Is there any "subtlety" with Feral Sense?

[ricp]

Turned it on, and happy with the amount of action it brings - upping the difficulty to something like warrior and starting in a snow biome and the early game becomes quite the struggle.

However, my question is regarding how subtle the effect is. Does it just say, "right, zombies, you are within XXX metres away, you now are continually locked on the player until you die or they do", or does it factor in things like game stage, difficulty and/or biome?

Apologies if there is a lengthy topic covering this, I did a search but didn't see a dedicated thread.

 

[meganoth]

It just increases the senses of zombies by a factor and lets the AI do the rest.

 

[ricp]

5 minutes ago, meganoth said:

It just increases the senses of zombies by a factor and lets the AI do the rest.

 

I wonder if some balancing will be introduced.

 

As I say, I like the inclusion because I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking A20 is pretty damned easy without it. Even with bumping the difficulty and dropping into harsher biomes. I feel it's a bit of a "blunt object" just now, though, when maybe something a little more elegant would offset the disparity of the very early days in a playthrough.

[Viktoriusiii]

I feel like upping the zombies pawns 2-4x increases the fun much more.

But feral sense feels wrong. They don't "see" 20 blocks, but hear you for 50 (in broad daylight) Even very silent noises will be heard from very far away, while they can't see you even with a clear line of sight.

I feel it should be the other way around. Only hear loud sounds from far away but see you in daytime for a lot of blocks
 

[Laz Man]

Last time I checked it was roughly double line of sight and hearing.  Lighting impacts line of sight though so if you are standing in a shadow it probably reduces their ability to see you as well.

[Mahnogard]

I turned Feral Sense on for the first time yesterday. I had started a new save (I do that a lot) and decided to turn it on, did the tutorial then shut down for a few hours because I was hungover. I started it up several hours later, forgot I had turned FS on and went to do a trader quest. I heard all this noise behind me and realized I had collected my own little horde. And then more showed up, and then while I was in the POI I could hear them beating on the walls trying to get to me. 

 

I don't know that I'd play with it on all the time, but I like it. It felt pretty natural in that scenario because I wasn't trying to be quiet so area zombies coming to check out the noise makes sense. But I tend to play long days / fast progression and having all those extra zeds in my face definitely super-charges the leveling so I might need to reconsider my other settings if I keep it on. I'll be running into glowies and spitters quite quickly if I keep going this way. 😁

[Boidster]

51 minutes ago, Viktoriusiii said:

I feel it should be the other way around. Only hear loud sounds from far away but see you in daytime for a lot of blocks

 

I think that since the game doesn't actually model "feral" at all, it uses hearing as a rough approximation. If the idea is that zombies have some sort of extra-sensory or supernatural zombie feral sense, then being able to hear you 100m away search through a trash pile kinda sort of produces the result they're going for. Zombies have a special ability to detect you. Maybe when we reduce it to "sound level" and "line of sight" we're oversimplifying what TFP is going for. But all they have to work with in the game engine is sound and LoS so that's how the changes in the AI are documented.

 

Think of it like the old raw meat sense they used to have, except now you are the raw meat.

[Loboling]

I hope they do expand this back to what I thought was the original design: A slider for sight and sound. Then players can easily adjust as they see fit, even going as far as making every zombie blind and/or deaf or making any zombie spawn hone in on you immediately, like a bloodmoon. 

[Boidster]

Not quite a slider, but you could play with this setting in entityclasses.xml:

    <property name="AIFeralSense" value="1.5"/>

 

There is one on zombieTemplateMale which covers all humanoid zombies, then one for animalZombieBear (1.2) and one for animalZombieDog (1.6).

 

 

[ricp]

It's quite funny, in many ways the feral sense has turned the game into a classic 'boomer shooter', with rows upon rows of enemies spawning in on you, but even boomer shooters would ease you into it. It really should be pegged to XP, imo. While I can do it, it's just not that entertaining having to fight off 20 zombies at your very first PoI of a playthrough when all you'll have is a weak character and low quality club. As I say, it's doable, just not that much fun.

  

22 minutes ago, Loboling said:

I hope they do expand this back to what I thought was the original design: A slider for sight and sound. Then players can easily adjust as they see fit, even going as far as making every zombie blind and/or deaf or making any zombie spawn hone in on you immediately, like a bloodmoon. 

 

For me, I'd much rather the difficulty (range?) increased as you progressed. I don't want to manually have to change the sliders because my character improved.

[Krougal]

41 minutes ago, ricp said:

It's quite funny, in many ways the feral sense has turned the game into a classic 'boomer shooter', with rows upon rows of enemies spawning in on you, but even boomer shooters would ease you into it. It really should be pegged to XP, imo. While I can do it, it's just not that entertaining having to fight off 20 zombies at your very first PoI of a playthrough when all you'll have is a weak character and low quality club. As I say, it's doable, just not that much fun.

  

 

For me, I'd much rather the difficulty (range?) increased as you progressed. I don't want to manually have to change the sliders because my character improved.

Well it seems to be something they just dropped in there, maybe for us to try and so they could refine it.

I just turned it on for the daytime to see how it works. One thing that is lacking in 7DTD that I feel like it once had and most other zombie games have is the desire to be quiet and not attract attention. Unless of course you want to attract attention, and then there were noisemakers and explosives for that.

 

Once upon an Alpha the guns had different noise levels, firing off that 44 downtown was like ringing the dinnerbell, for better or for worse. Then there was the smell system, which needed a lot of work for sure but was abandoned like so many other things. I remember actually being scared most of the time playing this game. That feeling is long gone, although some of that is just what happens when you've got 1k hours under your belt I guess. I get it they are for performance and also to make the dungeons more dungeon but the sleeper volumes really ruin the game in a lot of ways.

[meganoth]

I thought the noise level that is displayed in the lower left corner when you sneak is in reality a combination of sounds and sights. If you are standing beside a light source, you noise level goes up. When you make noises it goes up. When you have an axe with burning shaft mod in hand it goes up. When you are standing in the sun it goes up. And I seem to remember that Fataal explained it that way.

 

And this approximation of your noise and visibility is simply compared to the zombies sense. So paradoxically you are louder when you sneeze under a lamp 😉

 

Though Lazman says different and he should know the situation better than me.

 

 

Edited December 29, 2021 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Tmodloader]

16 hours ago, ricp said:

It's quite funny, in many ways the feral sense has turned the game into a classic 'boomer shooter', with rows upon rows of enemies spawning in on you, but even boomer shooters would ease you into it. It really should be pegged to XP, imo. While I can do it, it's just not that entertaining having to fight off 20 zombies at your very first PoI of a playthrough when all you'll have is a weak character and low quality club. As I say, it's doable, just not that much fun.

I had read from another player that sneak still works with feral sense. Maybe if you spec into stealth early you can get away with less zombies to fight, or being extra careful about your noise. That being said, I haven't tried feral sense yet but I am interested in it.

[ricp]

25 minutes ago, Tmodloader said:

I had read from another player that sneak still works with feral sense. Maybe if you spec into stealth early you can get away with less zombies to fight, or being extra careful about your noise. That being said, I haven't tried feral sense yet but I am interested in it.

 

 Yeah, sneak does nothing. Or at least not in the way I phrased my initial post. For example if I get a job for a trader, then arrive at the PoI, even if I stealth in the zombies will still bum rush me. Now, it may be that at higher skill levels the stealth does affect this, the problem is early game though and its lack of scaling to the players' skills/physical strength.

 

That's really the only problem with it. As I say, I like the inclusion, as someone who finds A20 far too easy in default vanilla it adds some more beef. However while I can deal with 10-15 zombies with nothing other than a freshly spawned player armed only with a wooden club and the lowest set of skills for agility and strength, it's certainly not much fun doing so.

 

A week or so in and it stops being an issue at all. You've got a weapon you can dispatch with and physical stats that allow you to dodge. Day 1 you have none of that.

[Ghostlight]

18 hours ago, Mahnogard said:

I don't know that I'd play with it on all the time, but I like it. It felt pretty natural in that scenario because I wasn't trying to be quiet so area zombies coming to check out the noise makes sense. But I tend to play long days / fast progression and having all those extra zeds in my face definitely super-charges the leveling so I might need to reconsider my other settings if I keep it on.

 

I feel it is a "must have on" setting. There are so few zombies in the world that it makes little difference anyway.

 

And since I mentioned that, can anyone remind me which xml config file has the settings to increase the zombie count in the wild and change their respawn time? I need at least 5x more zombies than there are, with about 0.3 day respawn or less. I remember setting this in A18 but it was so long ago. Feral Sense might actually mean something if there were actually any zombies in this zombie apocalypse.

 

Thanks.

16 hours ago, Krougal said:

I remember actually being scared most of the time playing this game. That feeling is long gone

 

So very true.