en-zombies

en-zombies is the undead population. A server-side director keeps a shared crowd of zombies around every player. The crowd is not per player, so two survivors standing together share one crowd. Zombies spawn out of sight and despawn when nobody is near.

Three types ship: walkers (slow, drunk gait), runners (fast but weaker) and brutes (+850 HP, no ragdoll, heavy knockdowns). Zombies see and hear, chase, search your last known position, then go back to wandering. Their hits can knock you down and infect you. They attack cars, smash windows and can pull drivers out. Hot zones raise density, change the type mix and can apply radiation. Safe zones spawn nothing, remove zombies that wander in and end chases. Dead zombies stay as corpses you can search for loot, split with nearby party members, and nearby zombies have positional audio.

#At a glance

GTA's ambient peds and traffic are switched off by en-core, not by en-zombies.

#How it works

#Authority

The server decides where zombies exist and validates every hit: the attacking ped's owner, range (plus 1.75 m tolerance), cooldown, that the target is not in a vehicle or a safe zone, and that the zombie is alive. The client that owns a zombie ped runs its AI through the states wander, investigate, chase and search.

#Spawning

Every tick, the director walks through players who are in routing bucket 0, loaded and alive, in random order. For each one it works out a target count within 130 m: perPlayer times the zone density, times 0.4 in a vehicle and 1.4 at night. The player's client proposes ground points 65-115 m away, and the server rejects points near any player or within 30 m of a safe zone. The budget is 4 spawns per tick and 120 zombies in total. Nothing spawns within 40 m of a safe zone.

Models missing from the server's game build are detected (a client validates the list) and skipped with a warning.

#Senses

Sight depends on day or night, weather, whether you are crouching, driving or using a flashlight, and a field of view. Hearing reacts to noises: gunshots, suppressed shots, explosions, sprinting, engines, horns and crashes. Each noise kind has a radius and a per-player throttle.

#Infection

When a zombie hits you, the infection chance is its type's infectChance, reduced by armour (1 - armour/100 x 0.7) and further by the infectionResist skill bonus (capped at 0.9). An infected player gets AddInfection from en-core with a random amount from the type's infection range.

#Radiation

Entering a zone with radiation above 0 sets the player's exposure with en-core's SetRadiationExposure. en-core absorbs it on each survival tick. Exposure is cleared when you leave the zone or the resource stops. See Survival system and Radiation zones.

#Corpse loot and XP

Bodies stay for 120 seconds (20 seconds once looted). A search takes 3.5 seconds and only one player can search a body at a time. It rolls once on the type's loot table; the extraLoot skill bonus gives a chance of a second roll. With party members nearby, cash splits evenly (the remainder goes to the searcher) and item units are dealt out in turn; anyone who can't carry passes their share on. A search gives 5 XP.

Kills give XP by type (walker 10, runner 15, brute 40), up to 40 rewarded kills per minute per player, shared through encore.party.shareXP.

#Configuration

#config/shared.lua

Config.senses also holds sight multipliers: crouchSight 0.5, vehicleSight 1.5, flashlightSight 2.2, and weather multipliers (FOGGY 0.45, BLIZZARD 0.5, THUNDER and SMOG 0.7, RAIN and SNOWLIGHT 0.8, CLEARING 0.9).

Noise kinds (radius in metres / throttle in ms per player):

A vehicle counts as noisy above vehicleSpeed (12 m/s), and a crash is a speed drop of crashSpeedDrop (8 m/s).

#Zombie types

Each entry in Config.types has: label, models, health (added to base 100), speed (1 walk, 2 jog, 3 sprint), clipset, damage, attackRange, attackCooldown (ms), knockdownChance (%), infectChance (%), infection = { min, max }, sight, hearing, ragdoll, sound (.ogg) and loot ('common' or 'rare').

#config/server.lua

A loot entry is { item = 'name', min, max, weight } or { cash = true, min, max, weight }. nothing is the weight of an empty roll.

-- config/server.lua: a richer common table
loot = {
    common = {
        rolls = 2, nothing = 40,
        { item = 'bandage', min = 1, max = 2, weight = 20 },
        { item = 'water', min = 1, max = 1, weight = 15 },
        { cash = true, min = 5, max = 40, weight = 10 },
    },
},

#Zones

{ name = 'my_zone', label = 'Label', type = 'hot', coords = vec3(x, y, z), radius = 150.0,
  density = 1.5, types = { walker = 50, runner = 40, brute = 10 }, radiation = 0 }

• type is 'hot' or 'safe'.
• Zones are cylinders: only 2D distance counts.
• Values are clamped: radius 5-5000, density 0-10, radiation 0-1000. Unknown type names are ignored.
• Where zones overlap, safe zones win, then the smallest zone.
• Zones placed in game with the en-admin Build tab (content kind 'zone') override a config zone with the same name. Deleting the placement restores the config version.

#Exports

#Server

#Client

#Commands

/zombies is restricted to group.admin.

#Events

#Server (local, for other resources)

#Client (local)

#State bags

Replicated entity state on each zombie:

With en-target running, bodies get the global ped option en-zombies:search ("Search body"). Without it, or with Config.loot.useTarget = false, an E prompt is used.

#Examples

An alarm that draws a horde, and a bonus for killing brutes:

-- server
RegisterNetEvent('my-heist:alarm', function(coords)
    exports['en-zombies']:MakeNoise(coords, 'explosion')
    CreateThread(function()
        for i = 1, 5 do
            local offset = vec3(math.random(-20, 20) + 0.0, math.random(-20, 20) + 0.0, 0.0)
            exports['en-zombies']:SpawnZombie(coords + offset, 'runner')
        end
    end)
end)

AddEventHandler('en-zombies:server:zombieKilled', function(killer, zombieType, netId)
    if killer and zombieType == 'brute' then
        encore.inventory.addItem(killer, 'scrapmetal', 2)
    end
end)

A new hot zone in config/shared.lua:

{
    name = 'fort_zancudo', label = 'Fort Zancudo', type = 'hot',
    coords = vec3(-2250.0, 3150.0, 32.8), radius = 600.0,
    density = 2.2, types = { walker = 40, runner = 40, brute = 20 }, radiation = 0,
},

#Related

• Radiation zones
• Survival system
• en-party
• en-admin
• Content registry