Monsters, zombies and so on

[Ludovico Technique 0]

Okay so I've been digging around for ages and not found much on the subject of zombies in Arma 2. Just some talk of a mod and mission nearly done which may or may not be functional in a wider context.

What's the deal? By the normal run of things zombie mods pop up pretty quick.

Is anybody working on zombies or similar monsters?

Can somebody let me know if there's a zombie mod in the pipeline, or if not, just what exactly is the sticking point for zombie mod design, what's making them so hard to do?

I know this topic has come up before, but it was a while ago and although there's mentions of such projects all over the place I was really wanting something concrete.

[Black1ron 10]

Isn't this technically a request?

[Fudgeblood 10]

Isn't this technically a request?

Pretty much, seems like he's trying to cover it up as an actual question though. :p

[NeMeSiS 11]

Well, direct copies of ArmA1 scripts didnt work properly, and they cant be 'fixed' for ArmA2. And ive been to lazy to try another approach, apparently its the same for everyone else. :p

We discussed this mupltiple times before.

[Ludovico Technique 0]

Well, direct copies of ArmA1 scripts didnt work properly, and they cant be 'fixed' for ArmA2. And ive been to lazy to try another approach, apparently its the same for everyone else. :p

We discussed this mupltiple times before.

I'd heard that there was a problem with the sides or something, which I took to mean zombies wouldn't attack member of a certain faction or some such? Is there more to it than that? I mean if you're old zombies work but only attack Blufor that's still fine as far as I am concerned.

[NeMeSiS 11]

I'd heard that there was a problem with the sides or something, which I took to mean zombies wouldn't attack member of a certain faction or some such? Is there more to it than that? I mean if you're old zombies work but only attack Blufor that's still fine as far as I am concerned.

I dont have a clue where you heard that. The problems are pathfinding related, its either the 3ms limit, or .FSM's/microAI messing with what the scripts should do. Or maybe a combination of those, i dont have enough time to look at it, plus, i dont actually like modding. :p

[Ludovico Technique 0]

I dont have a clue where you heard that. The problems are pathfinding related, its either the 3ms limit, or .FSM's/microAI messing with what the scripts should do. Or maybe a combination of those, i dont have enough time to look at it, plus, i dont actually like modding. :p

Have heard that from quite a lot of mod-makers recently, which is a shame. Still thanks for clearing that up. It's a shame about the lack of zombies, had some properly epic missions in Arma with the old ones. So it goes.

The living dead, are dead. :(

[charon productions 10]

NeMeSiS is absolutely right, the engine is not made for zombies, it`s as simple as that. I gave it a go one night and tried some stuff, but hard-coded pathfinding spoils every imaginable approach resulting in the zombies just standing around a lot while they should attack you. They just deny to complete their waypoints sometimes too.

If you are just happy with shooting somy bloody textured unrealistically moving units, some guy will probably sooner or later release something like that. But it just won`t be like you see it in the movies.

Or just re-install Arma1. CSM was as good as it can get. ;)

[Ludovico Technique 0]

So specifically then we can say that zombies are undermined by the fact that they won't walk up to people and nom on them? And is it thus safe to presume this would carry on to any form of melee based monster, be it werewolf or poisoned monkey or anything else? Damn.

Would it be possible to create something that just killed anything that got within a few metres of it? As in the target just dropped dead? Am thinking perhaps that some sort of ghost might work. Wouldn't need an attack then, it could just kill you stone dead if it got near.

[charon productions 10]

Hmm, do you honestly think that would be fun if you just drop dead? That would look really boring imho.

The thing is that they sometimes stop 10 or 15m away from the player and just walk slowly and then run a few meters again and so on. There is no setting that can make any AI unit just run,run,run.

As long as all character models can only run with the same speed, there is never a real danger from a monster at all, because the player can always outrun them.

[Ludovico Technique 0]

I think it could be fun, in the sense that it'd cause panic.

Could it possibly be done using animals? What's their behaviour set up like?

[Drew 10]

Nogova Virus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZaSHBsh7TQ

[icewindo 29]

Hmm, do you honestly think that would be fun if you just drop dead? That would look really boring imho.

The thing is that they sometimes stop 10 or 15m away from the player and just walk slowly and then run a few meters again and so on. There is no setting that can make any AI unit just run,run,run.

As long as all character models can only run with the same speed, there is never a real danger from a monster at all, because the player can always outrun them.

I guess there is no way of speeding up the binarized animations? Or can we replace animations, e.g. create a new zombie class where the walking animation gets replaced with the running/sprinting animation? This way they couldn't slow down.

I remember one ArmA1 zombie mod had the default walking anim changed and replaced by a custom one, will it work for originals?

[sic-disaster 311]

Zombies dont necessarily need to run per se.

I actually dont even like those kind of zombies. I want old, rotten corpses shambling about in huge hordes! The old Romero zombies :)

[madrussian 347]

As long as all character models can only run with the same speed, there is never a real danger from a monster at all, because the player can always outrun them.

You just hit the nail on the head there! In zombie missions, we need the possibility for the player to be able to get tired and wear out, thus moving slower until he can get rest/food/water/whatever. (The zombies are dead, so they don't really need to get tired, necessarily.)

Even simply temporarily removing the player's ability to sprint would get the job done. Somehow I think this has got to be possible. For example, when you get "leg shot" now, you lose access to a whole set of animations, so I can only assume it's possible.

[charon productions 10]

There is different preferences when it comes down to Zombies.

Romero`s and "28 days later" kind of zombies.

In optimal case it could be an option to choose from.

The whole animation thing is highly unaccessible in the hard-code.

Sure you can change the animation type, but the engine`s decision to choose the movement speed for AI can not be overidden. ( i have tried, maxspeed = 50 or whatever wont work for infantry).

So who of you likes no challenge and just camp the creepingly slow zombies and not risk anything will probably be happy with whatever zombies will be brought to the game.

Me personally am bored if i don`t have anything to fear from enemies when i can simply outrun them, but that`s just me. ;)

I have written the other day a decently working Arma2-hunting script that allows for zombies to move up to humans even in cities with no screwed up pathfinding, but their chance to kill you as a player is extremely low except if you are out of ammo and trapped in a backyard. I`d really like them to be more of a challenge.

Edited October 24, 2009 by Charon Productions

[Ludovico Technique 0]

Arma 1 managed it by forcing you to stop to reload. Ultimately though zombies can be dangerous you just need to code the missions right. For instance one of my old tricks was to split players up, because a player on his own has vulnerable flanks. Also forcing the players to stand still to complete tasks, for instance maybe a player needs to fix something that requires him and his team to stand at the radio for two minutes. Zombies on all sides, in numbers, will always be a threat, even if they are slow. Sure maybe you need fifty zombies to bring down one guy, but so what? Use fifty zombies. That's the beauty of the horde. A zombie approaching a player from the front ought not to be any sort of a threat at all. Group them up, work the flanks, block the escapes, suddenly the players are in trouble.

Hell you think it's hard to make a slow zombie challenging for one person, I'm having to put together a zombie op for an entire platoon of players. It's not going to be easy. :D

[Defunkt 431]

I tried a few zombie mods in ArmA 1 and 28 Days Later zombies are much more intimidating when it comes to setting up tension and fear.

Thanks heavens we now have an open thread to direct the repeated zombie enquires towards. Shame it's so hard to do, a real loss but I live in hope of the Terminator mod.

[madrussian 347]

As a longtime zombie mission lover, with many fond memories of going out into the foggy dark to save civilians, only to end up running like hell from the hordes in my all-time favorite zombie mission Trapper's *Zombie Outbreak Simulation (ZOS)*, I've reached the following conclusion:

I firmly believe if we get enough brains working on this, by God the end result will be utterly dangerous and believable zombies and tense, murderous mission scenarios for ArmA2!

I guess there is no way of speeding up the binarized animations? Or can we replace animations, e.g. create a new zombie class where the walking animation gets replaced with the running/sprinting animation? This way they couldn't slow down.

Based on what I've seen working on my animations mod, this should be possible. Just make an animation class that inherits from the main one and then start tweaking speed values. And the good news in terms of workload is you'd only have to mess with the unarmed stuff on zombies (as the undead don't typically carry things!).

I remember one ArmA1 zombie mod had the default walking anim changed and replaced by a custom one, will it work for originals?

Again, based on what I've seen in there, there's no reason why that couldn't work. Curious though what do you mean by "work for originals"? Child animation classes (mentioned above)?

The whole animation thing is highly unaccessible in the hard-code.

Sure you can change the animation type, but the engine`s decision to choose the movement speed for AI can not be overidden. ( i have tried, maxspeed = 50 or whatever wont work for infantry).

Did you try that in conjunction with the forceSpeed and/or limitSpeed?

Also, did you try with only one unit in the group?

(If you have multiple units in the group to avoid them going slower as they try to keep formation you can use setSpeedMode "FULL")

I did some experiments a while back with achieving different speed and had some success getting them to stick to a varying degree of speed with a fine level of control within the speed range of various individual animations. Unfortunately these adjustments did NOT work on players. Otherwise we'd basically be there. (Also I haven't messed with trying to get them to go faster than max default though. Might be interesting. And now I'm curious, what's the fastest anyone anywhere has ever gotten an AI on foot to go? :D )

The other thing that could have bitten you are hard-coded limit(s) in the way relSpeedMin and relSpeedMax work. I don't completely understand it, but there definitely appears to be a hard-coded limit for speed degradation (which itself affected by the duty value). You know how when you've been running a long time and start to get tired? Anyone notice how you start to slow down (although only while sprinting)? Well in various experiments I've run at least while sprinting as the player, your speed will never drop below 17.6 km/h, regardless of any other factors which should allow it to drop below that threshold. btw- If you adjust the relSpeedMin and relSpeedMax incorrectly, you won't get speed degradation at all.

In any event, the 17.6 limit is huge, because it's way too fast - otherwise we could simply adjust the duty value and tire the player out quicker. :)

Also forcing the players to stand still to complete tasks, for instance maybe a player needs to fix something that requires him and his team to stand at the radio for two minutes.

The only problem potentially here is he can still run away, and come back later to do the task or just keep running around, running circles around the zombies.

Ultimately, imo we need a way to slow the player down (due to fatigue, etc).

Arma 1 managed it by forcing you to stop to reload.

I truly think this is where the fundamental power lies. If we can temporarily disable certain animations the player has access to then we can slow him down, and that when the tension really starts to ramp up. The hordes don't get tired, after all.

First and foremost, does anyone know where in the config it is specified that these animations are disabled? (for example, getting leg shot)

In case anyone wants to start taking a look in the anims config and is unaware, here's a quick rundown of how things work: There are two main files, CfgMovesBasic.hpp and CfgMovesMaleSdr.hpp

• CfgMovesBasic contains the "action states", which define what his given controls do while in that "action state". In other words, based on what controls he's pressing, this file tells the unit which animation to proceed to. Most importantly, defined here is exactly which animations the player has access to, based on the state.

• CfgMovesMaleSdr contains information on the individual animations themselves. Within each animation class, one of the item contained is an "actions" value that points directly back over to CfgMovesBasic.
  

So it's a vicious cycle back and forth between these two files. CfgMovesBasic tells CfgMovesMaleSdr which animation to proceed to (and strictly which animations are allowed given the state), and CfgMovesMaleSdr tells CfgMovesBasic which "action state" to be in.

When someone gets "leg shot", BIS is somehow sending the player into an alternate "action state" within CfgMovesBasic. From that point on the player is limited to only a subset of animations (crawling around and standing only, but no longer able to run or sprint, etc).

I can only assume the answers regarding disabling animations reside inside these two files.

btw- Sorry about the novel there. :eek:

Edited October 24, 2009 by MadRussian

[charon productions 10]

It also very much depends what class the AI is inheriting concerning those damn FSMs. Just made a test with russian soldiers instead of civilians and surprisingly they do catch up with the player pretty fast, that is mainly due to a different, smoother movement control method that i am using that deviates from the methods formerly used.

If BIS would fix the handledammage EH bug, then this could also nicely allow zombies to drop with a single headshot. As of now it does not work as intended.

@MadRussian: That is all good points.

The most convincing animation would actually be when the zombies stretch out their arms towards their victim to grab it once in close range. If the bones could be tweaked to do that, it would look killer.

For those Romero freaks, the wobbly drunk walking animation could be satisfying.

[andersson 285]

I havent looked at arma2 configs that much yet, but most of it resembles arma and ofp.

In arma I tweaked zombies this way:

They where just a tad slower but had better stamina, so in the beginning you could get away by sprinting but after a short time when you started breathing they would gain on you.

I had them walking really slow, running like a fast pace walk and sprinting like running very fast. That was not done in the units config itself, speed is tweaked in the anim config. So you can tweak different speeds for different zombies if one like by making different sets of anims. Unless something has changed in arma2?

I dont see the problem with tweaking the armourvalues for the body either. Have high values for the body and low for the head. Should work I guess, no need for an EH?

So I dont see that much problems with changing stamina, speeds and resistance to dammage + week spots. Then again, as I pointed out, I havent had a thorough look through the arma2 configs regarding this, but I dont think it should be so much different from arma.

I guess the clue is a good FSM for zombies? And anims..

edit: And ofcourse you as a player in a zombie wil be affected the same way regarding speed, resistance and stamina. No need for scripts.

Edited October 24, 2009 by andersson

[celery 8]

Romero`s and "28 days later" kind of zombies.

There are fast zombies in Romero's newer films.

[goose4291 11]

There are fast zombies in Romero's newer films.

No there isn't... that's the Zack Snyder remake of Romero's Dawn Of The Dead.

Mind you, the remake of the Crazies looks interesting...

[charon productions 10]

goose4291 is right, Romero did shoot newer zombie movies, but their movement is still like in the old movies :

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qJZ5r5faQ&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qJZ5r5faQ&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Didn`t know that their is also a game for Land of the dead.

Was surprised that their attack doesn`t look better than what

they do in Arma:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGfuHPZdoPA&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGfuHPZdoPA&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

I dont see the problem with tweaking the armourvalues for the body either. Have high values for the body and low for the head. Should work I guess, no need for an EH?

This does not work either unfortunately, i will test it again, but early test showed no effect on soldiers, just on vehicles.

EDIT: The damage is spread over the whole body, that s why the handledamage EH doesnt work as intended and the class definitions of armor for separate part are entirely useless ! :

class HitHead {

armor = 0.100000;

material = -1;

name = "head_hit";

passThrough = 1;

};

class HitBody {

armor = 1110.900000;

material = -1;

name = "body";

passThrough = 1;

};

class HitHands {

armor = 1110.500000;

material = -1;

name = "hands";

passThrough = 1;

};

class HitLegs {

armor = 1110.700000;

material = -1;

name = "legs";

passThrough = 1;

};

You expect such a unit to withstand a whole magazine of shots in the leg, but he also dies from 2 shots in the leg. That proves that this does not work.

EDIT2: Ok, i found a working method to kill a zombie with 1 headshot and he can withstand like 8-10 bodyshots. You just need to crank the values to their absolute extremes and play around with the settings to overcome the damage spread.

Edited October 24, 2009 by Charon Productions

[Ludovico Technique 0]

At the risk of getting too technical on the artistic side of things, zombies have to be slow. That's the point. Every successful monster in horror appeals to a fundamental fear. For zombies that fear is part conformism, and partly the inevitability of death. You can fight, you can run, but the horde just keeps coming at you, and while each element of the horde is weak and easy to kill with a shovel or pistol or whatever, when one flanks you, or you flee a group and run into another, you're boned. Fast zombies, usually called infected as in general they tend not to be reanimated corpses like regular zombies, in such films as 28 Days Later and such, represent the fear of relentless, unchecked aggression and violence- the fear that, in this age of road rage and random violence, anybody might just wig out and tear us apart. So that's the theory side to it, and that's why and what the two different sorts of zombie are all about.

For my money the slow zombies are better, because they are creepier, especially if they are hard to kill. Fast zombies are more of a sort of RAAAARGH BRAAAAAINS DEAD kind of gameplay experience, without the sort of long drawn out battles you get from slow zombies. Equally they are very unforgiving, you can make mistakes fighting slow zombies, fast ones will just pwn you. Sure you can run around in circles and hope that slow zombies never kill you, but you can just as easily unpick the .pbo and drop a tank at your spawn point, you can't stop people from not playing within the spirit of the game. That said from a mission designers point of view I can happily work with both types of zombie, each just requires a different approach.

If the troops work best in terms of movement AI would it not be easier just to make zombies an Opfor unit, rather than civilian or independent? Maybe have them on both blue and opfor, so you can pick the ones for the mission.

Shooting for perfection is nice, but even rudimentary zombies would be a great starting off point.