Modlet Improved Hordes [A21.2]

[FilUnderscore]

On 8/4/2023 at 7:42 AM, Razor_ said:

I did set "max_hordes_per_player_group" setting to -1 and still experienced non-stop spawning of radiated screamers. Even when I set chance to something like this:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

<gs min="0" max="75">
                    <entity name="zombieScreamer" minCount="1" maxCount="1"/>
                </gs>
                
                <gs min="75" max="200">
                    <entity chance="0.5" name="zombieScreamerFeral" minCount="1" maxCount="1"/>
                </gs>
                
                <gs min="200">
                    <entity chance="0.3" name="zombieScreamerRadiated" minCount="1" maxCount="1"/>
</gs>

It has gotten even worse. A pack of 2 radiated screamers keep spawning right after we killed them. It did not seem to stop. I will disable screamers altogether and see if the problem is fixed.

 

21 hours ago, Casapa said:

Hi downloaded the latest update today, but ran into a problem.

Doing a tier 2 had a dog spawn that never ended,  was quite intense for a while, but had to DM out as it wouldn't end. I carried on outside to see if it would finish, but it didn't. 

Settings haven't been changed, all default.

 

 

Looks like a bug with hordes respawning when they are killed, I think if you leave the area and return it should fix itself. I'll try get it fixed as quickly as possible.

[tithin]

I downloaded the mod after the video from GNS, and what I can say from my experience is that

 

1/ in my established game, I was drowning in wolves, wolves spawned repeatedly, throwing themself into my tunnels and choke points, a literal mound of wolves. No zombies.

 

2/ in a new game I started, I came across no wandering hordes until I dropped my land claim block, at which point they started and never stopped coming. Can't use my base at all because it is perpetually under zombie siege, which look, zombie apocalypse and all, but even leaving my base and going to do some pois, I come across no hordes, but the second I return to my base, there's easily 20-30 zombies waiting for me, clear them out, another group spawns immediately.

 

Gonna have to delete the mod which is unfortunate because I like the idea of it.

[FilUnderscore]

3 hours ago, tithin said:

I downloaded the mod after the video from GNS, and what I can say from my experience is that

 

1/ in my established game, I was drowning in wolves, wolves spawned repeatedly, throwing themself into my tunnels and choke points, a literal mound of wolves. No zombies.

 

2/ in a new game I started, I came across no wandering hordes until I dropped my land claim block, at which point they started and never stopped coming. Can't use my base at all because it is perpetually under zombie siege, which look, zombie apocalypse and all, but even leaving my base and going to do some pois, I come across no hordes, but the second I return to my base, there's easily 20-30 zombies waiting for me, clear them out, another group spawns immediately.

 

Gonna have to delete the mod which is unfortunate because I like the idea of it.

Apologies for having to experience that issue.

 

There seems to be a bug right now where some hordes never finish spawning. I've received a couple of reports so far, and I'm still in the process of trying to fix it. A temporary solution would be to leave the area and wait for the horde to move away or run "improvedhordes flush" to reset the hordes on the map.

[FilUnderscore]

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-beta.3 for A21.1 EXP b16 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-beta.3/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Changed

• Horde AI now favors zones within the same biome, however there is a random chance that a horde may choose a zone in a different biome.
• Adjusted horde biome density calculations.
  • Some biomes were capping out hordes because the calculation was being applied twice, leading to extremely large sized hordes in harder biomes being very common.

Fixed

• Horde density value updates not being properly reflected.
  • This caused a couple of bugs, as the horde density would not be updated on entity kills or decay.
• Hordes spawning infinite number of entities.
  • An additional measure has been added to prevent hordes infinitely spawning if horde despawning fails in the first place, by killing off the entire horde.
• Horde biome decay not properly being applied.
  • This is also related to the horde density values not being updated properly.

Edited August 9, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[FilUnderscore]

  

On 8/4/2023 at 7:42 AM, Razor_ said:

I did set "max_hordes_per_player_group" setting to -1 and still experienced non-stop spawning of radiated screamers. Even when I set chance to something like this:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

<gs min="0" max="75">
                    <entity name="zombieScreamer" minCount="1" maxCount="1"/>
                </gs>
                
                <gs min="75" max="200">
                    <entity chance="0.5" name="zombieScreamerFeral" minCount="1" maxCount="1"/>
                </gs>
                
                <gs min="200">
                    <entity chance="0.3" name="zombieScreamerRadiated" minCount="1" maxCount="1"/>
</gs>

It has gotten even worse. A pack of 2 radiated screamers keep spawning right after we killed them. It did not seem to stop. I will disable screamers altogether and see if the problem is fixed.

 

On 8/6/2023 at 5:03 AM, Casapa said:

Hi downloaded the latest update today, but ran into a problem.

Doing a tier 2 had a dog spawn that never ended,  was quite intense for a while, but had to DM out as it wouldn't end. I carried on outside to see if it would finish, but it didn't. 

Settings haven't been changed, all default.

 

 

 

5 hours ago, tithin said:

I downloaded the mod after the video from GNS, and what I can say from my experience is that

 

1/ in my established game, I was drowning in wolves, wolves spawned repeatedly, throwing themself into my tunnels and choke points, a literal mound of wolves. No zombies.

 

2/ in a new game I started, I came across no wandering hordes until I dropped my land claim block, at which point they started and never stopped coming. Can't use my base at all because it is perpetually under zombie siege, which look, zombie apocalypse and all, but even leaving my base and going to do some pois, I come across no hordes, but the second I return to my base, there's easily 20-30 zombies waiting for me, clear them out, another group spawns immediately.

 

Gonna have to delete the mod which is unfortunate because I like the idea of it.

 

This issue should now be fixed in the latest release 2.0.0-beta.3. Please give it a go and let me know if it pops up again!

[SylenThunder]

Curious question.    Can the latest release be used on a21.0 as that is still the current stable?

[FilUnderscore]

4 minutes ago, SylenThunder said:

Curious question.    Can the latest release be used on a21.0 as that is still the current stable?

Should do, I did some brief testing and it seemed to work the same (no errors, hordes seemed to react as expected).

 

The only breaking change from A21 -> A21.1 was one of the game's heatmap related functions that was being patched was removed, so I patched another one which should still be present in both versions.

[Wyrm]

Tried latest version and it seemed to run fine.

I do wonder if something can be done with the Zombie AI, as it seems to love just forming a long line, making it very easy to deal with them. But that could just be the vanilla AI that is a bit too linear when it comes to path finding.

[tithin]

18 hours ago, FilUnderscore said:

Apologies for having to experience that issue.

 

There seems to be a bug right now where some hordes never finish spawning. I've received a couple of reports so far, and I'm still in the process of trying to fix it. A temporary solution would be to leave the area and wait for the horde to move away or run "improvedhordes flush" to reset the hordes on the map.

 

all good dude, I've installed the new version and give it a crack tonight, let you know how it works out.

[FilUnderscore]

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-beta.4 for A21.1 EXP b16 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-beta.4/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Fixed

• Exception thrown when fetching biome-specific zones and a biome does not contain any zones.

 

 

15 hours ago, Wyrm said:

Tried latest version and it seemed to run fine.

I do wonder if something can be done with the Zombie AI, as it seems to love just forming a long line, making it very easy to deal with them. But that could just be the vanilla AI that is a bit too linear when it comes to path finding.

Yeah that seems to be part of the vanilla AI pathfinding. I've encountered similar issues with vulture hordes circling around indefinitely instead of flying across the air due to them using a different AI altogether. Hoping to slightly change up the vulture AI in hordes at some point.

Edited August 10, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[Darkanger]

Is there a way to put in a timer between spawns like days ?

[CrimsonKing]

Getting an error with the latest release.

 

2023-08-10T21:55:25 13408.660 ERR [Improved Hordes] [WorldHordePopulator] ThreadLoop(ThreadInfo): An exception occurred during UpdateAsync: Object reference not set to an instance of an object 
Stacktrace: 
  at World.GetTraderAreaAt (Vector3i _pos) [0x0000c] in <d7dcfa4979674f179c13273f8b30b551>:0 
  at (wrapper dynamic-method) World.DMD<World::IsWithinTraderArea>(World,Vector3i)
  at World.GetLandClaimOwner (Vector3i worldBlockPos, PersistentPlayerData lpRelative) [0x0000b] in <d7dcfa4979674f179c13273f8b30b551>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldPOIScanner+POI.IsPlayerConvertedPOI () [0x0002b] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldPOIScanner+POIZone.GetLocationOutside (ImprovedHordes.Core.Abstractions.World.Random.IWorldRandom worldRandom, UnityEngine.Vector2& location) [0x0001b] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldZoneHordePopulator`1[Horde].CanPopulate (System.Single dt, ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldPOIScanner+POIZone& zone, System.Collections.Generic.List`1[T] playerGroups, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue] clusters, ImprovedHordes.Core.Abstractions.World.Random.IWorldRandom worldRandom) [0x00082] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Horde.Populator.HordePopulator`1[TaskReturnValue].Populate (System.Single dt, System.Collections.Generic.List`1[T] playerGroups, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue] clusters, ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Horde.Spawn.WorldHordeSpawner spawner, ImprovedHordes.Core.Abstractions.World.Random.IWorldRandom worldRandom) [0x00001] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Horde.Populator.WorldHordePopulator.UpdateAsync (System.Single dt) [0x00089] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.Threading.Threaded.ThreadLoop (ThreadManager+ThreadInfo threadInfo) [0x00078] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0

 

Also hordes are being a tad buggy still I think, after killing a horde another shows up almost immediately afterwards don't know if this has something to do with LandClaim blocks or not though I am on day 19 so maybe has something to do with that.

Edited August 11, 2023 by CrimsonKing (see edit history)

[Wyrm]

12 hours ago, CrimsonKing said:

Also hordes are being a tad buggy still I think, after killing a horde another shows up almost immediately afterwards don't know if this has something to do with LandClaim blocks or not though I am on day 19 so maybe has something to do with that.

 

I have noticed this myself and have a theory about this.

The commotion when fighting a horde attracts other nearby hordes, meaning that if there are enough hordes nearby, you can end up with multiple waves of zombies coming with a few minutes intervals.  The reason I think this is what happens is that they sometimes come from multiple directions, meaning it most likely is not the same horde.

 

This is most noticeable after a repopulation-cycle, when horde-density is at its highest. 

Edited August 11, 2023 by Wyrm (see edit history)

[FilUnderscore]

On 8/11/2023 at 3:57 PM, Darkanger said:

Is there a way to put in a timer between spawns like days ?

You can delay the number of days before hordes reappear in areas on the map, look at the "zone_horde_repopulation_days" and "wilderness_horde_repopulation_days" settings. Hordes are simulated across the map and load in when nearby.

 

On 8/11/2023 at 4:12 PM, CrimsonKing said:

Getting an error with the latest release.

 

2023-08-10T21:55:25 13408.660 ERR [Improved Hordes] [WorldHordePopulator] ThreadLoop(ThreadInfo): An exception occurred during UpdateAsync: Object reference not set to an instance of an object 
Stacktrace: 
  at World.GetTraderAreaAt (Vector3i _pos) [0x0000c] in <d7dcfa4979674f179c13273f8b30b551>:0 
  at (wrapper dynamic-method) World.DMD<World::IsWithinTraderArea>(World,Vector3i)
  at World.GetLandClaimOwner (Vector3i worldBlockPos, PersistentPlayerData lpRelative) [0x0000b] in <d7dcfa4979674f179c13273f8b30b551>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldPOIScanner+POI.IsPlayerConvertedPOI () [0x0002b] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldPOIScanner+POIZone.GetLocationOutside (ImprovedHordes.Core.Abstractions.World.Random.IWorldRandom worldRandom, UnityEngine.Vector2& location) [0x0001b] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldZoneHordePopulator`1[Horde].CanPopulate (System.Single dt, ImprovedHordes.POI.WorldPOIScanner+POIZone& zone, System.Collections.Generic.List`1[T] playerGroups, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue] clusters, ImprovedHordes.Core.Abstractions.World.Random.IWorldRandom worldRandom) [0x00082] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Horde.Populator.HordePopulator`1[TaskReturnValue].Populate (System.Single dt, System.Collections.Generic.List`1[T] playerGroups, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue] clusters, ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Horde.Spawn.WorldHordeSpawner spawner, ImprovedHordes.Core.Abstractions.World.Random.IWorldRandom worldRandom) [0x00001] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.World.Horde.Populator.WorldHordePopulator.UpdateAsync (System.Single dt) [0x00089] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0 
  at ImprovedHordes.Core.Threading.Threaded.ThreadLoop (ThreadManager+ThreadInfo threadInfo) [0x00078] in <80d3512d8bed4cc88056a90b32046e32>:0

 

Also hordes are being a tad buggy still I think, after killing a horde another shows up almost immediately afterwards don't know if this has something to do with LandClaim blocks or not though I am on day 19 so maybe has something to do with that.

Will look at the error, thanks for bringing it up. @Wyrm pretty much nailed the reason for hordes showing up often in your case.

 

On 8/12/2023 at 4:24 AM, Wyrm said:

 

I have noticed this myself and have a theory about this.

The commotion when fighting a horde attracts other nearby hordes, meaning that if there are enough hordes nearby, you can end up with multiple waves of zombies coming with a few minutes intervals.  The reason I think this is what happens is that they sometimes come from multiple directions, meaning it most likely is not the same horde.

 

This is most noticeable after a repopulation-cycle, when horde-density is at its highest. 

This is absolutely what is happening, though I am looking to maybe offset repopulation times for different areas so it feels a bit more gradual.

[Wyrm]

Had an instance today where a horde spawned inside a trader. This might be an exception to include in the future?

 

It was a bit fun though having them all trapped inside 

 

[fmkiddo]

This mod is awesome, really amp the difficulty of the game, especially using as Multiplayer

 

Umm, when i apply this mod, the screamer stop spawning, even when called using console..
Is this a bug or intended result?

[FilUnderscore]

On 8/17/2023 at 7:38 AM, Wyrm said:

Had an instance today where a horde spawned inside a trader. This might be an exception to include in the future?

 

It was a bit fun though having them all trapped inside 

 

Yep, might need to increase the detection range.

 

5 hours ago, fmkiddo said:

This mod is awesome, really amp the difficulty of the game, especially using as Multiplayer

 

Umm, when i apply this mod, the screamer stop spawning, even when called using console..
Is this a bug or intended result?

Great to hear you've been having fun! Vanilla screamers are currently disabled with the mod installed, I'm wanting to further customize their behavior in a future update, so not a bug right now - they still spawn in towns/cities. I've just been busy with some real life commitments in the past two weeks, but hope to get back to modding soon.

Edited August 18, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[fmkiddo]

12 hours ago, FilUnderscore said:

Yep, might need to increase the detection range.

 

Great to hear you've been having fun! Vanilla screamers are currently disabled with the mod installed, I'm wanting to further customize their behavior in a future update, so not a bug right now - they still spawn in towns/cities. I've just been busy with some real life commitments in the past two weeks, but hope to get back to modding soon.

 

Alright, great to hear it is intended result, not a bug.

unfortunately, screamers never spawn at all even in towns/cities.. I played with friends couple days on higher tier quest and we've using guns, a lot.

Usually the game spawned screamers when we generate too much heat/noise in POI inside a city. but it never spawned at all.
So the spawned zombies much easier to deal with a lot of guns.

Hope you can improve the mods further, especially on screamer thing, because as server admin, i always tried to surprise my friends to summon a screamer at base to amp the challenge or to test the base defense

[Agame]

Dunno if its possible but would be really cool if you could make the hordes escalate similar to the 'horde night' mechanic based on gamestage, that way this mod could completely override the blood moon in vanilla game and it would be possible to remove it. I really do prefer the more dynamic nature of this mod to the way blood moon works so it would be nice to have an alternative.

[FilUnderscore]

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-beta.5 for A21.1 b16 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-beta.5/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip

Changelog

Changed

• Re-enabled vanilla screamer horde spawns alongside screamer town/city spawns temporarily until the screamer wilderness feature is integrated in a future update.

Fixed

• NotifyEvent patch causing NullReferenceException leading to bugs with heatmap emitting tile entities.
• NullReferenceException when loading into the prefab editor.

 

 

On 8/19/2023 at 1:49 PM, fmkiddo said:

 

Alright, great to hear it is intended result, not a bug.

unfortunately, screamers never spawn at all even in towns/cities.. I played with friends couple days on higher tier quest and we've using guns, a lot.

Usually the game spawned screamers when we generate too much heat/noise in POI inside a city. but it never spawned at all.
So the spawned zombies much easier to deal with a lot of guns.

Hope you can improve the mods further, especially on screamer thing, because as server admin, i always tried to surprise my friends to summon a screamer at base to amp the challenge or to test the base defense

I've re-enabled vanilla screamer spawns as a temporary fix to this issue until a new screamer wilderness horde is implemented in a future update - download the latest version 2.0.0-beta.5.

 

On 8/23/2023 at 4:45 PM, Agame said:

Dunno if its possible but would be really cool if you could make the hordes escalate similar to the 'horde night' mechanic based on gamestage, that way this mod could completely override the blood moon in vanilla game and it would be possible to remove it. I really do prefer the more dynamic nature of this mod to the way blood moon works so it would be nice to have an alternative.

I've been thinking of ways to maybe redesign how the blood moon spawns/difficulty work dependent on the current time at night when the blood moon is at its greatest intensity. It would also be cool for hordes to have a chance to become longer and harder depending on certain factors like biome and heat, perhaps as either a core feature or an add-on.

Edited August 25, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[-Holo-]

Does the pathing of the horde target a player and hold on it?

 

We have had this mod active for a while now while playing, and it's been absolutely great to random run into a horde walking past while out looting every so often.

But recently it seems to always come straight to the small outposts we build and just run back and forth until they detect us.  Making it extremely tedious and boring when it's something you can count on happening twice a night.

 

 

[FilUnderscore]

3 hours ago, -Holo- said:

Does the pathing of the horde target a player and hold on it?

 

We have had this mod active for a while now while playing, and it's been absolutely great to random run into a horde walking past while out looting every so often.

But recently it seems to always come straight to the small outposts we build and just run back and forth until they detect us.  Making it extremely tedious and boring when it's something you can count on happening twice a night.

 

 

Are you generating lots of heat at these outposts, e.g. sounds, forges, etc? That could be attracting the hordes as attraction distance at high heat levels (>80%) is a few hundred blocks (dependent on world size). Hordes only hold target on players as long as they can see/hear you nearby, otherwise they will quickly stop pursuing you after a short time.

[-Holo-]

On 9/1/2023 at 12:53 PM, FilUnderscore said:

Are you generating lots of heat at these outposts, e.g. sounds, forges, etc? That could be attracting the hordes as attraction distance at high heat levels (>80%) is a few hundred blocks (dependent on world size). Hordes only hold target on players as long as they can see/hear you nearby, otherwise they will quickly stop pursuing you after a short time.

Not much heat at all really, one of the outposts was a fresh new POI we took over, an older firestation, we had built a campfire but it was not used since we hadn't found cookingpot/grill, and we hadn't done much constuction either, just sitting inside at night stealthed when we heard z's roaring about. sneaking up on the roof (nightvision goggles to the rescue) we watched the horde running back and forth until they somehow detects us.
This behaviour we have seen on some other outposts aswell, horde comes running kinda straight at the base and running back and forth outside until they detect us. Usually twice a night.

Would it be possible to tweak the behavior of the horde in the future you think?

Ideally for my taste, I'd like to run across hordes wandering the world , not necessarily targeting a player since I'm fed up with how 'gamy' the world has become.
 

[FilUnderscore]

3 hours ago, -Holo- said:

Not much heat at all really, one of the outposts was a fresh new POI we took over, an older firestation, we had built a campfire but it was not used since we hadn't found cookingpot/grill, and we hadn't done much constuction either, just sitting inside at night stealthed when we heard z's roaring about. sneaking up on the roof (nightvision goggles to the rescue) we watched the horde running back and forth until they somehow detects us.
This behaviour we have seen on some other outposts aswell, horde comes running kinda straight at the base and running back and forth outside until they detect us. Usually twice a night.

Would it be possible to tweak the behavior of the horde in the future you think?

Ideally for my taste, I'd like to run across hordes wandering the world , not necessarily targeting a player since I'm fed up with how 'gamy' the world has become.
 

Just checking, you are running the latest version released a few days (2.0.0-beta.5)? There have been tweaks to AI between different versions, however it might not be 100% perfect yet. This sounds like it was an issue some were experiencing in slightly older builds as well.

 

Regarding tweaking horde behavior in the future, I am looking into ways to allow complete customization of horde AI through configuration. It's a challenge to put it into an intuitive config format with how it's currently handled in the code and there are still a few bugs in the current build that I'm ironing out.

 

If you are running the latest version, I would be happy to take a deeper look into what could be causing the AI to act like that. You could try setting "event_chunk_radius" to 0 and see if that affects anything (it should disable the horde heatmap detection).

Edited September 2, 2023 by FilUnderscore (see edit history)

[-Holo-]

5 hours ago, FilUnderscore said:

Just checking, you are running the latest version released a few days (2.0.0-beta.5)? There have been tweaks to AI between different versions, however it might not be 100% perfect yet. This sounds like it was an issue some were experiencing in slightly older builds as well.

 

Regarding tweaking horde behavior in the future, I am looking into ways to allow complete customization of horde AI through configuration. It's a challenge to put it into an intuitive config format with how it's currently handled in the code and there are still a few bugs in the current build that I'm ironing out.

 

If you are running the latest version, I would be happy to take a deeper look into what could be causing the AI to act like that. You could try setting "event_chunk_radius" to 0 and see if that affects anything (it should disable the horde heatmap detection).

Hm. Think it might have a been a earlier version then, updated yesterday( I think) and havent been to the outposts to check. will take a look and update with results!

I can imagine it being a nightmare to get to work, never looked into dll modding though, just having a hardtime with regular xpath edits to customize the game to our tastes