EnigmaGrey

Looks very sharp, I like it. Just note (and I'm not saying you do this, it just trips people up): make sure you're sending the strings "save" (followed by a pause) and "quit" to the console to shut it down properly. PZ doesn't support a graceful shutdown via signals at this time.

Pretty sure he just described how it works now. Generator inside a pre-built building uses the IsoBuilding def. If there's no IsoBuilding, it acts as a big bubble, as Danny says. Ofc, it's been a while. I could be wrong.

Oh, yeah. It’s not a row of townhouses that are defined as a single block, but a bunch of individual houses separated by a tile or two. Okay, I see why that’s a problem.

Get slightly closer and they'll collapse.

Good news, looks like the sound guys figured it out: there’s a mic bump early in the file that can be mistaken for a notification sound, so it’ll be sorted in the next update.

Relistening to it with a set of AirPods pro 2 w/ the volume cranked and set to isolation mode, I really can't hear anything at the various suggested locations. It just sounds like the thunder drops off a little before rising again. Listen to both the mute sound at 0.25x and the thunder at 0.25x in the video, and I think you'll see what I mean. It's a similar sharp increase, dip, then sharp (which is similar, but not the same to the discord sound) increase again, followed by the next crackle of thunder.

Great, thank you. I'll give it a more thorough going over on Monday, but a quick look seems to suggest it's only removing a small number of zombies each time and their IDs don't go past 5000, which is quite different compared to when the mod is used. I'll try to force it to happen here and see if we can tell what it is. Note though it might not be something that's preventable: since zombies need to be updated every 5 seconds to avoid becoming stale, the packet(s) to do so might not have made the trip or there might be enough zombies responding to the gunshots that it's hit its maximum of updating 5k zombies, so is not updating other zombies. Quite possibly, if it's the latter, the MP team will be able to address it by adding a distance check to the player, so that the closer zombies take precedence over ones further away (if that's not already done).

Understood, Fadoli. Just please note that for now I consider your issue separate from Modin's, even if it's similar in nature. Could you grab your log so we can see if it differs from Modin's screenshots of theirs or not? It'd be quite helpful to see if what I'm assuming is abnormal actually is "normal" even without the mod or not. They're stored in %UserProfile%\zomboid\logs and are sorted into folders by date. If you remember the day/time of the worst example, it'd probably be the most helpful. If not, any that show the stale zombies would still be good. Pastebin.com should work for any file that's under a mb. Just copy + paste its contents and submit it. Then copy and paste the web address of the submission here.

As said, there are sandbox options if you'd prefer not to have it. Would be a good idea to check if your server is running out of RAM before blaming stunlocks for this. That can cause zombie behavior to become strange. Zombies shouldn't otherwise "spawn on top of" you and we'd not be balancing animations around such a thing regardless. Instead, we'd want to fix that bug.

Can't hear it myself. Very slight bird sound or cricket sound, maybe at 0:18? I think it's a bit like the Ceasar 3 soundtrack -- there's one track where I could swear my old 90s landline phone is chiming, but it's really just 3-4 separate sounds that play at a similar time and overlap a little to generate something "like" that tone. I've just been primed to interpret it as that after 8-9 years of having to always listen and rush to answer it. Haunts me to this day ...

I did suggest lowering the zombie population to normal values. If you push it, you will break it. Those screenshots without culling look pretty overloaded, but maybe it's just random chance for those areas? Either way: The short end of the stick is if people only notice stale zombies because they broke the game using a mod that intentionally breaks part of the game and that allowed them to find a way to provoke the vanilla game to also break, then it's not exactly much of a problem, is it? We're a year out from release now and aside from one post in July (caused by a mod that changed zombie settings ... somehow), any other reports have stemmed from the people involved with the mod. So, I'm going to assume it's related to the mod, aren't I? I'm not just pulling this out of my ass. I was there when this stuff was put into the game, tested it, and I have access to the code and people who wrote it to double-check with and have done so while expressing that we'd likely look at culling again in 42. Til then, it's not getting touched. That means I'm also the only one actually interested in this. You guys seem to have a strong desire to have as many zombies as possible, no matter what, at any cost, and you have broken things before to get 'em? So I'm certainly going to be skeptical of whatever comes out of it, especially when it's been over a year since this released and most of the reports come from people using the mod (and now one other person who's just baffled they're getting the message). Why wouldn't I be?

Yeah, we're not particularly happy with the way fence-zombie lunges sometimes go, so there'll be addressed later. You can just disable it in Sandbox, OP, but I feel badgzerz is right: you're letting yourself get pantsed by 3 human-sized entities who are dedicated to eating you. It's not really something you should be able to fight out of.

The server runs its own zombie sim and is responsible for syncing the clients regardless of whether the cull list is generated on the client or the server. The cull list is then sent to the server, server purges those sim’d zombies, then sends updates to the relevant client. The mod introduces the possibility clients with and without the mod to therefore disagree. It is then possible that too many zombies pile up to be synced in time, being stale. (All the message means is it didn’t get updated after 5 seconds, so is no longer valid.) Any individual user with the mod can break it. You do not personally have to run the mod, Fadoli. You can tell culling isn’t working due to the volume of zombies in the vid first vid, imo. I can quickly see if it’s possible to provoke it by leading zombies in an infinite kongaline and never looking away so that they either pile up to an indefinite amount or can only be removed after falling well outside the visible area, but then we’re talking about an edge case + a diagnostic message that doesn’t matter in the second case, should there be no real affects vs what’s suddenly being reported frequently in relation to the mod.

Just seems like something they could have easily prevented by writing their start scripts correctly. This is based on assumptions from the above, ofc: 1) They don't need to set an -Xms5G value (start the server with a minimum of 5 GB allocated) This doesn't really harm anything beyond the server's ability to free memory it doesn't need, so we'll just consider this normal -- it's only really using 1.4 GB of a possible 5 GB it already has access to. No big deal. It just looks like it's using more than it should in their admin panel. 2) They don't need to set an -Xmx value higher than whatever your plan is -- then it'd be impossible for you to run over it. i.e. -Xmx8G means the JVM can't make the Java heap larger than 8 GB. (Assume around 500 MB for the OS and 500 MB for any data we store in Native code, and you should still be at or under 9 GB). So, say the server legitimately filled up all 8 GB of that -- your performance would start to suffer and the server might crash, but it's fairly unlikely you'd get there with only 5-10 people. If they set this value higher than what your plan is or they didn't set it at all, then it could conceivably grow indefinitely, until the system ran out of RAM in the wort case (but that's not too likely unless there were a severe memory leak) Done right, they'd just change the value based on the subscription you buy, like java -Xmx$WhateverSubscriptionYouHave$ ... zombie.GameServer and that's it. You'd just buy a higher subscription and restart it vs. get naughty messages about going over should this ever happen. So yeah, I'd just suggest self-hosting or using a different service. Just note: don't expect much from these services; they're basically using automated software to provision a virtual server, using a minimum of staff, so they're all (likely) fairly similar. I'd personally suggest spending $20-$30 a month if it's an option, and you're comfortable with Linux, and just skipping the middle man. Services like Hetzner and SoYouStart do have good offerings if it's of interest to you. You'll pay more, but you'll also get something much more capable out of the deal. For example: $30 Canadian gets you a 32 GB linux server with a 400 GB SSD and a 4 core Xeon at SoYouStart, albeit it'll be using linux.

Did you delete the class and properly reverify the server and game for anyone on your server also using the mod? Because realistically, we've not had reports of this until very recently, all from people using the mod, so to say the least I am extremely doubtful it's the base game doing it. And, if it's happening because you're just trying to force insane zombies on the server, the answer is to "turn it back to normal."

So they’re setting xms to 5 gb most likely. Had they not done that, it should only use 800-1200 mb on start (you can see in game that it’s also only using 1.4 gb). If they do use xms and they’re using the zgc, it’ll never get smaller. It deactivates its ability to shrink the heap. If not, g1gc uses more ram, which might also explain it, but it’s most likely they start the server at 5 gb. Personally, I’d just ignore the panel’s ram value unless you’re going to have 8 people on at once or use a lot of big mods. That is, unless you actually use 5 gb in game, the web panel should just remain constant.

Again, caused by the mod.

As said previously, this is from breaking sync when you disabled the zombie optimizer and overloading the server with zombies. You have 21k. Well past the 500 zombies cutoff due to using the mod and well past the point that the game can reliably update the number of zombies you have. We can't help with problems caused by mods.

Over-all the heap's max size would be 5.3 GB with only 1.3 GB used. If it's running ZGC, that value should go down, since there's no point holding onto memory it doesn't need. I don't -think- the in-game measure would be affected by the Mac/Linux issue, it's a bit odd. Will double check that later. What is the value when you restart the server, after giving it a few minutes to boot up?

Others have looked at using containers for PZ before. For example: https://github.com/Danixu/project-zomboid-server-docker You don't change the base game files to add custom spawn points. You modify the $userhome$/zomboid/server/ spawn_regions.lua file. It's not practical to have to decompress the entire map directory at runtime.

Posted on the Steam thread. There’s no need to have the same conv in multiple locations.

Googling it indicates it’s a filename or path issue.

Stale zombies are zombies that haven’t seen a remote update in 5000 ticks. I’m guessing that means they were originally properly of another user that is no longer near or no longer part of the server sim. If you’re using the mod, you should know it’s going to cause a schism between clients that have it and those that don’t, leading to the simulation on the server and other clients to be out of sync. Whether this is a symptom of the mod or not, I have no idea. I’ve only two logs from users with that since 2021.

Thank you for your feedback, we’ll be sure to consider it.

I assume this is also your post? https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/6/3774616756094647293/#c3774616756100521502 We don't really need to have the same conversation on each forum / community, imo. But the tl;dr is that the in-game server doesn't really matter very much for PZ. This isn't a game where you're going to sink maybe an hour into a match and then pick somewhere else to play; you're going to sink tens, hundreds, or thousands of hours into that server. So, use the areas dedicated to server ads / looking for groups instead of relying on the in-game server browser. As to using something else, realistically we're not going to replicate Steam's infrastructure and provide matchmaking and UPnP support for 35k servers and 30k+ users per hour. It's just not feasible for a company our size.