zombies spawning around you

[arty0m 1]

ok so the other day, i was reading up on dayZ and i had read that when you get close to town and biuldings, zombies and loot would THEN spawn. I think this is to eliminate lag. interestingly though, i walk through the forests and mountains (i dont trust people on the roads) i noticed there were zero zombies in forests and mountains and generally any area except cities. i think it would be a good idea for a small population of zombies to spawn in the woods to add realism and more fear into the game (the zombies arent scary)

[dra6o0n 15]

Yes zombies can despawn when no players are near, the reason why no zombies spawn in forests is because a ton of people hide out there, so in a sense it would bog down the server resources even more no?

What's needed to change, is better zombie management. LOTS of zombie games handle this pretty well...

When zombies are far away they do not despawn entirely, just vanish from the client's resource, but they become a 'low priority' entity server-sided when zero players are near it, which means they function 100x slower to save resources since no one is going to go near it anyways.

a 'low priority' zombie will basically stop moving and idle, or the server will control or move it much slower. Another idea for this is to have server 'skip' the zombie if it's in a 'idle/low priority' state so it doesn't control it until a player is within 500m of it?

500 meters is the view range of all players, and basically if you are going to snipe stuff past that, zombies and players wouldn't be viewable.

Edited July 29, 2012 by dra6o0n

[arty0m 1]

i agree alot with the low priority zombies. one time i went through kamenka and not a single zombie aggro'd me.