Awful zombie spawn positions

[ZehMatt]

I'm a bit annoyed about where zombies may or may not be located/spawned. 

 

Most annoying ones:

1. Inside a wardrobe

  - How the @%$*#! did he get there and why is he staying in there?

2. Ceilings

  - How the @%$*#! did he get there and why is he staying in there?

3. Random

  - Yes, this is still happening and its annoying as hell. Walking around a corner and turning back, a new zombie has appeared.

 

For me this is the biggest immersion breaker ever, game or not, when something makes absolutely no sense regardless in what abstract universe its just silly. There are better ways to have more than enough zombies without having to rely on silly jump scares.

 

The alternative

Take my Server Mod as an example to how you could do zombies.

Legend:

- Red Dot: Roaming offline zombie (Not yet active in the game world)

- Cyan Dot: Roaming Sleeper Zombie (Not yet active in the game world)

- Blue Dot: Active game zombie (Actual spawned zombie)

- Red Rectangle: Player visibility zone (Each player has this)

 

The way this works is pretty simple:

- The player visibility zone controls if the zombie is supposed to be spawned or de-spawned, the zone should be large enough for players not being able to see them spawn.

- Zombies will always start at the border of the map and travel to a random location, when destination reached they pick a new location nearby.

- Sleeper Zombies will always travel to their desired sleeper position.

- When zombies are killed, a new zombie will start at the border.

- When a zombie crosses the border, he starts again at the opposite side.

 

I really hope the developers can take out some inspiration from this, its not very difficult to do and the offline simulation is very cheap and does not have to be accurate at all.

This simulation at least gives the player the impression that the whole world has turned into zombies and that they actually come from somewhere (no explanation needed).

 

Given that what I've built is merely a proof-of-concept thing you can have something better like flock simulations, heat map attraction and so on.

 

Having them stored in POIs and randomly spawn them "when not in sight" is just lame (sorry but that's what it is)

 

Source: https://github.com/ZehMatt/7dtd-WalkerSim

[Lorca]

I miss the free roaming zombies of A15, and the large number of them.  The sleeper zombies that are all hiding in funny places make the world feel empty. 

[captincorpse]

On 8/6/2020 at 11:17 AM, Lorca said:

I miss the free roaming zombies of A15, and the large number of them.  The sleeper zombies that are all hiding in funny places make the world feel empty. 

Same, I enjoyed having more roaming zombies. The sleeper zombies was a fun addition but not at the cost of removing 90% of the roaming zombies

[smokingpaper]

On 8/6/2020 at 4:36 PM, ZehMatt said:

I'm a bit annoyed about where zombies may or may not be located/spawned. 

 

Most annoying ones:

1. Inside a wardrobe

  - How the @%$*#! did he get there and why is he staying in there?

2. Ceilings

 - How the @%$*#! did he get there and why is he staying in there?

 

Well, if you use a little imagination you can think of certain possibilities.
Maybe they werent zombies at the point they get inside a wardrobe, hiding there in fear after being bitten and then turn into one.
Same for the ceiling.
Hell, I don't know.

 

1 hour ago, captincorpse said:

Same, I enjoyed having more roaming zombies. The sleeper zombies was a fun addition but not at the cost of removing 90% of the roaming zombies

Agreed.

[SylenThunder]

On 8/6/2020 at 11:17 AM, Lorca said:

I miss the free roaming zombies of A15, and the large number of them.  The sleeper zombies that are all hiding in funny places make the world feel empty. 

No, I miss from alpha 13 when there were about 5x more free roaming zeds. They were greatly nerfed in a14 due to UMA.

[Teacyn]

Yeah I strongly wish there were more roaming zombies, potentially on long re-spawn timers to allow players to "clear out" areas (but they'll always be back eventually)

[Gideon]

More roaming zombies is easily accomplished by tweaking some of the xml files. I'm not saying you should have to, just that it is easily achieved.

 

I think the sleepers jumping out of things/falling down is supposed to represent a horror movie sort of jump scare.

 

As for zombies appearing out of thin air behind you, I've seen people complain about this for quite a while, and never ONCE experienced it myself. Every time I have had a zombie come up behind me, it is always in circumstances where I didn't clear a room completely or they pathed in to me from outside if I'm in a building already.

[pApA^LeGBa]

5 hours ago, SylenThunder said:

No, I miss from alpha 13 when there were about 5x more free roaming zeds. They were greatly nerfed in a14 due to UMA.

That was one of the worst decisions for this game imo. Putting graphics over gameplay is never a good idea. We can just hope that there is a way to get back to the amount of zombies roaming around.

 

There has been a lot of progression since then, a lot of it were good things. But that is all useless if the world stays as empty as it is now. And bandits won´t change that.

 

I still do have fun playing it, but only because i still have hope that the amount of zombies will be higher again at release. If they now tell me this will never happen i would propably be done with the game i guess.

 

We need the slider in the menu back that allowed us to regulate how many zombies there are. Not everyone would be happy with the amount of zombies that we used to have.

[leaderdog]

3 hours ago, Gideon said:

More roaming zombies is easily accomplished by tweaking some of the xml files. I'm not saying you should have to, just that it is easily achieved.

 

I think the sleepers jumping out of things/falling down is supposed to represent a horror movie sort of jump scare.

 

As for zombies appearing out of thin air behind you, I've seen people complain about this for quite a while, and never ONCE experienced it myself. Every time I have had a zombie come up behind me, it is always in circumstances where I didn't clear a room completely or they pathed in to me from outside if I'm in a building already.

The house where the kitchen floor (I believe) falls out and you drop into a pool of water.  In the closet in the kitchen there is a ladder down.  I ran into one of these houses and smashed open the closet door and climbed down the ladder quickly.  ran into the room and slowed to look for zombies.  I got hit from behind.  Apparently a zombie spawn point is right at the bottom of those stairs. 

 

Next time I did it, I climbed down the stairs then turned around quickly and there it was.  But it was not visible either time I came down the stairs.  And no it didn't come down after I went in.

 

I've even had loot spawn in after I ran past an area. back tracked and saw it there.  so some of the loading is delayed i guess.

[Teacyn]

7 hours ago, leaderdog said:

I've even had loot spawn in after I ran past an area. back tracked and saw it there.  so some of the loading is delayed i guess.

Wouldn't surprise me, almost all POIs have "Intended" paths through them which are usually intentionally slower than just breaking in.

[Outlaw_187]

Someone mentioned in another thread about possibly putting in some generic, low texture (or however they would do it), zombies to over populate some areas, for instance cities. 

This could be a great idea but could also somewhat dilute and or take away from the cool hd looking zombies. 

I'm kinda 50/50 on this idea. Definitely sounds good in theory.

[eXSe]

I don't know what they think was accomplished with the introduction of sleepers and dungeon POI's, but I'm not a fan. Game just feels empty and linear and instead of searching the house and looting anything and everything you might find because there isn't any "special place every house has that has goodies piled up in it", you're better of just targeting that loot room and skipping the Nth drudgery of rinse and repeat linear clean up job.

[Anoraki]

I've been wanting a system like this that's map-wide. Maybe each dot wouldn't represent a single zombie, but a horde. Combined with the zombie area density system in games like Project Zomboid, it'd make it so you could actually make a dense city slowly more empty of zombies, and more would come in over time.

 

Not sure if that'd fix zombies popping in unless the system was very reliable, especially in multiplayer where the server and clients go out-of-sync.

[Vedui]

Yes, alpha ... 17 was it? Where they started adding way too many jump scare zombies. I get the feeling the new POI's in Alpha 19 they are trying to tone that down.

 

It was fairly peculiar to always find zombies in wardrobes (which can't be open/closed), or up in ceilings (where there are false ceilings and no ladders and no access).

 

Great for jump scares once in a blue moon. Pretty overdone when every single POI has it

[ZehMatt]

I had a small base for the blood nights setup on my first in-game week and on day 7 I had the most ridiculous moment with zombies. Around 10 or so spawned around a corner of a building and started to line up and just ran towards a some direction totally ignoring me, too bad I didn't record it, it looked like a zombie train not knowing where to go. The second blood night was a bit different, they just spawned wherever they could be placed nearby me (The In-Game God at play again)

 

The game is still plenty fun, but as some others mentioned the POI's also have a very linear progression/fixed path that you are supposed to take, not taking the intended path leads often to awkward moments where you just have zombies spawn where you just walked by, not fun. I'm also not saying to just take my approach as is, but the general idea is to have roaming zombies populated all over the map which would bring a better scenario in general to the game, we all know that the world is a pretty big place meaning a lot of zombies everywhere. And if you wonder why should they ever walk towards you? Lets just say you fired a gun, any gun, they are brutally loud and you can hear gunshots from miles away usually which should attract more zombies to walk towards this direction.

 

I've worked with Source Engine, Unity, Unreal Engine and I can think of so many ways to compensate the fact that you can only spawn so many zombies before the CPU is starting to cry. I can not comment on what the current performance bottleneck is but if you look around on articles that simulate hundreds of zombies it should be pretty clear that the issue is certainly NOT a technical limit.

 

Just have a look at this game: 

 

 

Thats how it should be

 

[ElCabong]

The only thing I detest about this are the ones that spawn at random behind you. When you walk through an empty room only to have a z spawn behind you, it removes all the skill out of cleaning a room. You might as well just walk through banging on the walls with a club to wake everybody up.

 

Having them hide in various places is just fine with me. I've also encountered horde zombies. It's a lot of fun to take them all out with just a baseball bat.

[Boidster]

2 hours ago, ZehMatt said:

if you look around on articles that simulate hundreds of zombies it should be pretty clear that the issue is certainly NOT a technical limit.

UEBS? Oh lord you're going to wind up SylenThunder for sure. Apples to artichokes.

 

If you have a machine just moderately above the "minimum" specs for 7D2D you absolutely can double or triple the number of wandering zombies in the game without problem. If you have anything approaching a current-gen gaming rig, you could probably go 6x or 8x I dunno. My PC is only mid-potato strength and I run my server with 4x spawns.

2 hours ago, ZehMatt said:

I've worked with Source Engine, Unity, Unreal Engine and I can think of so many ways to compensate the fact that you can only spawn so many zombies before the CPU is starting to cry.

You should submit your résumé.

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, Boidster said:

UEBS? Oh lord you're going to wind up SylenThunder for sure. Apples to artichokes.

 

If you have a machine just moderately above the "minimum" specs for 7D2D you absolutely can double or triple the number of wandering zombies in the game without problem. If you have anything approaching a current-gen gaming rig, you could probably go 6x or 8x I dunno. My PC is only mid-potato strength and I run my server with 4x spawns.

You should submit your résumé.

Yes, @ZehMatt should apply.  He has some interesting ideas in spawning. 😀

[ZehMatt]

4 hours ago, Boidster said:

UEBS? Oh lord you're going to wind up SylenThunder for sure. Apples to artichokes.

 

If you have a machine just moderately above the "minimum" specs for 7D2D you absolutely can double or triple the number of wandering zombies in the game without problem. If you have anything approaching a current-gen gaming rig, you could probably go 6x or 8x I dunno. My PC is only mid-potato strength and I run my server with 4x spawns.

You should submit your résumé.

The best I ever got was about 20 zombies or so on the i9-10900k before the FPS started to drop significantly which is still nothing. There are games from 2004 which could handle way more enemies on your screen, so this is not a CPU problem. Our modern CPUs can even easily handle fluid simulations without having to rely on GPUs anymore, there is definitely a problem with how the zombies are handled in the game and not how our current hardware is unable to keep up, thats just nonsense.

 

I also applied a few years back, I never heard back, literally nothing, currently I also have a job as a software engineer, not looking to change jobs right now. I'm just trying to put in some feedback from what I've gathered from my current A19 play. The game has certainly improved a bit performance wise but whenever I switch back to lets say A16 then the current version is rather a downgrade performance wise and not better. Too much focus went on graphics rather than mechanics which for me got worse every iteration, I've quit my run at day 15 as it felt like I don't need to achieve anything anymore, I can't quite explain why, the first few in-game days were pretty fun but then it just got a bit annoying with the leveling and having to read books where a "probably" grown up man would already know those things just growing up.

 

Edit: I also might look into updating my WalkerSim mod, which does exactly what I mentioned in my first post, it was built for A18 so its probably not gonna work as it is. I had quite a few plans before I got busy with life again.

[Gideon]

On 8/7/2020 at 9:53 PM, leaderdog said:

The house where the kitchen floor (I believe) falls out and you drop into a pool of water.  In the closet in the kitchen there is a ladder down.  I ran into one of these houses and smashed open the closet door and climbed down the ladder quickly.  ran into the room and slowed to look for zombies.  I got hit from behind.  Apparently a zombie spawn point is right at the bottom of those stairs. 

 

Next time I did it, I climbed down the stairs then turned around quickly and there it was.  But it was not visible either time I came down the stairs.  And no it didn't come down after I went in.

 

I've even had loot spawn in after I ran past an area. back tracked and saw it there.  so some of the loading is delayed i guess.

So, what I'm seeing from your comment is that if I'm actively trying to break spawns so that things appear out of thin air, then I can break spawns so that things appear out of thin air.

I'm not saying it is okay that spawns can be broken so that things just appear, I just want to be clear. It breaks because you're trying to break it.

[Teacyn]

11 minutes ago, Gideon said:

So, what I'm seeing from your comment is that if I'm actively trying to break spawns so that things appear out of thin air, then I can break spawns so that things appear out of thin air.

I'm not saying it is okay that spawns can be broken so that things just appear, I just want to be clear. It breaks because you're trying to break it.

it's more an issue of the strange """"Dungeon"""" design of POIs in modern 7D2D that has lead to this even being a problem in the first place. There shouldn't be a @%$*#!ing, "wrong way" to loot a random house or store, but there is. Instead of doing logical things like breaking down doors and looting as fast as possible, you're expected to take these weird-@%$*#! winding paths through otherwise completely normal houses, and if you don't follow them then stuff magically spawns in behind you.

[pApA^LeGBa]

Yeah, so it is not to your liking because you can´t just grab the loot superfast. Who would have thought. Is it logical to break down doors and make noise in a zombie apocalypse or should you rather be as quiet as possible?

 

Also this isn´t a pure FPS where this logic would be ok, it´s a genre mix, welcome to the RPG part of the game. Fast in and fast out by breaking trough every barrier get´s boring fast also.

[Axonius]

For the zombies in closets and ceilings - I like to think this was a normal infected human that was hiding. Then died. Rigor mortis sets in (thus standing in place). Then they turn into a zombie. Then you step on a piece of paper and wake them up.

 

This is based on established medical facts and logic.

[KennyBMallNinja]

7 hours ago, Teacyn said:

it's more an issue of the strange """"Dungeon"""" design of POIs in modern 7D2D that has lead to this even being a problem in the first place. There shouldn't be a @%$*#!ing, "wrong way" to loot a random house or store, but there is. Instead of doing logical things like breaking down doors and looting as fast as possible, you're expected to take these weird-@%$*#! winding paths through otherwise completely normal houses, and if you don't follow them then stuff magically spawns in behind you.

I'm not seeing that on my system. I routinely go into buildings through windows and shimmying my way up to 2nd levels and never had spawn magically appear. I also routinely pop doors and other hidey holes Zeds like to take naps behind. I tend to have more of them show up from outside as I am looting a building rather than in the room with me. However on the console which is in A15 I have had zombie stand up literally as I am riding through an area on my minibike.

[Solomon]

You open a big vault door what leads into a molten metal container, the moment you stepped in the game spawned 6 burning zombies above you in a clear circle to jump on you.

 

Gotta say this sounds like some cheesy bull@%$*#! written on tumblr for some zombie webcomic and it doesnt get any better. The worst i hate is those zombies in the safe room on military poi, you somehow manage to get inside the area and this 4 guys all crammed up into the wall behind some filmsy metal brake out to kill you, like damm did you all just decided to go zombify in the least comfortable area with your friends to look like sardinies in a can?