Zombie detection and escalation minigames

[Troblin]

There's a problem to balance out keen zombie senses vs player chances of security if they behave right. Currently we have relatively blunt tools of zombie sight, hearing and smell and a blunt in itself mechanic of individual zombie perception.

 

To counteract this want to suggest the following:

1) Zombies having several perks and traits, making them individually much more relied on one of the senses, hinted by sounds that they do during trying to find a player.

2) Making zombies have scaled degrees of confidence during indirectly sensing a player, also expressed through different sounds and scaling amounts of physical activity towards anything that obstructs them from current player location.

3) Make zombies on higher degree of agitation attract other zombies by noise and even share the confidence of fresh meat being where the initiator zombie is confident it is

4) Make over four zombies in close proximity to each other synergize excitement to even more agressive behavior.

5) Add mechanisms to detect and counteract reasons of zombie excitement before the situation get's nasty.

 

Example: Zombie with maybe better smell perk smells a player inside a building. Walks to this building and starts slowly banging. At this moment the player might even fail to understand which building the zombie is banging at. Good part is that during this moment there's no chance of damage - glass breaking etc, though there's a minimal noise radius to attract other zombies.

In 20 minutes the zombie becomes more agitated - starts emitting sounds that might be linked to ways he's using to detect a player. Sniffing for smell, sudden stops for hearing (player or mechanisms or npcs) and couple of types of moaning + sounds of touching window with head for suspected visual detection of player shadow or light.

Now at this point it's a split

--either the suspicious activity persists, the zombie will grow several more levels of agitation up. As it happens, the single zombie will have only minor chances of damaging barricades and doors but will also create a lot of noise. Final stage will happen whenever there's either direct observation of player or a bunch of zombies gathers and synergy of anger occurs - final berserk stage where they damage barricades at a confident pace and make even more noise, resulting in a massed attack of at least a dozen Zs onto a shelter.

--OR player takes action to counteract detection. Possible steps include either distraction via direct or remote means or extreme mitigation of initial irritating factor, i.e. bathing oneself in chemicals (bleach included) to temporarily alter the smell, stopping any noise and giving specific orders to friendly npcs and mechanisms to stop noise and killing the light and or any movement where that movement or its shadow can be seen. Problem is that during mitigation there's a chance based on a number of traits etc to do something that irritates zombies even more - the smell they trailed actively changing might provoke them in like 10% cases. Combined approach might be taken - using any form of minor distraction (pulling rope to fall a scarecrow with tincans on the street etc) to give a small window of opportunity to hush the irritating factor with minimal to no chance of zombie suspicion growing.

--After successfully becoming invisible to the zombie you will witness its suspicion decrease approx twice as fast as it grew, and after it does, the Z will 80% wander off somewhere and 20% remain around. Also there's a chance that noises made by zombie sensing light will attract a zombie sensing smell, and, despite having killed all the light, you will then hear sniffing noises and suddenly have to deal with smell.

 

Why all this? Because just banging is tad boring and just a couple of zombies breaking in is boring too. Player should know that any zombie detecting him could potentially escalate to a whole lot of zombies and be motivated to take action before it all hits the fan.

 

As usual - 95% chance that this post is garbage, but 5% chance of it inspiring anyone to anything is cool. So adressing anyone reading it - support, criticise, comment.

[Strang]

I tend to follow the ZSG lore, so he is my 2 cents on the suggestions

 

1) Zombies should not have any "trait/perks" has all the traits they had as a person would be gone as they are no longer that person. A variant of this would be the state of decay of the zombie. Zombies that have decayed slower should still have a boost for sight/sound, while zombies that have decayed faster should lose some sight and sound.

 

2) Zombies, as they are not alive nor have any emotions would not feel any confidence levels, if they see food they would be 100% to get it. 

3) I agree that zombies should be drawn to other zombies making noise, but still the zeds should go 100% all the time at getting its prey.

4) Zombies would not encourage other zombies because they are dont really exist in zombies minds. The best i can explain it is that all  zombies are in the "friend zone" to other zombies, being neither a friend or a foe or even existing. 

5) I dont really understand this one, could you explain more?

[Mikhail Reign]

Just a point, there is plent of evidence on many different zombie lore of zeds 'signaling' other zeds when they detect prey. This is normally the zed stopping and moaning loudly before engaging the survivor. Whether they are actively calling other zeds or just making a noise because they seen something and the other zeds are simply responding to their noise is debatable.

[Troblin]

5) I dont really understand this one, could you explain more?

 

 

I'm talking about not direct detection of player, but suspected detection and degrees of recognition of target, which is natural for any target recognition algorythms, including ones used by biological creatures. Unless there's instant direct contact with prey during search for food, which justifies full use of force and energy to get the food, there are many situation when there's only minor trace detection of food, which demands further investigation but does not justify instant use of all the organism's resources before more clarity is made. Thus even the dumbest animals don't rush full onto target while only minorly detecting it via smell, hearing or --minor-- visual contact, i.e. seing something too far and/or too shortly to identify.

 

City is full of human smells - if zombies used all their power to bash their way to each and every place smelling with humans, they'd suicide their bodies on endless bashed doors even before the refrigerators stopped working. Thus they have to have those degrees of recognition, following by investigation. While doing investigation they are not yet sure whether what they sense is a food or a similar, yet useless item - noise of a rat that came and gone, smell brought by wind from far away and not from here, shadow seen as a side effect of tree shadow movement or flickering of decaying eyes and not the actual target. So before a zombie is confident of what it sees, it can be distracted and mislead to end up with false results of its investigation, which would result in a negative flag on previously detected suspicion and temporary end of interest.

[Mikhail Reign]

You read WWZ? How about the zed that dug in the desert for 5 days straight, never getting anywhere because the sand would fill in the hole, looking for a mole that was probably long gone...

 

Generally speaking zeds are very binary. They are either attacking prey, or they aren't. They don't normally have a 'I think I heard something' period.

[Troblin]

Okay, got your point. No, I haven't read pretty much anything about zombies and tried to rely on certain common sense (hehe) of my own regarding zombie lore. My ideal zombies are deadspace necromorphs, because being a receiver antenae for incoming power of planet sized fusion reactors actually explains their undead biology and how limbs get energy.

 

All the thoughts I ever generated come from ratinal approach, but here's the catch - that makes them complete IMHO stuff.

If members of the community are into zombie books and operate with prementioned zombie cases, like the British law - that too forms a system, a canon, which is useful and then I'm sorry for unknowingly contradicting it.

[Mikhail Reign]

My 2 cents has the same value as yours.

[Daman453]

I 1+ this

[Comrade Crimson]

I think zombies should generally be more attracted to moans in general. When I am smashing a zombie in the head with my golf trophy, making the TF2 Sniper proud and the stinker is moaning with their HUAH! and exasperated cries of death, other zombies within the vicinity should IMMEDIATELY be drawn to it and investigate. Zombies do not moan or scream all the time and naturally a zombie is going to be alerted when it senses something it normally doesn't, even if its coming from one of their own.

 

Because how else would a zombie die? Trip down the steps and split its head open? It probably wouldn't make as much moaning and sound as it would getting bashed in the head by a survivor.