Zombie Mode Thread

The original, free Ace of Spades game powered by the Voxlap engine. Known as “Classic,” 0.75, 0.76, and all 0.x versions. Created by Ben Aksoy.
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Sasquatch
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This topic just popped up in a .75 bots discussion thread. I'll quote myself and rakiru here:
Sasquatch wrote:
rakiru wrote:
Having bots in game types other than regular ones (such as zombies, as mentioned above) offers the possibility of new gamemodes.
Now that's what I'm talking about! As overdone as the zombies thing is today in video games, this has to happen. It would offer not only a fun time for map makers, but also a legitimate one player mode, which would be great for traveling or when you're taking up bandwidth downloading something and don't want to lag out of an online game. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about programming, but I would totally love to see something like this happen and if my say meant anything this would be one of my biggest suggestions to people making mods/updates :P
I think we should have an official thread about this, to raise awareness about the desire for this kind of game mode. On top of that, a lot of brainstorming can go on in this thread (but keep it simple stupid.) For example, how does one create a system of NPCs that follow the character? Ideally this has been done two ways in gaming history: Running for you in a direct path or strait line (I'm sure most of you are familiar with this in some way), and developing a pathway to come find you (a la Minecraft)... But recognize first that in Ace of Spades we have potentially two kinds of environments. One is where terrain is destructible, and of course, I'm assuming that one should also be able to choose the option where terrain is indestructible. I'll offer my insight as to what's may happen in either case, what problems will arise, and what a few of my solutions are...

So lets say I start a one player zombies game and turn building/digging off. This means that I cannot create any kind of structure for myself to shelter in (such as a bunker) or get out of reach with (such as a pillar/wall) and then mindlessly cap zombies from a safe distance. The downside to turning digging off is that zombies will get stuck behind walls and could easily become stuck. A possible solution is allowing a zombie to recognize when it has failed to move more than a block after a certain period of time, that it needs to add momentum to the left or right to move past an obstacle. But even getting stuck behind lips or cusps of some sort might keep the zombies trapped. That's why the A.I. solution of developing a pathway to you seems to be the most useful approach, but I would imagine that kind of engineering is much more difficult, even considering that the zombies only need to count vertical faces to reach you.

Now developing a pathway to come find you is useless once you turn on building. If you block up a point that cuts off all walking/jumping options, the zombies wont know how to find you. That's why the only option left is to give them the ability to dig. They can go into strait line mode, and if they get stuck behind a wall, it's no big deal, because zombies would have, say an automatic 3 block digging function which digs once every three seconds or so. This means zombies can dig through obstacles in their way so that they never get stuck, but it also means it becomes futile to start hiding behind things/on top of buildings because zombies will eventually break it down and you will fall to you're doom.

Again, as a disclaimer before you start posting, I know virtually nothing about programming but this is what just a few minutes of thinking about zombie mode got me to. Some of these solutions might be ridiculous, some might have to be used together. I don't know. Cheers.
GreaseMonkey
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A* search algorithm represent.
Of course, for dynamic environments, D* might be better.

I tried implementing D* in ComputerCraft. Didn't have much success at all. But I've definitely done A* before.

But yeah, you assign a cost for breaking down a wall, a cost for building your way to stuff, a cost for going some place, a cost for going up/down hills, and so on.
rakiru
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I was interested to see that you'd written such a large post on this as I am truly interested in such a thing, but sadly most of it seems to be your ideas on how to implement pathfinding, which is pretty simple, and something that I, and I'm sure some others here, have experience in doing before.
Basically, try to keep this discussion off the technical details, unless it's something you're experienced in. No point trying to come up with something that ends up being inefficient (or just plain wrong) when there are others here who can contribute that part, should it even need to be added to the discussion.

There are a few different possibilities that come to mind when thinking about possible game modes. One part is zombie spawning, and another is environment interaction. Zombies could either spawn in waves, with the players getting a chance to cool-down, change weapon, heal, etc., before the next wave spawns. Another way would be a continuous stream of zombies, their numbers slowly increasing until the players are overwhealmed. That last method may not work well since there is such a low player limit, and the zombies must be in that. Buffing the zombies' health could help with this a bit though, although large map designs may still suffer.
As for the environment, there can either be building/destruction, or no building/destruction. If the environment is static, one possible gamemode would be something like that popularised by Call of Duty. If the environment is dynamic, the gameplay would be completely different.
Tex
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Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2012 11:42 pm


rakiru wrote:
I was interested to see that you'd written such a large post on this as I am truly interested in such a thing, but sadly most of it seems to be your ideas on how to implement pathfinding, which is pretty simple, and something that I, and I'm sure some others here, have experience in doing before.
Basically, try to keep this discussion off the technical details, unless it's something you're experienced in. No point trying to come up with something that ends up being inefficient (or just plain wrong) when there are others here who can contribute that part, should it even need to be added to the discussion.

There are a few different possibilities that come to mind when thinking about possible game modes. One part is zombie spawning, and another is environment interaction. Zombies could either spawn in waves, with the players getting a chance to cool-down, change weapon, heal, etc., before the next wave spawns. Another way would be a continuous stream of zombies, their numbers slowly increasing until the players are overwhealmed. That last method may not work well since there is such a low player limit, and the zombies must be in that. Buffing the zombies' health could help with this a bit though, although large map designs may still suffer.
As for the environment, there can either be building/destruction, or no building/destruction. If the environment is static, one possible gamemode would be something like that popularised by Call of Duty. If the environment is dynamic, the gameplay would be completely different.
Even if there was waves of zombies, the amount of people playing would have to be very low, if you are thinking the number of zombies builds up each wave. On the environment part, I'm in favor of the environment being dynamic, it offers a much more wider variety of gameplay to deploy in clever or practical ways. Another major problem is the weapons the players use. Are the weapons the players choose in the beginning of the game the one they have for the rest of the game? Or can they change during rounds? In the middle of a round?
Sasquatch
Mapper
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Joined: Wed Nov 14, 2012 5:18 pm


rakiru wrote:
I was interested to see that you'd written such a large post on this as I am truly interested in such a thing, but sadly most of it seems to be your ideas on how to implement pathfinding, which is pretty simple, and something that I, and I'm sure some others here, have experience in doing before.
Basically, try to keep this discussion off the technical details, unless it's something you're experienced in. No point trying to come up with something that ends up being inefficient (or just plain wrong) when there are others here who can contribute that part, should it even need to be added to the discussion.
Fair enough. If you are certain pathfinding isn't a challenge then I wont argue against it.
rakiru wrote:
There are a few different possibilities that come to mind when thinking about possible game modes. One part is zombie spawning, and another is environment interaction. Zombies could either spawn in waves, with the players getting a chance to cool-down, change weapon, heal, etc., before the next wave spawns. Another way would be a continuous stream of zombies, their numbers slowly increasing until the players are overwhealmed. That last method may not work well since there is such a low player limit, and the zombies must be in that. Buffing the zombies' health could help with this a bit though, although large map designs may still suffer.
As for the environment, there can either be building/destruction, or no building/destruction. If the environment is static, one possible gamemode would be something like that popularised by Call of Duty. If the environment is dynamic, the gameplay would be completely different.
I see your point. I was thinking of a steadily increasing number of zombies, mainly because waves are a little less intense. I don't see the 32 player limit being a huge problem, but I was initially thinking of this as a single player mode anyways, in which case 31 zombs at a time is plenty, so I'll talk about single player for a moment. Instead of having zombies increase at random intervals of time, what if they spawned according to how often you killed? I came up with the idea of every three zombies you kill, four are spawned.

Again for the sake of demonstration, imagine this is single player on a medium/small map. You're alone in a game and you start out with three zombies or z=3. When you kill all three, four are spawned somewhere on the map. Now z=4. If you kill three of them, four spawn once again, but you still have one leftover zombies from the last spawn to kill, and z=5. Kill three of them, there are two left and four more spawn, z=6. Thus every time you kill three zombies, you will always end up with one more than the number of zombies you had right before killing of them. This could possibly simulate waves while still having a simple algorithm decide how many spawn.

I hope that wasn't too technical :P
Chameleon
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What about zombies starting to spawn more closely? Not on top of your head, but 32 blocks away in the direction you are not looking at would be 100% difficulty.

For wave-based spawning, you would have a number of zombies the wave has, for example 64. You can't have 64 zombies running around... But you can have 31 zombies. When you kill a zombie, it randomly chooses 1 out of X zombies that are the farthest away from you and spawns at him. Then the number of zombies of current wave would be 63, since you killed one (31 on screen, 32 to spawn yet = 63). Wouldn't be too hard to code (in comparison with getting 64 players on server).
EDIT: cool. a bit dead thread.
Last edited by Chameleon on Sat Jan 17, 2015 6:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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