drNovikov

Hello, guys.

I tried searching for "crossbow" in suggestions forum, found no such suggesion. So I decided to suggest a crossbow. Why?
 
1. It is an iconic weapon of many post-apocalyptic games, films and books, because it is silent, shoots retrievable and craftable ammo. Perfect tool for a survivor.
 
2. It will enhance survivor's sustainability, because it's bolts can be retrieved and crafted.
 
3. It will enhance stealth gameplay, because it is silent.
 
4. It will not be overpowered, because it will require players to reload (I suggest 2-3 sec reloading) it after each shot, and because player will have to search zombie's body to get his projectile back. Also, a typical crossbow weight is about 3.5 kg, so it will limit player's carrying capacity. Also, it's range is not that great.
 
I think that bolts and arrows could be crafted by a player with intermediate carpentry skill.
 
 
Best regards.

They already came back. As zombies.

waiting for this moment so i can get myself to play PZ again

No, it's not that. What they mean is that if you have rotten food, and you cook it, you assume the character cuts off the bad parts of the meat and eats the newly-cooked good parts. Of course, refurbished rotten food won't have as much of a nutritional kick as regular cooked food because of the fact that there's less meat and such.

Actually, I'm afraid that right now you get the price for instantiation for every zombie anyway, whether you take it from an aggregated zombie or from a real stored zombie would make very little difference. The game would use more memory, but would not be slower because of it.
 
Working with 100 thousand simple records is not an issue for java. The price really is in the instantiation and simulation of the zombies, not in their memory storage and access. Getting them on screen is a thousand times more cpu and memory intensive than simply storing the coordinates.
 
I'm not sure how many zombies we're talking about here. But if you store only x,y coordinates per zombie  and you have 100 thousand zombies I doubt you'd hit 4 megabyte of ram. And that's a very broad guess, you could probably fit the zombies visuals, and direction into that same memory.
 
We're talking modern computers here. Juggling those amounts of data is peanuts. Even if you had a million zombies in the game you could probably squeeze them into 64mb. And even the 32 bit version of zomboid has at least 1.5gb of memory available to it. So the storage isn't the problem, trying to simulating them all, including pathfinding and visuals would instagib your performance. But that's an entirely different story

From what I have seen I think the previous post was correct in that the zombie horde group up when I reload into a cell. I have seen hordes like pictured, but I have also noticed very few stragglers in what I think is the cell after the square shaped horde appeared. My 2 cents.

Thank you for your input  lemmy, that sort of describes what I'm seeing. However, I'm seeing numbers of zombies aggregate together in those square tiles where the day before there were none in the entire screen around that tile and certainly not that many in the few screens around that area. So quite naively I ask if your aggregation might in reality pull zombies from a much larger block than you expect? Or perhaps there's a virtualize/unvirtualize bug that somehow amplifies the zombie count?
 
I ask because I see the number of zombies in the area, (certainly in the screen), increase from a handfull to over a hundred. Migration could potentially explain that. But It happened for me on three consecutive plays when I did not make much noise myself and I was attentive to audible events, like the choppers and gunshots.

I am not hyperbolizing, here is what happened:
 
1. A group of 12-15 zombies was staying in front of my warehouse door.
2. I slowly approached it and attracted 3 zombies.
3. I began retreating to the center of the parking space, swinging my axe and killing the fastest zombies.
4. As soon, as I killed them, I slowly approached the same place again -- and there was a whole fresh horde standing in a square formation.
 
Another episode:
 
1. I was moving along the road, being chased by a small group of zombies. I was retreating, letting 1-2 zombies approach and killing them with my axe.
2. After I killed the last of them (that took about 10-15 seconds) I decided to loot the bodies. I started walking back and saw a large square horde of zombies which was not there 10 seconds ago.
What kind of evidence do you need? Will a video be okay?

Hello there
 
I just bought Project Zomboid a few days ago and first things first. I absolutely love the potential this game have and even the gameplay it offers just by a alpha version! So big props to the devs.
 
I have been lurking the forums the last couple of days and especially this thread, because I have been experiencing the same, I'm still not sure about the whole horde spawning next to me, but I have seen some hordes seemingly come from nowhere pretty much every playthrou. Not only that but at the current state, even though I make safehouses way to the south/east of town, hordes just seem to home pigeon on my safehouses only after a couple of nights sleep, making it pretty much impossible for me to stay in one location more than a few days time. It happens even pretty early in the game almost from the start of a new survival playthrough.
 
My understanding of it so far seems that there is a pretty sadistic AI director, but it seems a taaaad too much, at least for my liking.
 
I just wanted to let u guys know my experience and seems like other people are suffering a bit from it too, so hopefully it can get recognized.

I'm surprised by everyone speaking of intended behavior. If you walk away and then back like regularx does there shouldn't be a packed horde. Maybe it's an artefact of the current system but it's also game breaking behavior and that can't be as intended. An unintended negative side effect counts as a bug where I work! 
 
Thanks everyone though, you're putting mighty amounts of experimentation and testing into the subject. I could not have wished for a better reaction to my original post. I wanted to draw attention to the way the zombies spawn at your doorstep seemingly out of nowhere. That certainly worked. No matter what the outcome, it will be a thoroughly researched topic  And I'm sure things will get all the better for it! I hope one of you gentlemods will tip the devs so they know about the topic and can peruse it at their leasure.
 
I'm going to stop playing for a bit. I want to take the next step and do the mid game base building/farming but zomboid is just not quite there yet. I realize this is an alpha game, bugs are to be expected and will be fixed eventually. I fully accept that, so I'll be following the development with eagle eyes! The first chance I get I'll be right there in the front with you other survivors! I love this game, it really kicks ass. It's the best game out there at the moment. Devs are truly doing a stellar job (Keep spanking that code guys!). And the community is awesome to boot. So a big thumbs up to all of you! 

Hi, guys.
 
I've found a way to survive in a land of rotten food. Even if refrigerators don't work anymore or your crops were left unattended for too long, you are not completely screwed! Of course, this needs some additional tests.
 
1. Making your own tinned soup 
 
You can preserve food by cooking pots of soup! Put all the ingredients, even rotten, into a cooking pot filled with water, then cook it. Temperature will sterilize it's contents. According to game files, pots of soup don't have a "DaysTotallyRotten" parameter. If I am right, that means you can cook and make your own tinned soup! Collect cooking pots!
 
But beware! As soon as you open it and make 4 bowls of soup (adds a bonus to it's nutritional value and allows to eat 4 smaller portions instead of a whole pot), it will become susceptible to rotting again. Bowls of soup have a "DaysTotallyRotten" parameter.
 
Hint: if your chicken, salmon of steak became burnt, don't eat it and don't throw it away! You can use it as a soup ingredient. Just cut the bad pieces out and leave some good meat =) Adding more ingredients (meat, peas, butter, flour, sugar, eggs) increase nutritional value even more!
 
+  +  +  =  (salvation!)
 
Farmers! Grow broccoli and carrot! Each can decrease hunger by 15 points, but if you combine them, make a pot of simple soup, cook it and pour into bowls, each bowl can decrease hunger by 45 points, providing additional bonus against boredom and unhappiness. If you make 4 bowls, each bowl will make you 14 points less hungry. Also, you can cook this soup in a campfire, increasing it's value even more. Growing your own cookable crops provides great sustainability!
 
 +  +  + =  (non-perishable)
 
 + 4x  = 4x  (more yummy, but perishable)

Very soon I will make an little mod allowing to use potatoes and tomatoes in a soup as a third ingredient, so survivors will have a reason to grow more crops and be able to make better soups.
 
2. Refurbishing other food 
 
So you've got a watermelon, but it's rotten? Don't eat the rotten parts! It still got some fresh parts inside! Smash it or slice it, and you will get some fresh watermelon slices (I prefer slices) or chunks. They, in turn, will rot after some time, but right after slicing it's still edible.
 
I still have to double-check this, but it seems like rotten chicken, salmon and steak can be cooked. Temperature seems to kill bacteria =)
 
3. Bugs 
 
While making tinned soup and cutting the fresh pieces of food is legit, there are other ways to get some fresh food from garbage.
 
A cheese sandwich (not grilled) does not have a "DaysTotallyRotten" parameter. I believe (haven't checked yet) it is possible to craft a fresh cheese sandwich from rotten cheese and rotten bread.

OK, so I decided to keep fighting the Sadistic AI out in the wilds a while longer and did finally see something which more precisely fits the OP.  I'm really sorry I didn't get a video of this, it would have been able to describe it better.  I'll try after the next horde.  But here's a pic:
 

 
 
Sorry the pic probably doesn't even remotely do it justice.  OK, so I'm in the exact same place.  I've just managed to wipe out that third horde.  My kill count at this point is 1,042 - and I don't think that's the old kill count error at work.  I've cleared out the entire area.  I ran away from the shack (from about the point in the pic) to the west, ran back and forth a bit and then returned.
 
To a completely brand new horde as pictured.  I had been out to the east of the shack a moment ago, and didn't see any stragglers left.  These guys all came from nowhere, seemingly.  
 
So I still stick to the fact that this is just the AI behaving in a very artificial, but somewhat intended way - but yeah, I could see where it might seem like hordes appear out of thin air.
 
Update: OK, now there are too many corpses on the ground to consider this save a valid test anymore.  But I am about to test that whole "zombie population equals Mulbraugh population" theory.
 
Update 2: After about 4500 corpses, I'm thinking the census in Kentucky needs better funding.  I can't really test this save anymore, the game is effectively a crawl now.

I'm going to be streaming the game and see what I can muster up, besides there being tins of zombies everywhere, which is normal until they fix the low density option, I did notice some odd spawning of a few zombies. I was at the normal wooden fenced in house and had the front barricaded. Zombies found my back entrance I had and kept banging at my door, I went out to clear them and noticed some zombies coming at me from inside my base, from near the house even though there was no way for them to get there without me noticing, ill check my stream to see if I got the video but it isn't exactly evidence of anything horde sized. Will update if I see anything odd later.

Ok so I've just been playing.
I picked the usual spot for a hideyhole and things were going quite well (Love the new fight system, it makes me feel like rambo! Maybe a bit OP)
 
I dropped a load of items there and spent the night. The next morning all is well. So I leave for the big warehouse in the northwest corner hoping for an axe, didn't find one, but I found enough fun items to be satisfied, (Check the inventory list!). I get back home, turn the corner to walk into the garden...
 
And then this...
Deja vu all over again... A mob spawned outside my front door.
 
The square formation isn't very visible here. I think I see it but it's not that clear. However! you can see the area outside the fence is abandoned which is not what you'd expect with normal migratory zombies.
 
Also note that it's day 3... The sadistic AI manager reads along on this forum and hates my guts? I haven't even been chopping wood here, I just smashed a few zombie heads and unloaded my bags. Density was about 1 or 2 deadheads per screen. A little denser than the previous game at the farm.
 
Why don't you guys try it? Start game, gather stuff whilst moving to this area. Sleep and head for the warehouse. Then day three you go to the warehouse loot that and return. This happened to me on 3 consecutive plays now.
 

I'd like to refer back to the algorithm I described in my third post. It should solve the teleporting problems and still allow for hordes. Notably hordes would arrive for reasons dictated by the meta game. So if the game for some reason decides your house gets attacked it will get attacked. It will be a design choice instead of a flaw in the meta game.
 
So it would actually become a story telling tool.
 
First of I'd like to note that the horde in the screenshot is in a square block formation indicative of being spawned. (If they randomly walked there you'd see a blob but no square.)
 
1. would be a natural result which could be tweaked by a simple multiplier.
2. Hordes are just high density zombie counts. They aren't objects in themselves, but could still appear, if they appear they have a specific meta game attractor causing them.
3. Also automatically solved, zombies only spawn on tiles as they're being loaded, and if the character isn't moving "upstream/offscreen" according to the vectors, so they migrate past the player. If the player were to be hiding in a house and looking out of his upstairs window. He'd see zombies mulling past in a definite direction attracted by some meta game event.. 
Or when there are no events pulling them in you'd just get some  wanderers moving in random directions,
4. Hordes will never spawn, Instead they will converge in local meta game indicated areas.
 
If you somehow attract a horde to your safehouse, (Practicing your electric guitar again?) they'll effectively arrive from all angles (though more from the higher density areas around you) and converge on the house. It wouldn't be a blob unless you run ahead of them...

absolutely something similar to this would help. The point of PZ is to let the player survive in their own way. If you can't build a base then that rules out half the game right there. I understand it's a WIP but I agree that their migrations should be based on other noises or random and if they get at the player base, they should keep moving along unless they notice the player, hear him, etc (me cowaring upstairs under the covers with my baseball bat until they leave). I haven't noticed the teleporting zombies, it always seemed to me that I would go out around day 2-3 and just have a massive horde near me that looked like it had just walked up (seemed spread out)

Wow! I've just notices a new item: concrete powder!

Hello, guys.

I tried searching for "crossbow" in suggestions forum, found no such suggesion. So I decided to suggest a crossbow. Why?
 
1. It is an iconic weapon of many post-apocalyptic games, films and books, because it is silent, shoots retrievable and craftable ammo. Perfect tool for a survivor.
 
2. It will enhance survivor's sustainability, because it's bolts can be retrieved and crafted.
 
3. It will enhance stealth gameplay, because it is silent.
 
4. It will not be overpowered, because it will require players to reload (I suggest 2-3 sec reloading) it after each shot, and because player will have to search zombie's body to get his projectile back. Also, a typical crossbow weight is about 3.5 kg, so it will limit player's carrying capacity. Also, it's range is not that great.
 
I think that bolts and arrows could be crafted by a player with intermediate carpentry skill.
 
 
Best regards.