Sanctus Posted October 23, 2019 Share Posted October 23, 2019 Just wondering how to keep them from finding me. I was in the second floor bedroom of a cleared house with the lights off and a sheet over the window, I didn't make any noise and I wasn't followed in but when I left there were thirty zombies outside the bedroom door. How did they know I was in that specific room? I was only there for about one in game hour. This is especially sad for me because I had just found a katana in the room. :,( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krumple Posted October 23, 2019 Share Posted October 23, 2019 12 minutes ago, loudboomaker said: Just wondering how to keep them from finding me. I was in the second floor bedroom of a cleared house with the lights off and a sheet over the window, I didn't make any noise and I wasn't followed in but when I left there were thirty zombies outside the bedroom door. How did they know I was in that specific room? I was only there for about one in game hour. This is especially sad for me because I had just found a katana in the room. :,( It depends on several factors. What negative traits did your character have? Anything that produced more noise than normally? Walking around makes noise. Zeds can also smell you as well as see or hear you. Pretty much you have to play defensively when you are raiding, if you don't you will get jumped. Open doors quickly and then shut them almost as fast as you open them. This way if there were any zeds on the other side, chances are none or one got into the room. Then you can decide on the escape plan. If there were too many outside the door, find another exit. You can craft some sheet rope out of clothes, tear apart a bed or something in the room for a nail and you now have a second floor escape out a window. You can try to take on the group inside the house by continuing to quickly open and shut the door allowing only one zed in at a time. If they happen to break the door down then take the rope sheet escape. Depending on your settings, default zeds are allowed to group up meaning there is 1 zed leader for each group. So if that zed hears something, hears you, it will bring all it's buddies along with him to check out what naive survivor was making unnecessary noise. Always have an escape route, always be on the defensive, never assume a path is clear ever. You can't hide from them, they will eventually get you. So you should always be taking out ones that are a threat to your raiding or safe house. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
feral_donkey Posted October 23, 2019 Share Posted October 23, 2019 My problem is when a horde sits at a door making no noises. You open the door and they have you. No time to do anything. They seem quieter than before. I guess I have to thump every door and see what happens. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BoogieMan Posted October 23, 2019 Share Posted October 23, 2019 The zombies seem far more capable of coming to your location, even if you're not doing anything to draw attention to yourself and there should be no way for them to know you are there even if you lower some of their sandbox settings such as hearing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krumple Posted October 23, 2019 Share Posted October 23, 2019 When you open a door be ready to push. Like anticipate needing to push. Sure if there are 4 or 5 pushing wont really help you but its better than getting instantly bit. You can occasionally push the first one and back up, push again, and make it out of a trapped situation. It just takes some experimenting and not freaking out. If you try to turn to run next to zeds they almost always will bite you or grab you. From my experience playing sandbox, I always change the default settings because some of them are silly. So I dont really have any issue with zeds tracking me down like bloodhounds. Turn their memory down and their sensitivity to your input. Not sure why you want to hang out in a house doing nothing for long periods of time. Unless you are trying to find a place to sleep, it doesn't seem like a good idea. There are also perhaps some things I do that you guys aren't doing. Like when I'm raiding, I clear the area around the house before going in. The reason is as you walk through the house they are piling in on the house so by the time you are done looting you unknowingly have zeds outside waiting for you or they are climbing in broken windows. Clear the area first then go in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZombieHunter Posted October 24, 2019 Share Posted October 24, 2019 3 hours ago, loudboomaker said: Just wondering how to keep them from finding me. I was in the second floor bedroom of a cleared house with the lights off and a sheet over the window, I didn't make any noise and I wasn't followed in but when I left there were thirty zombies outside the bedroom door. How did they know I was in that specific room? I was only there for about one in game hour. This is especially sad for me because I had just found a katana in the room. :,( Devs have stated there is a "suspected" bug but have tried for a while to figure out what is causing them to "find" the player in a sealed room. But unable to reliably reproduce it. My guess is because of how the pathing system works is actually broken. They can do extremely complicated pathing through multiple paths to find the player. I am guessing what happens is 1 zombie "paths" to you, but the "forget" timer doesn't break on LoS fast enough. So it creates a path to the players actual position ( instead of last "known" position resulting in a horde forming. But of course it is just speculation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josko Posted October 24, 2019 Share Posted October 24, 2019 9 hours ago, loudboomaker said: because I had just found a katana in the room. :,( Holy shit a katana! Those things are really rare. What mode did you play? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thimascus Posted October 24, 2019 Share Posted October 24, 2019 I'm definitely feeling like the zombies are honing in on the player a bit too fast/hard. > Hiding in a small room > Curtains drawn > Massive thunderstorm outside. > Have life and living on lowest setting. > Zero zeds outside > Slept > Started reading a beginner carpentry book on speed 2 > Suddenly 8 zombies burst through the window (No thumps as warning) > Exit, entire house is completely stormed despite the fact that I was making almost no noise, minimal light, and there was a thunderstorm going on outside. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
feral_donkey Posted October 24, 2019 Share Posted October 24, 2019 Wasn't there something about smelling bloody clothes this time? I thought someone mentioned it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quigleyer Posted October 24, 2019 Share Posted October 24, 2019 I'm living in that farm house north of West Point and regularly crossing that field to the east/northeast. It's not uncommon for me to suddenly see zombies heading EXACTLY my direction from very far off (in that field). If I move out of the way they pass through where I was (if you've played 7DTD it feels reminiscent of their wandering hordes, which spawn in aimed towards where you are when they spawn in). They don't seem to be coming for me exactly, they seemed to be aimed towards where I was. I imagine this is a problem when in your house. FWIW I try and only use doors that I can see from my second story window each morning. I can confirm if there are zombies or not by looking out the window, it helps immensely. You're right, they are often sitting right outside my door being quiet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sanctus Posted October 30, 2019 Author Share Posted October 30, 2019 On 10/24/2019 at 1:00 AM, Josko said: Holy shit a katana! Those things are really rare. What mode did you play? apocalypse mode, the hardcore survival one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josko Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 13 minutes ago, loudboomaker said: apocalypse mode, the hardcore survival one. After checking the Distribution file, I found that Katana only spawns in Man wardrobes with a chance of 0.02 lol In Gunshop locker the chance is 0.5, much better but only 2 lockers so very unlikely to find it there. I find it weird they havnt added katana spawn to women and redneck wardrobes, surely a woman or a redneck could aquire one? ^^ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loskene Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 Zombie pathfinding seems to be oddly implemented, in that whenever they detect something (like your footsteps) they get its exact position and travel towards that point, stopping there if they find nothing, rather than just being given a *direction* to walk in until they get distracted or forget and go idle. I don't think they should be able to determine the exact origin of a sound and home in on it with precision regardless of how long ago the sound was or how far they had to travel to reach it. They should just get a "go that way" order in the general direction of the sound, with some variance since even a living human can't be that accurate, until something else distracts them, be it encountering the player or just hearing a different noise. If they wander past the origin of the sound without encountering anything then just have them forget about it. I mean, they're zombies, not laser guided bombs, but every one acts like they have a target painter telling them where to go. Their homing abilities need to be "stupider", which is not less threatening, rather less predictable. It's kind of boring knowing you can make a noise and every zombie within range will flock to that exact point in spacetime without fail and then stay there. If they started to fan out and search for the noisemaker for a few minutes after not finding anything that'd be a hell of a lot scarier, and make it harder to keep them distracted with a radio while looting an infested building. Also "omniscient" is the word you're looking for here, as in all-knowing. Omnipotent means all-powerful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZombiesLoveBrainiacs Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 1 hour ago, Loskene said: Zombie pathfinding seems to be oddly implemented, in that whenever they detect something (like your footsteps) they get its exact position and travel towards that point, stopping there if they find nothing, rather than just being given a *direction* to walk in until they get distracted or forget and go idle. Yup. One of the build 41 preview streams showed a good example. Zombies are doing long-range pathfinding right through the police station... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Milkdromeda Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 10 hours ago, ZombiesLoveBrainiacs said: Yup. One of the build 41 preview streams showed a good example. Zombies are doing long-range pathfinding right through the police station... https://imgur.com/a/I2uPMXc I think I also ran into the same long range pathfinding here. When I jumped over the fence most of them hit at the fence I jumped from, but one of the few that were there managed to figure out that it needed to go back through the shipping container, and up to the wooden gate. I don't think there were any other noises or distractions that could have caused one to be distracted, and if there were why'd it have gone to the gate and not any old fence. Not sure if this is the way its supposed to be. Are the zombies in Project Zomboid supposed to be possess this level of pathfinding ability? Seems pretty smart for a zombie, but most of the zombie lore I know of is derived from The Walking Dead so it might be different to whatever the devs have envisioned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZombieHunter Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 The issue is they want players to be constantly "Struggling" and developers have said it a few times. They don't want Zombie Ai realistic - where you expect Dumb zombies to do Dumb things. They want zombies challenging enough where players constantly fear for their lives. There for all Zombies in Zomboid are MENSA members and can perform Complex Logarithmic and statistical analysis for the nearest possible path to brains. That is one of the most basic Requirements of being a Zombie - why did you think Zombies want to eat brains? Obviously to get smarter. It is more of a gameplay \ computational issue more than anything. To make realistic dumb zombies - requires a lot more computing power than making mildly smart cheaty ones. For example Zombies do not register Existing objects - they only register them as blocks. So it simply creates waypoints around them to the target. I think they could probably cheat the code more by having "Controller" Zombies and "groups" Essentially what RTS games do were they add more actors to the screen by having a single controller deal with bigger groups. Allowing for smarter Ai while increasing numbers. But again its easier said than done. Ai Logic is a PhD topic in the end of the day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheLostBigBoss Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 The fence situation could be fixed if they did a clean up job on the map and replaced the "permanent" fences with new, high quality carpentry/metal fences that can bend and break down over time. I always assumed this was something in the back burner, as having permanent fences that don't break down really doesn't make sense and does make specific zones in the world extremely safe to man, and easy to maintain. That way when you enter a place with a chain fence, the zombies will "attack" it to get to you instead of having the obviously unrealistic and rather unfair pathfinding of scoping out a window and somehow instantly knowing it's the fastest path to the player (through multiple windows no less in a non straight path that zombies clearly shouldn't be able to naturally navigate) The zombies already know how to simply attack player structures as the "fastest" way to get to the player, so having to make new AI logic for the current permanent structures seems like an overly complicated fix for an issue that, from my understanding and observations at least, could be done with a more brute force approach. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZombieHunter Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 7 hours ago, TheLostBigBoss said: so having to make new AI logic for the current permanent structures seems like an overly complicated fix for an issue that That will just result in every fence being torn down - similar to how neighboorhoods where every window and door is broken due to zombie pathing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EnigmaGrey Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 With build 41, they should be going to a random position within ~30 tiles, rather than directly to the source of the sound (the player at the time of placing the construction, in previous builds). That goes out the window, ofc, if they can see you standing right behind the thing you placed, as they do have LOS on top of hearing. Having a bunch of nodes and a more staggered path would make performance of large groups worse, thus their pathfinding is simple. Similar thing with permanent, pre-built objects: it's done not because it's ideal but because the alternative is a zombie would have to weigh whether it was worth destroying the thing or not when trying to get to a location vs. a simple blocked/notblocked bool for all 8 possible walls on the edge of a single tile. Any changes to those structures would then make the cache of valid paths invalid (okay for player constructs, but bad for the whole map). tl;dr: We know it's not perfect once you notice the quirks, but it's the best we can do without the game's performance degrading. Remember, there can be thousands of zombies patching within the loaded areas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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