Luke159

In this one case, there's nothing to do as modders, unless you really want to get into their Java and Lua-centric metagame code to understand the process. The game is highly moddable. Take a look at the modding section, pick something you'd like to do, and give it a shot. Thank you I might do that one day, i'll wait for the next beta patch to be released first though because it looks to already have many fixes included and i'm sure it will have more before the patch is released for public testing. Ah that would explain it then. I just read what RobertJohnson said wrong? anyway thanks for the clarification.

I have worked on mods in the past and one of them was a sandbox game that became twice the size of the original and was very unstable due to the devs deciding not to spend any time fixing it. The game was Age Of Pirates 2 City Of Abandoned Ships and like so many mods a lot was been put in without public testing and thus bugs became a huge problem. In the end I stripped the mod back to the core on my own and fixed it so it was far more stable and had less bugs. There are a lot of very talented people out there and I have had the pleasure of working with some of them and speaking with many others who had/or still do work on the older game Pirates Of The Caribbean (not movie based game original name was meant to be Sea Dogs 2). Anyway if you do not wish to have my help then that's ok, I was simply throwing out possible ways to fix the problem or at least reduce it. If I had the time to really look into this I would do it myself, but sadly I do not have the time needed to fully understand how this game is coded.

This was why I said that disabling zombie loot coding might fix the horde problem. http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/1774-items-rarity/?p=26167

Maybe adding axes to sheds (not many sheds around) then lower the spawn chance a little for those in sheds only. You might get one but at least you know you have a chance of finding one in a shed at some point.

Since the item's in game decide how many zombies are spanwed its fair to say that as your looting and filling a safe house this causes the game to spawn/teleport hordes of zombies to that location. Perhaps disabling the zombie loot spawn and see how this goes, I haven't looked into how to disable it, but i'm sure someone will come along and help out here (if its not hard coded). But this would explain the sudden zombies appearing from no where right outside your safehouse(s) for no apparent reason.

I like the idea, I don't like the idea of been able to switch between characters as and when you choose. I think it if you die then the game randomly picks a player who's skills was less or similar to that of the character you was playing with before he/she died (I wold rather have the characters skills reset though).

In my new game (which i'm now at game day 8) i set it up (sandbox) to be few zombies, poor sight, hearing and smell, strength set to weak and other settings lowered for the zombies while i learn to play the game (found it boring playing without zombies). Anyway i started at this small house and quickly went out looting what i would needed and taking any sheets i could find for setting up a safe house to start storing all the goods at (my aim was for every 9 houses i looted the 10th would be a basic safe house). All the houses i wouldn't use as safe houses i would leave the doors open so i would no they are not the safe houses and that i had already looted them. Anyway game day 1 and as soon as i leave the house i find a small pack of zombies spread out a little, i start to kill them looting the houses around as i go. Finally after killing around 12 or so zombies and looting 9 houses i start to scout out the next house to be made into a safe house. No zombies which sounded perfect, so i start looting the houses around killing any zombies i see. After 2 game day's i have looted 9 houses and so its time to look for another suitable safe house, or so you would think. No though this safe house has a load of zombies around it and i start to focus on killing them and spending the night in a house that wasn't going to be used a safe house (in the hope that this draws zombies away from the safe house). Sadly this doesn't work and after killing all the zombies around the house i turn to walk away and almost run into a zombie who appears out of no where right in front of me, but worse still just over the back of the house there is a horde of zombies (at least 60+ zombies) and a little just over the other side of the street another horde of zombies (20+). Now i had been avoiding sleeping in this area while i killed these zombies and yet they are all coming here, so i have now abandoned the idea of trying to kill the zombies and moved on to looking for the next house to be a safe house. As for setting up an actual safe house with fencing and farming setup etc, i think this should be made so the player can do it if he/she wishes to. It should be up to the player how they want to go about playing the game, if they want to spend years moving around the map avoiding zombies then so be it, if they want to spend years farming and living in almost a peaceful place then again that's up to them. Going about setting up a fully functional safe house takes a lot of time resources and dedication as well as been extra careful not to attract to much attention. However i think for survival mode the ability to setup a fully functional safe house should be made hard but at the same time rewarding, for sandbox the player can choose his/her settings and so it doesn't really apply (or won't once sandbox is fixed). I think to make survival harder the setting for items been rare should see planks and saws made harder to find, this will then mean the player can't just stock pile planks, nails and when ready begin getting the foundations of the safe house in place. Instead the player would need to find a saw before they can make planks from the logs they have cut (axes are already very hard to find). While your at it hammers could be made a little harder to find (not a lot harder, but a little harder). But once a player has setup a fully functional safe house he/she shouldn't be punished for doing so, of course the player shouldn't just be able to sit back and relax. They should have to work to keep the safe house safe, but they shouldn't be presented by hordes of zombies in less they attracted them (or when NPC make their return, the NPC's bring the unwanted attention). Survival mode should be exactly what it is (survival) but again it shouldn't punish a player for setting up a safe house (but it would depend on how the player went about setting it up). avoiding making to much noise at the safe house or close by is fine, if the player constantly makes noise day after day then they should expect unwanted attention from zombies investigating the sounds. If they player go's around killing any zombies every few days and then spends what ever time is remaining to build some fence panels etc and get them in place before taking a few days rest and maybe heading to a new location where they will chop down the tree's and saw them into planks to attract zombies to them and move them away from the safe house then this should be fine. As long as the player is careful when setting up a safe house the player should be rewarded, obviously no one can live for ever at the same house while zombies are around, but the player should be able to spend a quiet a lot of time at the safe house (the more careful they was the longer they can stay there). Sandbox excluded from this because the player can easily lower the zombies settings and make them either as slow and dumb or intelligent as they like, so if they set the zombies to few and dumb as possible then the player should be able to get a safe house up without been careful and stop there for a long time. We will see how the changes effect zombies as and when the updates are released, hopefully the fixes drastically improve things though.

Well my position was hopeless, zombies had surrounded the house and was trying to break in and all I had was a knife so I drank the bleach and stood my ground while I waited for the bleach to kill me. Just as the zombies broke into the downstairs a house alarm went off in a distance and after I went down to have my final bash at some zombies I found myself in an empty house and not far from deaths door.;((

Well these sound events shouldn't be based on where the player is, they should be random as to where they happen (a gun shot goes off miles away from you and the zombies that heard it all head that way) a helicopter cycles over the police station (an example) but your no where near the police station. At the moment everything has been coded to kill the player, there is surviving and then trying to survive and as it is now its more like trying to survive. The player shouldn't be punished for setting up a base, he shouldn't be the focus of attention to bring the zombies to him. The player can do that on his/her own. Example of this is cooking, you cook something in the oven any zombies near (and they would need to be very close) would come to investigate the strange smell (but not every single zombie on the map). Might be 2 could be 8, but those who are close enough would pay you a visit. Not complaints, these are what people want addressed. If the game was released right now then you would start to see complaints. People want the zombie game where they can do what they want and not feel punished for doing something they decided to do by having herds of zombies appear for no reason other than the player has been staying at the same house for a few days or a week. Zombies don't exists we all know this and because of that we can make them as intelligent or dumb as we want, we could make it so zombies walk on all fours. Just because there is no rule stating a zombie must behave like this doesn't mean we should change the principle way we see a zombie. @ All those working on this game. What we want is a game where zombie's behave the way we see in your normal zombie move, and this from what I can see is fine. Ok zombies can climb through windows in this game, this however I see as been acceptable to the fact. What I don't agree with is seeing a player setup a base and then been over run a day or 2 later. We just want to have zombies do and behave as we expect them to, we could go into sandbox and play the game the way we want, that's not a big deal But if survival mode has things in it that sandbox doesn't the its obvious that people will want to play that mode and then start to complain. Perfect example to this is the Formula 1 2012 game by code masters, a lot of the people who want a true simulator won't touch any F1 game made by this company because their focus is on trying to make a game the fits all. Setups that are pre made so the player doesn't need to learn how to set the car up, the handling so the player can race around the track and not be punished to harshly for getting on the power a little to early or not punishing the player for running on the curbs all the time damaging their tyres. In stead the curbs are just an extension to the track and you are free to run over those curbs all the time with no increase in tyre degradation. So the sim like players play RFactor for a more true to life feel. Another example is Rome total war, it was not perfect but it was balanced enough to be seen as good and because of how popular Rome TW was, the developers released Rome 2 TW and have now had many complaints because the units are not balanced enough. Many great games fall at the waste, this is because people are more willing to voice their opinions be it on a forum via a video on you tube, etc. Some people here might never have worked on a sandbox game before, but many could have worked on mods for games. These are the people that transform a poor game into a game that everyone wanted (again look at Rome 1 and 2 or many other games like Pirates Of The Caribbean aka Sea Dogs 2). All i'm trying to say is I understand that as a developer its frustrating seeing people making demands or picking faults with things that have had many hours, weeks or months of work put into them. But in todays world this will happen and many people who are not happy will not only focus their attention on what annoys them but will start to look for other reasons to pick apart features within the game.

This used to be the idea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsL_7xQnCSA Note this is old back when npcs where in the game. This is before the streaming got put in so its different now. I think this is what they have said they wanted to do but all of this would happen in the back round out side of the players view in numbers only in the meta game. That looks over kill to me, zombies should not be made aware of where the player is by magically going there. There needs to be reasons for zombies to move to new locations. How it right now, the game seems to be set up so the player always has to move around, why can't a player setup camp and stay there for a few months before been forced to move out? the game is meant to be based around realism, but I don't see realism in the zombie spawn rates or how the zombies all move to where the player is located. Either the amount of zombies generated ingame at anyone time needs to be lowered or the zombies coding needs to be completely changed so that the zombies don't know where the player is. I understand that the developers don't want you to be camping somewhere for years and never seeing a zombie but I think how it is done right now is a problem. All zombie spawn points I feel should be moved to around the edge of the map (no spawn points in side of the map its self). There will be more than enough zombies in the map its self to keep the player happy and feeling unsafe. Any zombies are respawned at the maps edge and slowly move in to the centre of town in less they hear or see something some where and go investigate that. I have watched many LP's on you tube and seen how the zombies all group up and before you know it there is thousands of them. The total allowed on the map should be set to a 2 hundred and then released for the community to test out, if there feels to few zombies then the total amount should be increased from 2 hundred to say 4 hundred and then tested again. You could even have the game events play a role in how the total amount is effected. A helicopter increases the total amount by 50 (so from 2 hundred it becomes 250) machine gun fire increases the total amount by 20 (from 200 to 220) and so on, then make the game events a little rarer. The truth is though, zombies need a lot of work and balancing and NPC's need to be reintroduced to help fine tune the balancing around them other wise all the balancing will need to be relooked into once the NPC's make their return.

Could this not also be used to help lure zombies away? setup a trap that can only be activated by a zombie (like a mine I guess, but not a bomb) something that causes a load noise that makes zombies want to go an investigate.

As a new player to the game and after watching many LP's from earlier releases to see how the game has developed to where it is now, I can honestly say that going back would be a mistake. I have had no issue's at all with the steam version and think the only thing to do for the steam version right now is to either reduce the amount of zombies that can be spawned or find another way to stop the zombies from over running your position after a few game days.

What happened to the link to this version? I wanted to try it out.

Its perhaps a windows 8 issue as many games have problems with that operating system and is the reason I will not go to it.

@ Crazy Eyes Thanks for the tip bud, this is what I was planning on doing, but wasn't sure if it would work out the way I wanted. The main reason I wanted to do it like this was so I could cut tree's and things down over one side of town and then move them between safe houses till I finally get them to the main one (where I want to secure for the last stand). By doing it like this I figured the zombies would start heading to where i'm cutting the tree's down and then when I start to put the materials into use at the main safe house the zombies would start to head back up towards me. This way I could keep moving them between 2 or 3 area's and perhaps manage to hold out for a lot longer. @ Suomiboi Thanks for the links bud , really looking forward to using this. At the moment its not to bad, not many zombies. But when it starts getting to the large herds that's when I will have problems, maybe by the time that happens I will understand enough of the game mechanics to be able to continue the game without the need to modify anything. But this savegame editor will most likely come in use soon because I have a lot to learn.