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| Piles of zombie bodies at Cambridge Police Station during Fire Support quest. |
Performance Impact
I have a GTX 1050ti and normally get a solid 60fps when playing with the default Ultra graphics setting. To test the limit of zombie spawns I started the Fire Support quests and monitored the zombie count which went over 100 in short order (within a 10000 unit radius of the player). I was getting around 30fps at this point and then manually spawned 200 more zombies right next to Paladin Danse and watched my frames per second plummet to around 8-10fps.
I was able to play through it with Spray 'N Pray but it was quite laggy and I probably would've died if it weren't for using God Mode during my testing.
Area Spawn Limits
To help avoid performance problems, I had added a new spawn limit to the Zombie Walkers holotape. This limits zombies from spawning by checking how many zombies already exist (alive or dead) in the area around the spawn point.
This spawn limit applies to all spawning options including extra spawns, spawn replacements, settlement attacks, etc. and it checked each time. It is possible for an extra spawn point to respawn if the zombies eventually wander out of the area but those zombies would then be counted against the limit in the area they wander into.
This limit is really more of a soft cap in that I did make an exception for spawn replacements. If a spawn replacement is processed, at least one zombie will spawn regardless. Note that the replacement may only spawn one zombie even if the holotape is set to three if the zombie count is at or over the limit in that area.
Dead Zombies Count?
Dead zombies count against the spawn limit as they also chew up resources until they are cleaned up. Sometimes the game is good about doing this automatically as more continue to spawn but sometimes it can take some time.
To address this, I added a new Utility Menu on the holotape to "Remove Dead Zombies" which will disable and mark all dead zombies for delete. Additionally, I add a cleanup timestamp to each zombie at the time they are killed and a quest alias binds them for manual cleanup when the time comes. Currently, the cleanup time is set for roughly 48 in-game hours.
Extra Spawns - Initial Spawn Delay
I made a small change to the extra spawns feature to not spawn when the spawn point is first established. The logic here is that this is the first time the player has ventured into the area where the spawn point resides and there is likely already other creatures nearby anyway.
Now the spawn point will spawn for the first time after waiting the configurable amount of time (eg. 2-5 days).
Increased Spawn Density
Now that I have a spawn limit in place, I felt more comfortable expanding the number of extra spawn points. As such, I added X Markers to the list of potential spawn points since there are a lot of them and they include some random event locations not otherwise covered by Patrol Markers or COC Markers.
Also, I decreased the minimum distance between spawn points from 3000 to 2000. To get this to take effect for save games that have already skipped a bunch of potential spawn points, I migrated to a different keyword. Basically this means previously skipped spawn points are re-checked.
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