DayZ September dev blog teases new zombie AI and item degradation
DayZ creator Dean Hall's September dev blog detailed changes to the game's inventory, player interaction, item damage, and teased upcoming changes to zombie AI. The entire video is more than 20 minutes long and is stuffed full of information for DayZ fans, but here are a few highlights:
In the dev blog, Hall revealed that the AI for the DayZ standalone release would be written entirely from scratch, and is no longer based on the ArmA 2 AI. "The proposal I came up with was that zombies will chase players and avoid collision," Hall said. "The zombies will only pathfind for a short distance in front of them, and otherwise, they'll avoid collision." Hall stated more details regarding zombie AI are coming in a future dev blog.
Hall also demonstrated several ways he hopes to reduce the "kill on sight mentality" that currently permeates the DayZ experience, one of which is to have loot take weapon damage. This means if you shoot another player to take their stuff, whatever you hit with your bullet will be damaged. You can watch Hall demonstrate this when he shoots another player in the chest, which not only ruins their clothing, but all the items carried by that clothing.
Even after the zombie apocalypse, you still have to worry about keeping your clothes nice.
