Hi everyone! Got another rather significant change to talk about this week!
I'm working on the AI for the Alarmed state:
Alarmed citizens (I think I might change the name Alarmed to Survivors by the way) have a new system to try and survive the outbreak. The new system involves determining which areas are safe and which are not based on how many zombies are there, how many armed citizens and cops, the number of corpses, etc.
When an area is deemed Unsafe they will leave it, such as these citizens leaving a building due to a zombie presence. At the moment they do not return home as they did in the last update but I plan to merge these two types of AI in an upcoming update so that Survivors will decide whether or not they want to return home or stay where they think they are safe. I'd like to add a family / bravery system to help them make this decision and allow for interesting scenarios where survivors strike out on their own to try and rescue or find their loved ones.
I also want to add an overlay like the other overlays I have that shows which regions survivors deem dangerous so that users can see what is influencing these decisions better in a future update.
These changes have radically changed the survivability of the citizens, with them mostly being much better off for it. I had thought that they would have gathered and hidden in buildings when I wrote the code but to my surprise they do almost the opposite and gather in the street instead. I think a part of this is due to how the cops are mainly in the street when doing their quarantining and citizens feel left abandoned in the buildings, and therefore unsafe. I'd like to add more barricading systems in the future so that citizens will feel drawn to these as safer places as part of future updates.
The grouping together does also mean the occasional infected citizen gets in with the group, and this can keep a simulation going a lot longer. This to me is part of the strengths and weaknesses of citizens grouping up vs staying apart and I'd like to allow the player to be able to influence this more in the future to try and make more interesting simulations, as well have cops / military try to deal with things like the quarantining of infected.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on these changes!
I've also made some other changes:
I've changed the default cops to be 120 instead of 200 as with this new system the humans are winning almost every time. With 120 it feels like more of a chance for both survival and total wipe-outs to occur.
I've also changed the default police retreat threshold from 50% to 25% as this feels more reasonable as I felt too many cops were crowding into the police station too soon and leaving the civilians to die when they had a reasonable chance of winning the scenario.
I've changed how the twitch integration works slightly so that the name list is reset every time the game is started up so that only current chat members are added to the civilian list.
Thanks for playing and see you in the next update!