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arlingtine

fix the zombies already

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How many times do we have to die to invisible zombies or zombies that can walk through walls and doors. This is a huge glitch and they seem to be doing nothing about it. This is driving me insane!

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perhaps you should go spend some time reading up on the current state of development before you come here and cry a lot. zeds are getting some major rework, which you would know had you been following along.

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How many times do we have to die to invisible zombies or zombies that can walk through walls and doors. This is a huge glitch and they seem to be doing nothing about it. This is driving me insane!

I'm just going to quote a couple of the developers posts as I'm lazy, hopefully it will give you some insight into the work being done and what's involved in "Fixing" zombies.

 

 

It would help to be more specific each time you write something like this, zombies have many issues and each and one of them is or will be worked on. This is no easy task.

 

Movement : Navmesh is working fine, we have improved version internaly, however zombies moving through walls atm is animation and geometry issue. That is being worked on as well. Long term though since animation system has to be replaced.
 
Desync : mostly item synchronization issue , server performance (not server fps), is again fixed internaly. It was introduced after persistence, loot respawn and cleanup. This introduced different sleep arrays for items,mobiles and thus had a lot of issues at the begging.
 
AI : need hardcoded engine sensors, script is not getting there, worked on.
 
Amount : Mostly server performance and network code, which is constantly being worked on, long term goal as well.
 
Stealth : Part of AI and sensors
 
Damage : Damage system and hardcoded events
 
The list of issues I described is there because the saying zombies is broken is simply not correct. They are in development and although feedback is welcome, the more detailed it is more it helps. Some of them may plague part of our player base , some of them plague the whole community. And that goes both for their impact and visibility.
 
Its a combination of "not yet there" systems of melee and zombies. Which I do understand , are probably first two things you come across as far as interaction goes. (Besides movement and looting) We all want to just enjoy the game :), hopefuly down the road we iron out all the problems. In the meantime we will try to provide a reasonable experience even during development. The process of giving people product that is going through development should ultimatly be a iteration of systems,features,visuals and bugs. Playtesting and critical feedback that will help the development along the way.

 

The problem is people generally don't understand what it means to have zombies functioning.

Lets split it into parts :

Movement and Geometry : Navmesh is working just fine, and is done really well. The problem that we now face, even though zombies know where they are and what is around them is geometry and full-body animation system. There are still cases where zombies do get through doors/walls because of those two things. Although it does not happen nowhere near as often as it did before. This again is a great deal of work that will be done in time.

Damage and hitting long distances : Damage system needs to be changed, but again this needs to go from script to hardcoded and evolve from there. This is no small task. Hitting from long distances is caused by desynchronization. This is as Dean already mentioned part of object interaction and rendering. Which is undergoing huge optimizations.

AI : To have a working AI you need sensors for reasonable input. Zombie not only needs to know his environment. But status of players, noises etc. This again needs to go into hard code and evolve from there.

You have to understand that this huge block of fixes has a timeframe of months of work. All of the changes have a convergence point down the road. There is a snowball effects to some of it.

Navmesh is a memory stored navigation plane on server side. Increasing the amount of memory footprint for each instance running on a server shard. That means few things.

Optimization of x64 server to provide memory space. That hopefuly will provide even more space to build upon.

The clipping and zombies going through doors after navmesh has been implemeted is geometry and animation related. We however have only full-body animation available (thus limiting the amount of animations, and their blending). So we are working on animation system to be available down the road. That will take a long time, but we will get there at some point.

Most of the issues with performance, amount of players, amount of zombies etc. Have underlying problems with synchronization and scaling. The code has already started to improve. We have amazing people here taking care of exactly that. That directly ties into AI,sensors (core of the AI), interaction etc.

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You clearly haven't played the mod, or you wouldn't be making such ignorant comments about AI path finding progress with this engine.

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