Map questions: Problematic spawns, Road Tiles and Zones

[throttlekitty]

I'm getting all my ducks in a row to work on a map + tiles mod, and here's some questions I haven't been able to figure out. I'm a fan of not having to redo a bunch of stuff late in a project, so any help is much appreciated!

 

Are the road tiles behavior hardcoded? I'd like to make a couple more, but I don't see any properties or relevant scripts that make a road tile give a smooth ride (compared to driving on grass). I just want to make some tire marked roads so they aren't so uniformly clean; I could do this with an overlay, but if I'm going to do that, then why not save a little and make them a full opaque tile?

 

 

In my test map, I can't get zombies to NOT spawn. I have a sandbox preset that works just fine with the vanilla map, no zeds spawning. The same preset on my map has a small amount of zombies everywhere, including where I spawn, and inappropriate places like water or in kitchen counters for example. In this case, I was using an all-black spawnmap.

I thought maybe some slight noise was getting saved or something, but that wasn't the case. I also tried other combinations of spawn settings with some painted white spots in my spawnmap, but still seeing the loose zombies peppered across the cells. The map with the painted spots is increasing population density there, so that works as expected. But having them spawn on top of the player spawn or anywhere else they shouldn't is a problem. What am I missing here? (afterthought to point out that I am using the correct pixel size for the spawnmap)

 

I've gathered that most of the named zone areas (TownZone, Forest, etc) relate to trapping and scavenging through a couple thread and looking at scripts. Since I can't open the vanilla map in the editors to see exactly how things are laid out, just a few questions here.
Nav zone: What is this used for and where? I assume I would lay these zones out on roads, but what about say, a sidewalk system on a school campus? And should a Nav zone overlap a Town Zone, or does the game expect them to be broken down so they don't overlap?

 

Also, is it possible to use custom zone definitions? I've got a half-baked idea for adding random barricade type things similar to the car wrecks.

[Ciber Ninja]

Those are good questions. For the roads, I would go with an overlay. Then you can use a single set with all the types of concrete.

[throttlekitty]

So I got the spawning thing figured out. Kind of. Having the AIZ Enhanced map mod loaded is what's causing zombies to spawn in my standalone map. Didn't expect that, considering one picks which world to play in. Though a quick glance at the lua scripts shows that the map is making corrections/adjustments to spawns for the various map it includes based on cell position, so I guess that's getting ran on the 0,0:3,3 range when the game inits.

 

So that's a load off at least, I was doing experiments with tile properties last night and did a lot of new games in the process. Kinda sucks to get bit ~1 second after "THIS IS HOW YOU DIED", as funny as it is