Modlet Improved Hordes [A21.2]

[FilUnderscore]

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.

[Greymantle]

Mod looks very interesting. Will have to keep an eye out on this as I wait/hope I get a mod to revamp the new book/magazine system put in.

[Picklefart]

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?

[fnfear]

6 hours ago, FilUnderscore said:

 

Must be related to this config line in the Config/ImprovedHordes/hordes.xml file,

 

Adding this to the gs tag should fix it temporarily (my bad, forgot about not having a max/increaseEvery tag):

 

I'll push out an update soon with a more permanent fix.

 

EDIT: Update has been pushed, 2.0.0-alpha.2 should fix this problem.

Thanks for the quick fix!

[FilUnderscore]

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.

[ktrain]

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

[FilUnderscore]

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.

Edited June 19, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[ZombieMikeG]

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.

Edited June 19, 2023 by ZombieMikeG (see edit history)

[FilUnderscore]

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.

[Picklefart]

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.

[FilUnderscore]

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.

Edited June 19, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[FilUnderscore]

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.

[Picklefart]

22 minutes ago, FilUnderscore said:

 

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

 

Can't wait to give it a go after work. Thanks.

[Dragonchampion]

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?

[fnfear]

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 😕

 

[FilUnderscore]

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

[fnfear]

5 hours ago, FilUnderscore said:

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.

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

Haha, yeah it gave me a big fright lmao, had to close the game and go back in. I was and still am using the latest version so Idk what happened o.o

[Picklefart]

On 6/19/2023 at 11:44 AM, FilUnderscore said:

 

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

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.

[FilUnderscore]

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.

[FilUnderscore]

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.

[Cypherdiaz]

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.

[FilUnderscore]

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.

Edited June 23, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[Venturai]

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.

[Cypherdiaz]

3 hours ago, FilUnderscore said:

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.

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.

[FilUnderscore]

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.

Edited June 23, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)