Vehicles won't spawn [SOLVED, SOLUTION IN LAST POST]

[TitanKämpfer]

Hello,

 

I'm pretty new to map making in Zomboid and went through some tutorials on youtube. However spawning cars simply does not work for me.
At first I tried creating them like in the tutorial video, naming them "parkingstall" and giving them the template. First only 3x4 or 4x3, but neither them, nor the larger ones do spawn anything. I even tried not naming them or what would happen if I don't attach a template.

 

The parking stalls are in the worldobjects.lua and the worldsobjects.lua is also included in my maps folder. What else could I have done wrong?

Edited July 8, 2023 by TitanKämpfer

[Hugo Qwerty]

I've never done any mapping, but in my files the name value is never 'parkingstall', its either empty or a special value (MassGenFac, network3, spiffo, good, etc.)

 

If it makes any difference, vanilla parking stalls are in objects.lua rather than worldobjects.lua

[TitanKämpfer]

I also tried giving them no name (actually you can see that the list also still features 3 none named ones). But besides that also postal and bad never spawned anything.

But I will try renaming my objects file to objects.lua and test it.

 

Edit:

No, Did not make any difference.

 

Edit 2 & Solution:

I just added all possible car zones to my map to test if any of them works and now cars do spawn (on all parkingstalls). Seemingly the game does need at least some different types of parkingstalls? Probably normal ones and burnt or traffic jam ones?

- I can now confirm that the game does at least need one traffic jam parkingstall to spawn cars at all

 

Edited July 8, 2023 by TitanKämpfer

[Irradiated_Bagel]

Perhaps unrelated but having issues with getting vehicles to spawn myself I tried a view things.

1. You HAVE to name the parking stall zones using lower case: parkingstall

2. If you choose the West/South direction they will spawn cars more often than using North/East direction.
3. I've had the least success spawning cars using the East direction.

The screenshots below I've tested different sized parking places and specifically focusing on the East direction, naming the space + leaving 3 sections unnamed.
The unnamed sections didn't spawn a car at all. Only East facing spots had a zone larger than 4x3.
The zones facing North/South/West spawned cars fine in zones with 4x9 or 4x12.
This is in Sandbox with spawn chance set to high.
I've also been unable to spawn cars inside a building (such as a garage). So I don't know if that's possible at all other than manually placing cars inside them rather than using zones.

I don't fully understand the reasoning behind this but this is what I've observed. I'm sure there are smarter people out there that could explain things.
But for me the rules to spawn cars you need to:
1. Name the zone 'parkingstall'.
and
2. Pick either South or West direction. (North seems pretty decent too)

[TitanKämpfer]

For me spawning works even without naming the zone and will just default to the same as parkingstall.

I haven't really checked if different directions spawn things more often or less, but at least all of them spawn cars for me. Testing my current map project, there are however sometimes spawns that for some reason do rarely spawn cars even on high settings, while other parking stalls of the exact same type (name and direction) do often spawn a car. I think it's just bad luck in that case.

My map however is a standalone map, I don't know if things might behave differently if they're connected directly onto the Kentucky map.

 

But I haven't been able to spawn in cars inside of a garage as well, so I believe you really can't spawn them inside the room of a building.