ZOMBIES!!!!

The zombie is an enemy common to many first person shooters. A single zombie (the original dawn of the dead type) is generally slow and stupid and can be dispatched with even moderate firepower in the blink of an eye. But it is a scientific fact that zombies are lethal in numbers. Imagine this senario: You are standing in a sunlit street armed with a powerful chaingun and equipt with thousands of bullets. If you were in most commercial FPS games you might feel safe from zombies. Afterall the high graphics restrict the number you will face at once. Perhaps at most you can expect maybe 12 zombies to come round the corner. No problem. But what if you faced hundreds, or even thousands of zombies? You would be able to blast the front line with bullets, shredding the rotting flesh to pieces. But the dead mass of the front line of zombies would partially shield the zombies behind them thus wasting most of your firepower. So even though hundreds of zombies fall before your onslaught the zombie hoard is getting closer and closer to you. As slow as the zombies move, they are moving faster than the rate at which you can slaughter them. You would be forced to run. But where? And how do you get more ammo? Was it really worth spending the ammo against the zombies? Next time you encounter a hoard of zombies you might decide to just run immediately. No need to waste bullets on something you cannot wipe out anyway. So you survive by running from place to place. Unfortunately chance dictates that eventually you will get unlucky and find yourself cornered. If so you might find yourself subjected to a slow and painful death... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This type of senario is an inspiration for a game. A world overrun with zombies in which ammo and weapons are hard to come by and you can expect to meet hundreds of zombies at once. I decided to use sprites for the zombies. This allows the most number of zombies to be drawn at once. Lots of people might think "urrgh sprites" and believe any FPS that represents monsters as sprites in this day and age cannot be satisfying to play. I disagree. I think satisfaction from shooting monsters in FPS has nothing to do with the graphics, but is all to do with the reaction of the monsters to being hit. For example imagine a game in which monsters were amazingly high detailed models, but when they were shot there was no blood or gore, no wounds left behind, and no recoil, they make no sound, and to top it off they just disapear when they die. I argue that this would not be satifying at all. You might as well be clicking desktop items. Now imagine a game in which monsters are sprites and when they are shot there is blood, permament wounds, a good gut scream, they recoil from the blast and there is a good death animation. IMO the satisfaction from blasting these monsters to pieces would be immensely greater than the first case. Wasn't original doom fun when you faced 30 imps represented as sprites? As far as AI goes zombies zombies don't plan (much), or run from grenades or massive firepower. They just plod inevitably towards their doom. So very little AI needed, which of course is just as well if you have to manage thousands of enemies at once. This is a screenshot of the current test I am running: 500 zombies run smoothly: As an experiment I made it possible to shoot out chunks of zombie flesh: Probably remove this though, as it means storing a seperate texture in both main and video memory for each zombie.