u/fmacgsta

Hi everyone,

I was trying to find a way to make zombies gradually become attracted to areas where the player has been active, especially around bases late game, but I couldn't really find anything that did it without scripted events. So I made a mod using the games sounds and temporary heatmaps :)

The mod listens to normal ingame sounds and builds up a heatmap over time. Areas with repeated activity become hotspots, and the mod then uses silent sounds to gently influence zombies toward those areas.

The result is basically a simple memory layer for zombie movement. A noisy base, prolonged gunfight, generator, loud vehicle route, helicopter event etc. can all leave temporary activity behind and affect migration for a few days.

It's entirely systemic rather than scripted, so nothing is spawning or teleporting zombies around. It just listens to vanilla sounds, tracks activity, and feeds that back into the existing zombie sound/movement system. It's cool because all sounds made by the game now drive the heatmap, cars, guns, helicopters, tvs, generators, so it feels like the zombies arent just wandering around aimlessly, they are biased toward loud regions (if they become loud enough).

I use it with wandering zombies and it feels super good, my bases now in late game get attacked systemically and the early game feels super realistic, but I'm looking for your opinions/ tweaks to the settings.

It's also safe to add or remove mid-save since it doesn't permanently change anything in the world.

If anyone wants to try it (singleplayer only, but if you like it I can try get multiplayer working but its a lil more complex to figure out so thats why its SP for now):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3804755792

Let me know what you think if you give it a go. I think it's pretty neat.

If anyones interested in the way the code works I think its also super sick, a sound gets converted into a volume and radius gaussian and then accumulate onto a weight, on interval, i then discretize the heatmap by approximating how to build that heatmap using various circles of differing radius and intensity, then simply, just pipe those as fake sounds to the zombie migration - simple and super effective

I always get cheesed by this maneuver - I'm old, I'm slow

In ARMA, there's a simple fix - if you full sprint and try turning more than 60 degrees quickly, it slows down the character, simple, and it fixes the issue perfectly.

Please CIG, I can't keep up.. nor can your servers!!