[2022] Zombie AI is... kinda unfun.

Yeah, even though iron bars look thin and flimsy you have to look at it by the numbers, because that’s how the AI will look at it. Specifically, how many block hit points do the zombies have to chew through before they get to you, and is that more or less effort than digging from the surface or whatever they do wind up doing? Also, doors are a special case that only use a fraction of their HP value for calculations.

In cases like these, I’ve been curious if it would work to build a solid platform at surface level centered over your base, two blocks high. Then the zombies can’t simply walk until they’re above you and start digging straight down.

P.S. Your last point, to add an ‘exploits on’ mode, seems fanciful to me. When a game officially incorporates an exploit, it’s not an exploit anymore. 🙂

Originally posted by 76561197991736942:

Originally posted by ⚜ JOST AMMAN ⚜: To understand how the 7D2D Ai works you need to know that this also a Tower Defense game, meaning that the zombies will follow the shortest clear path available to you.

If there's no clear path to you, they'll choose the shortest path with less hit points of resistance to break. Putting the bars at the end of the staircase, means you blocked their path to you and digging dirst has become their best alternative.

Also, how deep is your bunker anyway?

Accurate 100%

I cannot speak as to the exact way the ai is programmed in this game but as a guy who makes some games on unreal I can say that its likely that the Zombies ai, basically finds the shortest route to you, the way this is done is with whats called a ray trace, it shoots an invisible line through all he objects till it hits you and then crunches the numbers on the materials seperating the 2 actors ( you and the zombie ) . ive kinda verified this by ( with a similar base ) digging and tossing a few layers of concrete slab under the above ground and then re growing the ground on top again. they also do this ray trace based on a perimeter hit box detecton base on where you are.

Ray casts may be involved in detection, but enemy pathing is based on an A* pathfinding algorithm, with adjustments to work in three dimensions. It is a node-based approach, which is the logical choice in my opinion for a voxel-based world.

Originally posted by Enola Gay: I imagine quite a few of us want to see the classic zombie as a choice. slow, dumb and the threat is in their numbers. Not freakishly intelligent, super fast or super strong.

having zombies with what is essentialy radar and pathing aimbot is ridiculous and ruins the immersion imo.

You're quite right that many people want the threat to come from the number of zombies. But if it were simple to crank up the number of zombies (without hurting performance), they would do that.

Originally posted by Grat Dalton:

Originally posted by Crater Creator: You're quite right that many people want the threat to come from the number of zombies. But if it were simple to crank up the number of zombies (without hurting performance), they would do that.

This game has a massive game budget sales. The limiting factor is Unity & Indie game coding.
- If a AAA publisher funded this type of game genre......

No, I don't think so. Consider Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator. According to Wikipedia, it was made in Unity, "as an indie game by a 1-man team." It advertises battles with more than 10,000 characters on screen at once. So clearly, something other than Unity and indie game coding are holding 7DtD to 64 enemies at once.

More likely limiting factors are that A) your hardware can only handle so much, and they want to sell a game that runs on certain minimum system requirements; and B) they made a conscious choice, from the start, to support a 100% destructible 3D voxel-based world. If they ditched that, they'd surely have a lot of CPU and GPU cycles to spend on more zombies. But, of course, it would be an entirely different game at that point.