Wildlife dont seem to care about zombies and vice versa [$25 awarded]

[JimboJamerson]

it happens too much to me that ill be murdered by a bear or cougar in the middle of a huge swarm of zombies. Which doesnt make any sence cause the zombies should try to eat the bear if he is closer to me and the bear should want to kill the zombies for whatever reason he has against me, instead of it deftly weaving its way through hundreds of zombies to pour more hate upon me. Lets end this friendship pact between the animals and zombies.

The $25 bounty on this issue has been claimed at Bountysource.

[JimQuaid]

Zombies usually only care for human flesh and bears are unlikely to be interested in the already rotten zombie meat. But a zombie getting too close to a bear should trigger its proximity aggro; that would be fun to watch.

[jvarnes]

Depending on how the game processes offscreen AI this might lead to horrendous results and/or crashes while the game struggles to deal with instances of creatures attacking one another.

I say this because when I enabled NPCs in my game I had two crashes which seemed like they might have been related to friendly NPCs dying offscreen (or at least the debug messages were about health before the game crashed) though I cannot be certain. I've turned NPCs back off for the time being until I figure out if it's related or not.

Even if stable I wonder about the overhead of monitoring something like this.

Having said that I do think it is interesting in games when there is a sort of eco-system or multi-faction interaction that occurs outside of your characters direct influence (STALKER and Fallout 3 come immediately to my mind). or simply to put it another way sometimes it's cool to stumble on a fight between computer controlled creatures ;)

As to game world "logic" there are some zombie references where zombies will hunt and kill any living creature if it's closer/easier to get to than humans (Walking Dead seems to be playing up on this a lot in it's last season).

To help avoid/minimize issues perhaps the proximity for any kind of provocation needs to be extremely close (3 squares or less?) and only triggered if onscreen. Additionally some kind of per species rules would need to be established. (i.e. to prevent zombies attacking one another, but allow bears to attack wolves, wolves to hunt deers and squirrels, etc.).

Does seem like this would offer an additional layer of immersion/amusement, but I'm relatively new to the game. Do animals currently have any behavior such as this?

[TheDarklingWolf]

Right now it's you vs the world. We want to get various types of monster infighting added at some point.

[ptgullas]

I'm pretty sure I've seen bears vs. zombies at some point, likely in 0.4. I was being chased by both Zs and a bear, and the bear managed to one-hit both of them before ending my game.

[kevingranade]

Certain monsters have an "attack other monsters" flag, but it's more "kill
other monsters if they get in the way to get to the player" than anything
else.
On May 21, 2013 8:18 PM, "ptgullas" notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm pretty sure I've seen bears vs. zombies at some point, likely in 0.4.
I was being chased by both Zs and a bear, and the bear managed to one-hit
both of them before ending my game.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/TheDarklingWolf/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/1098#issuecomment-18250146
.

[Coolthulhu]

Oh hey, there's a bounty on that.

I'm pretty sure my monster infighting system does that. Can I get the bounty?

[KA101]

Yep, you've ended the era of non-caring wildlife. Critter factions aren't required for this one. I vote this fulfilled.

Kevin, shall I photochop your face onto the Moneyman from UFO: Enemy Unknown? :-)

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Hooray! Congratulations, Coolthulhu!

[macrosblackd]

Grats Coolthulhu, this bounty stuff is pretty interesting :)

[kevingranade]

Congratulations! Since the original set of PRs didn't reference this, make an empty PR that claims to fix the issue (Fixes #blabla), and when it is merged the bounty should be assigned to you. I'll also poke at bountysource docs and see if there's a more direct way to do it.

[KA101]

Just linked the original, FWIW.