Hi everyone!
I've been overhauling the AI some more this week after some of the changes from last week broke some more things.
The focus is mainly on the cyan state of civilian known as "Alerted". This stage is meant to be the stage that knows something is wrong, but doesn't know about the nature of the zombie threat and I've made some changes to make that clearer.
Alerted civilians will now change to alarmed (purple) survivors who try to deal with the infected when:
They have to shoot at a zombie.
They find the dead body of a zombie. This is not a dead person who has yet to turn into a zombie, but someone who has turned into a zombie and been killed again. A zombie corpse with severed limbs, rather than someone who has died naturally before they turn (like in the image above).
They have been abandoned by the cops. This will slowly build up over time when the cops have entered the Withdrawal Phase. (This is shown to the player via the "Alarm Amount" percentage).
I've also had to make changes to the Cop Dispatch AI to facilitate this.
Previously the cops used to go into Quarantine mode when a certain amount of zones were marked as Incident Zones, but now there is another variable added to the mix. The police now are initially unaware that zombies exist and this is tracked as the first time a cop encounters a zombie. When this happens the sim will announce "POLICE HAVE BEEN ALERTED TO ZOMBIE PRESENCE" and Quarantine mode will not be entered until this happens, as police won't know what they've been quarantining otherwise.
As you can see this gets rather complex rather quickly but the main purpose of these updates is to try and keep the continuity working as otherwise behaviours feel out of place, like when people are acting like zombies are around when a single person hasn't turned yet.
One of the things that I also noticed was strange was how red civilians that are unaware would walk past purple survivors who are barricading, etc and not react. This felt strange and unrealistic to me so now they will turn to the cyan phase. They are aware something is wrong but not what.
TLDR this update fixes continuity errors in the AI that I've become aware of. If you encounter more behaviours that feel out of place in simulations please let me know so I can deal with them!
Thanks as always and see you in the next update!