Lemmy: Ever considered a "heat map" to govern zombies?

[zomboid123]

Something like this is what I mean

 
I know the game is not made of sqaures on a grid, this is just for demonstration purposes

Figure A
Player spent a couple of days chopping trees, sawing, constructing, barricading, running around and generally making a racket=high heat index
Figure B
One day before construction started in figure A, the player triggered an alarm, greatly rasing that tile and the surrounding tiles heat index, which made his construction ruckus all the more dangerous.
Figure C
One day before setting off the alarm in figure B, another was set off in figure C. Since the distance is further, there are only warm spots between the two alarms, and the heat has greatly subsided.
Figure D
A slightly longer time between figures C and D, but a much closer proximity gives us a similar results to b+c, the heat had subsided but was brought back up again from the alarm at C. Due to the great distance between B and D, the heat has almost gone back to zero.


Basically noise=attention. If you are making a ruckus, nearby zombies should be vaguely searching for the player, and heat would apply to zombies as well. The increased activity of them searching, pounding, smashing, would draw in even more... This is exactly how it works in the zombie flicks, things snowball out of control.


Basically a rated system of noise levels like:

Extreme Heat: Chopper
High Heat: Gunfire, Alarms, Large Horde moving(wish the game had a simulation to move and track large hordes moving around randomly around the map at large, they could snowball with this system making nuts "shuffling ocean" tier hordes that you don't want to mess with)
Mid Heat: Smashing windows, Construction, Barricading, Small Horde moving, Zombie Headbanging, non-gunfire meta events
Low Heat: Sprinting Outdoors, Melee Combat Outdoors, Zombies Pursuing Player Outdoors


And it would be a tracked number that both builds and subsides over time; barricading a house or sprinting a short distance wouldn't draw too much heat, but constructing a fortress in the span of a week or sprinting around a neighborhood smashing every window could draw serious heat that could snowball out of control as it draws zombies from further and further out due to the zombie movements causing even more heat in "squares" further and further out. If you got the heck out of dodge and let things cool off for a while it should slowly decay, save zombie/meta/npc activity.

[BayCon]

Err.. I know this is for Lemmy, but I personally think this would ruin some of the lore of PZ's unique brand of zombies.

[zomboid123]

Err.. I know this is for Lemmy, but I personally think this would ruin some of the lore of PZ's unique brand of zombies.

I'm not sure what you mean... PZ zombies very clearly have the ability to hear.

[BayCon]

 

Err.. I know this is for Lemmy, but I personally think this would ruin some of the lore of PZ's unique brand of zombies.

I'm not sure what you mean... PZ zombies very clearly have the ability to hear.

 

 

Mainly the zombies searching around the area of the player like cops on searching for a missing child. They're not people. Traditional zombie lore states that they do not have the cognitive ability to do much more than wander around and scratch on inanimate barriers and eat chase after/consume living flesh.

[Footmuffin]

 

 

Err.. I know this is for Lemmy, but I personally think this would ruin some of the lore of PZ's unique brand of zombies.

I'm not sure what you mean... PZ zombies very clearly have the ability to hear.

 

 

Mainly the zombies searching around the area of the player like cops on searching for a missing child. They're not people. Traditional zombie lore states that they do not have the cognitive ability to do much more than wander around and scratch on inanimate barriers and eat chase after/consume living flesh.

 

Well, yeah. But they've been agitated by the commotion, so they need to go find the food that made the sound, because that sound has to have been food.

[zomboid123]

Well, yeah. But they've been agitated by the commotion, so they need to go find the food that made the sound, because that sound has to have been food.

Exactly this. Think about someone hammering and sawing doing construction: it will echo throughout a neighborhood but not be easy to pinpoint unless you are fairly close by, so the zombies from a good distance away would have a vague idea of where the noise is coming from but would not have a pinpoint location. Noise=food so they would begin looking for the source of the sound. This is what I mean with the heat map, it would increase a "square's"(chunk/cell whatever in PZ) noise/commotion level and draw in zombies.

[ShuiYin]

Well sound do attract zombies and i believe you can increase or decrease zombie sensitivity to sound in sandbox options.

[Gomboid]

When I first read this thread I didn't really think much of it, but now that I've spent a good 12+ hours out in the sticks building a fort, I can say that this idea has merit.

 

In the 12+ hours I've been here, I've heard gunshots three times, and dogs twice. There hasn't been a single helicopter, and this has been shortly after a server reset (multiplayer btw). I've come across maybe 10 roaming zombies in the entire time I've been here, and even with the gunshots/dogs, there hasn't been anything else. The only way I'm really going to see some zombie activity is if I go into town, which is kind of pointless now that I have everything I need, and with hydrocraft I can pretty much make everything else.

 

I support the idea, but only if it was implemented as a sort of hybrid system, such as this + the current spawning system. Maybe have only 25% of zombie spawns follow the heatmap, and the remaining 75% follow the usual system. Or 50/50, I don't really know what would be most balanced, but all I can say is that at the moment it feels a bit like a construction/farming simulator.

[EnigmaGrey]

They'll come.

[Svarog]

Yep, they'll come. For lulz I started a game with no zombies, spawned 500 of them, ran away from them with Invisibility on and they found me after a while.