[2021] Nurse Zombie Thoughts (suggestion)

It has to do with utilization. The stripper zombie only fit in strip clubs. So it was either put a strip club on every block, or replace her with the ‘party girl’. The ‘sexy nurse’ outfit has the same problem, as did other overly specialized looks like the football player.

It’s not the direction I’d like them to go, either. I really want them to abandon the idea of having THE nurse zombie, THE businessman zombie etc. altogether. These zombies should not be thought of as unique, named characters. The character artist’s time should go into making pieces - heads, bodies, clothes, color tints - that can be mixed and matched to fill out hordes of zombies with per-instance variety. A zombie horde should be diverse, without clones and without feeling like you’ve seen that guy a hundred times before.

Originally posted by CptnHarlock: I think we did have randomized HD zombies for a while (somewhere between a14-a16 IIRC) but it was way too taxing on CPU. Can some oldtimer confirm?

Kind of, sort of, not really. The game used UMA[assetstore.unity.com], a Unity plug-in for character customization. There was a time when zombies could be, and were, constructed using UMA. In theory, TFP or modders could’ve used UMA to not just make a nurse zombie, but tens or hundreds of different looking nurse zombies. In practice, they deemed the performance was too poor when doing zombies this way. So they’re abandoning it, and that’s one reason they’ve been redoing better performing, HD versions of all the zombies.

I still believe individual variation can be done in a way that is performant, as has been done to great effect in other games with zombie hordes like Left 4 Dead. I’m crossing my fingers TFP can come up with something before the game’s done.