The NPC dance of death: AI behaviour video news

It also now shows how zombies (in red) are now completely persistent across the entire map, instead of being virtualised when they got out of range. This will be more taxing on the CPU, butmeans the cell you inhabit will be completely alive with no trickery, and also that fulltile barricades will be able to cordon off safe areas based outdoors.

On top of this zombies will only ever spawn on the edges of the map, while the flocking and wandering behaviours have been altered to provide much more interesting zombie migration and hunting. They’ll now never ever start thumping ata door unless they seen or heard a noise from directly inside, for example. This willkeep door genocide to a minimum, even though with NPCs about those deadheads will often have a perfectly legitimate reason to give those doors a hard time.

NPCs in this video (the white dots) are attempting to survive by grouping together -if their personality suits it. They are also establishing a safehouse, going on looting missions to other houses, eating, bandaging and fighting/fleeing zombies where appropriate. It's difficult to tell what they’re doing a lot of the time from blobs, butthey are a certainly a lot more intelligent now. If you see any odd behaviour then thisis likely either a bug, or a particularly mental NPC (they have stats).

At the moment their fleeing takes no consideration to where their friends are, so when there are a shit-ton of zombies surrounding them, they soon get split up. This coupled with the fact that NPCs try to avoid bringing zombies back to their safehouse does mean that things go a bit mental when the zombie count is high – they can be a little reckless. Then again it does make for more interesting video than a bunch of NPCs hid in a safehouse unseen by zombies for the whole time! Additional work needs adding to their tiny NPC minds too, since they can occasionally forget seeing a hordein a particular place and go back there to forage. Which is somewhat silly.

Oh, and as ever the music is by the awesome Zach Beever. We thought we'd add a couple of the new tracks as a taster of what's to come!

Best to watch on HD to see what's going on clearly.