[2024] Stunning Piece of Information That I Discovered

Some things about zombie A.I. I’ve picked up from following the A.I. programmer and other devs for a while:

1. People didn’t like being harassed by zombies from outside while trying to complete a quest. In the most extreme example, you can imagine if a quest sent you to the wasteland, you didn’t finish before nightfall, and you didn’t happen to opt for a stealthy character build. You could be stuck drawing in nonstop zombies as fast as you can kill them, sapping your resources and interrupting you from making progress on the quest. So outside zombie spawns are suppressed while a quest is active.
   Since you can’t leave without failing the quest (and BM zombies are their own thing), the exploitability seems limited. Keep in mind suppressing zombie spawns isn’t the same as killing the zombies already around at the start.
   Is it a flaw? Debatable. But it’s an intentional feature in any case.
   
2. They’ve discussed wandering sleeper zombies, which would be on ‘patrol paths’ in POIs, but they haven’t gotten past a planning stage. I’m trying to get the term sleepwalkers to catch on for these, because it’s perfect.
   
3. When a zombie encounters an obstacle, its fallback behavior is to randomly choose to attack in front of it or jump up. This makes sense for a general approach, as one or the other of those two actions would get it past a lot of kinds of obstacles. So I think the real question is why zombies sometimes go into that mode in the first place. They see a mailbox or trash can or honestly sometimes air as impassable, when there would seem to be an easier way around it.
   It does occur to me that I see this happen when a zombie is fairly far from the player. Does anyone see it happen up close? Since draw distance is a thing, it could be that there is something to jump over, but it’s just not rendering that far away. It may also be that zombies farther away from the player do simpler calculations. E.g. they don’t bother computing the path around the mailbox, because it saves calculation time to not compute a pathing grid out that far, and it’s far enough away that the dumber general case behavior doesn’t affect much.
   
4. Zombies often look like they’ve spotted you when they’ve merely heard you. They can be heading to a position e.g. a pace behind you, because that’s where the last footstep they heard was. It’s logical; it just seems wrong because they’re moaning and snarling and aimed in your general direction. But if you’re crouching and not moving in the dark, then your stealth meter is in the 0%-3% range, and they’re effectively blindfolded.

Originally posted by NHL12: depends on the situation and location but ive noticed sometimes doing a poi (generating heat) it attracts zombos that spawned outside the poi, and or including the scouting witch

The screamer is the only zombie used as a scout to investigate high heat/activity. So unless she screams, none of the other zombies are coming due to the heat/activity map.

but i dislike the artificial sense of a safety net where doing a POI isolates you from the world's threat

Meanwhile you have those that seem to think there are already too many zombies in POIs. Players that feel that way probably aren’t keen on having even more come in from outside on top of that.

It would be odd to design these spaces as dungeon crawls, without also designing the enemy encounters within them. It’d be harder to rely on the zombies outside to create engaging gameplay, because they’d all file in through the same entrance or two from ground level. I just can’t see them redoing all the POIs to make that fun at this point. So of the 20 or 100 or however many enemies is about right to fight for a given POI, I’d expect the vast majority to stay as spawns that are placed by the level designer in particular spots. That means sleeper zombies for now, and hopefully includes bandits and sleepwalkers in the future.

Originally posted by xycotta:

Originally posted by Crater Creator: The screamer is the only zombie used as a scout to investigate high heat/activity. So unless she screams, none of the other zombies are coming due to the heat/activity map.

That is definitely not what I have experienced. Quest is complete, told to return to the trader and an army (or a random zombie) shows up. Head out and there are holes where doors used to be from the outside.

Now, we play with Feral sense as always at max difficulty mind you. But I can assure you, zombies not from the POI show up.

One, I’m saying they’re not showing up because of the heat/activity map. The heat/activity map doesn’t spawn any zombies, except for screamers. NHL12 talked about attracting (non-screamer) zombies by generating heat but the game doesn’t work like that.

Two, it isn’t surprising that zombie(s) show up after the quest is complete, because (if I recall correctly) the spawn suppression only occurs while the quest is active. I.e. when you have a defined set of zombies to kill to win, and if you leave before you do, you lose. Before or after that, enemy encounters can evolve more organically.

Like I said, suppressing zombie spawns isn’t the same as killing the zombies already around at the start. The ones that were already there are still there, and they can potentially see or hear you after the quest starts, especially with feral sense on.

Originally posted by NHL12: so no matter what, as long as you "enter a building" and maybe climb up the roof or ladder, you will never ever fear the threat of them "randomly exploring inside that building"

There is a toggle in the options menu called feral sense. You can set it to day, night, or all. WIth feral sense activated you often get zombies from the area entering the POI you are exploring. If you want that experience more often turn on feral sense.