, even with this low number, so yeah... I'm still trying to find a good number.

[Cork55]

Upping my test server to Survivalist difficulty and lowering the population density to 50. We will see how this plays out.