Changing the zombie respawn system

[RedKrypton]

In my recent playthroughs I have noticed that altough I constantly clean out zombies everywhere the density of zombies stays the same. It's incredibly frustrating. Why can just all zombies be spawned at the beginning of game and then the rest wanders in as hordes from Louisville or the highways? And if that is too much to ask, maybe make a spawn proof zone around player built structures.

[EnigmaGrey]

Here is the problem we have:

In an ideal world, we would simply simulate a million zombies in real-time - they would all move around the map according to what they see and hear, if they're killed, they're dead permanently. Additional zombies would only ever 'migrate' in from the very edges of the map. No approximation would be going on. I think that we can all agree that this would be the perfect way for the game to operate.

I think we also intuitively know that such a system would be impossible for a number of reasons - not just the processing required for the A.I or the ridiculous burden on your net connection in multiplayer, but also the fact that the zombies would need to know about parts of the map which aren't streamed in (even if we made the map a fraction of the size it is, parts of it would still not be in memory at any given location). So that's out as a solution, by miles.

So. What can we do? How can we get the huge zombie populations that we need to give a satisfying sensation of being in the zombie apocalypse? Well, on some level, we have to cheat, just like all other games do on some level. Again, in an ideal world, you cheat in a manner which looks to the player as if you're not cheating. When you play games with incredibly sophisticated A.I. and oh my God it's so clever and amazing - this is because they cheated in a way in which it wasn't noticeable. Good job! 10/10

Now we've got a problem. We're a sandbox game. We need to give the player control over how the game operates. We need to let the player customise their experience. This means exposing the controls to the sandbox settings. Now when we cheat, we need to give you a little box in order to customise that cheat. We need to reveal that there is such a thing as migration and respawning. Without the sandbox options, we could have randomised the respawning a little and simply pretended that what you were seeing was migration. Oh! Those zombies were simulated! They must have heard a noise, wandered over, and that explains why this cleared out area now has some zombies in it. With some incredibly well phrased bullshit, we probably could have convinced a number of people that actually somehow we were able to pull off simulating that ridiculous a number of zombies.

The more technical amongst you probably would have smelled bullshit - but you wouldn't be able to say exactly how we were bullshitting.

Not so with a sandbox game. We have to expose how it works. There's no way we can bullshit our way out of this. And that means, because you know that respawning is something which happens, you're now in the position of thinking that the only explanation for some zombies being somewhere they shouldn't be is because of respawning - sort of Occam's Razor logic. And it puts us in a position where we're having a discussion in terms of those sandbox options, rather than having a general discussion about how the game feels - completely isolated from number in boxes. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in.

Because in an ideal world, all you guys would be talking about how the game feels - and only we developers would be worrying about what numbers go in boxes to make it feel good for you.

What can we do about this? Well, we're in Early Access - there's still plenty of room to tweak the actual ways in which respawning happens, when it triggers, all that jazz - to make it feel right. But regardless of what we do, it'll still be exposed in the sandbox settings. We could obfuscate those settings by giving them fairly meaningless names, but that would then make customising sandbox kind of shit - if you're setting options whose effect is unknown.

edit: I would also like to mention in this word "cheat" heavy post, that we endevour to cheat as little as possible, obviously. I've banged on about it simply to emphasise the point that it has to happen at some point in this, and almost every game. But the fact that most times, you can see a whopping horde, turn, run off, turn, run back, and there is the same whopping horde shows that we are actually simulating in a non-cheaty way a pretty damn large number of zombies

[The Good Noob]

Well, it sounds nice. But (always we have a "but"), it is really annoying when the zombies spawn INSIDE de safe house. You get a big work to build fences, walls, barricades and so on. Then, a zombi spawns INSIDE your property while you are doing something boring and it kills you 

 

Can the SandBox include a parameter fot giving the zombi-spawning-machine a order to get its ass hell out of the SH? 

[WolfeClaw]

Yeah, my friend lost a character to a zombie spawning inside our safehouse, losing hours worth of skills. A tad annoying, but the technical limitations are understandable.

[EnigmaGrey]

If they're spawning in a fortified area, there's a gap somewhere. The game does check if it's possible to navigate to that area across the map.

[Livio Persemprio]

as he said, zombies are not supposed to spawn inseide walled areas.
there is a zombie respawn setting in the sandbox options, check there, i think you can deactivate respawn or at least turn it to very very low

[BayCon]

Zombies spawning in safehouses? Well that makes me paranoid..