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Zombie aggro pathfinding bug, aggro is too "intelligent".
Assigned, NormalPublic

Description

I am using the word intelligent very loosely here.

Situation 1.

While player is inside a building they makes a noise or are visually spotted through a window. The zombies will find a path to the player and start making their way towards the target. The issue here is that the zombies will exhibit the same behavior when the player is 5 m from the zombie but the path the zombie has to take is along a 100m wall, through an open door at the other side of the building complex, through several rooms, up 2 flights of stairs and into the room the player is in. You get the idea.

Expected behavior would be for the zombies to gather at the window they saw the person at or gather at the nearest door or run around in an alert state.

Situation 2.

Player get zombie aggro in a building. Zombies get the shortest path to the player through door A. Door A is closed before the zombie gets to the player. Zombies will get a new path to the player through door B, even if door B is very far away.

Expected behavior is for zombies to gather at door A, not magically know the whole layout and door states on the map.

Details

Severity
None
Resolution
Open
Reproducibility
Always
Operating System
Windows 10 x64
Operating System Version
20H2
Category
AI Pathfinding / Motion

Event Timeline

Franzuu created this task.Apr 21 2021, 5:24 PM
JerryK added a subscriber: JerryK.Apr 21 2021, 5:29 PM

I was about to post something like that. Closing door A, going to door B and zombies magically know that I'm on the other side of the building and they start gathering around the door B.
I know, I know, something like that would be hard to fix/change, but it's fair to suggest changes.

I was about to post something like that. Closing door A, going to door B and zombies magically know that I'm on the other side of the building and they start gathering around the door B.
I know, I know, something like that would be hard to fix/change, but it's fair to suggest changes.

That is another issue. The Zombies will consider both routes through doors A and B. If both doors are closed and they are aggro on you in the building then they seem to pick the route that gets them closer to you. If the path though the building and through door A is closer then they will stay at door A, if you pass a threshold where they can get closer to you at door B they will go to door B.

A fix would be to make zombies stop at a closed door and from there on they will wait for audio and visual alerts to continue aggro.

There could be a condition that if the path through the other door is sufficiently short then they will start switching after a certain time. It should not happen like magic when the door closes.

Oh man, this would be an absolute game changer for the zombies. I think they are still a long way from being ideal. The current pathfinding is too gamey.

How great would it be to lose the infected by sneakily hiding from their line of sight?

For example, running through the bar/restaurant past the antlers on the wall. If you were to hide up the stairs where the barricaded door is, they shouldn’t know where to find you instantly. Same should apply if you’re running through dense foliage, and decide to hide in a bush.

Ironically, truly intelligent AI, would have a harder time finding you! I mean, look how easy it is for players to lose other players.

Geez changed the task status from New to Assigned.Apr 22 2021, 1:22 PM
Franzuu added a comment.EditedApr 22 2021, 5:20 PM

Oh man, this would be an absolute game changer for the zombies. I think they are still a long way from being ideal. The current pathfinding is too gamey.

How great would it be to lose the infected by sneakily hiding from their line of sight?

For example, running through the bar/restaurant past the antlers on the wall. If you were to hide up the stairs where the barricaded door is, they shouldn’t know where to find you instantly. Same should apply if you’re running through dense foliage, and decide to hide in a bush.

Ironically, truly intelligent AI, would have a harder time finding you! I mean, look how easy it is for players to lose other players.

A long time ago when the DayZ devs were scrambling to slap 1.0 on the game they started cutting features from the game. One thing they did was simplify the zombies because they were too resource hungry for the servers. I can not point you to any of the public statements they gave out during that time and I do not know what was going on behind the scenes. I'm pretty sure one of the things they simplified was zombie line of sight while they were chasing you, I think they completely did away with that. You'd find zombies chilling in trees because they lost sight of players they were chasing, you do not see this as often anymore. What you see is that the zombies charge directly to you through trees and bushes.

When this decision was made the DayZ servers were hosted on 2.2 GHz Xeons that were 5 years old and Intel had not seen any IPC gains anyway. There was no AMD Ryzen, Threadripper or EPYC CPUs. Cores were expensive and the prices for Xeon CPUs were very high. Single thread performance is now more than 2x what it was on the servers that were hosting DayZ servers back then https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSH7xbGU--m_YSFUuYjemDQ7x2UldAWNDjFx2r-7xEf_fskDfIyR2FYGQsiXEyzGGT6wnKWr0klfn7R/pubhtml?widget=true&chrome=false#gid=16202543 BUT! there are still problems with cars. They are ok on a straight road. They are no ok on populated servers, they are not ok when avoiding obstacles or making turns at high speeds. When there are multiple cars next to eachother then things can go haywire too. There is not enough server performance headroom for modded helicopters on the most powerful DayZ community servers out there. I think making zombies use more CPU is a no-go at this point in time.

Depending on how spaghetti the AI code is maybe they can be made to act more natural with no additional CPU cost and perhaps even get some savings out of it.

I strongly agree with this, however it would require more frequent updates to the AI pathfinding which in turn will increase server load