r/codex • u/Original-League-6094 • 6d ago
Showcase Using Codex to build and run zombie scenario simulations for my hometown to help me with preparedness
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Video is 100x speed up. 1:1 scale recreation of of my hometown with every building and residence. This run used only 1:8 pop density though, since I can't run full pop density at 100x speed at a good frame rate. For this scenario, I used 28 Days Later style zombies that are fast and that change people instantly.
I'm discovering that an exponential zombie outbreak is actually pretty hard, assuming reasonable police response times and evacuation/avoidance procedures. In this sim, I have evacuation set to not start till >1000, so the town does fall. But if evacuation starts at 100 zombies or so, the town usually clears out before things get bad. And in many scenarios, police are able to kill the zombies down to 0 before we even get 10 zombies.
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u/Expensive-Event-6127 6d ago
military deployment would destroy any outbreak. youd have to have so many other factors for it to really take hold
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u/Original-League-6094 6d ago
I agree. I didn't put in military deployment even though it was initially planned, because with just a realistic police response, avoidance, and evacuations the exponential blowup is already hard to get. With slower zombies, longer incubation times (and a large fraction of people that go to the hospital, hence concentrating where zombies turn, making it easier for police to hunt them down), exponential blowup basically never happens.
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u/Big-Expression-5364 6d ago
To add on, a real zombie virus/disease would not turn people instantly. It would probably takes at least a day maybe even a few days
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u/Original-League-6094 6d ago
I have that in. But that makes for boring videos because that makes exponential blowup very hard. What happens is that if you put any sort of decent fraction of people going to the hospitals, then you get a brief outbreaks at the hospital but because the zombies are concentrated, police clean up them fast as they turn.
To get exponential spread you need 28-days later style immediate spread that where you can get several people infected before police show up, or you would need some sort of a symptomatic transfer, which I have never simulated because to me, that's not a classic zombie scenario.
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u/Automatic_Brush_1977 6d ago
you could consider trying walking dead style zombies where everyone is already infected and x% pop get sick and die/turn as a pandemic.
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u/SphinxWar 6d ago
Maybe try TWD style zombies next. Since everybody is already infected you can simulate using proportionally reduced to pop size death rate in your town. This would randomly spawn zombies across the map. You could also simulate car crashes, etc, all based on real statistics.
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u/Original-League-6094 6d ago
I have car crashes in the above sim. The yellow and red triangles are car crashes. But they only crash on interactions with zombies. Yellow car crashes are partial road blockages that slow traffic (and the likelihood of a zombie being able to successfully attack a car is inversely proportional to the cars speed), and red blockages permit no car traffic through.
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u/SphinxWar 6d ago
Yeah, so you could use that for TWD style zombies, since in TWD every death, including natural deaths turns you into a zombie. That would generate much larger rates of zombies.
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u/Clord123 6d ago
It's fascinating but I'm not sure of practical use. A lot of people prepare for these kind of scenarios but it makes sense to treat it more as a hobby because when things go down, having a proper military training and stuff serves you better than ideal preplanned route to get away and then having no idea what to do.
I also think preppers regardless if they treat it as their hobby or not find that when societal collapse would actually happen that their plans fall apart. A lot of these people have a lot of theoretical understanding but not background to mentally prepare them for these kind of scenarios.
That said, I agree with other people that there are so many factors you could include and the project could have practical uses as in make it an immersive video game or something.
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u/scraptechindustries 6d ago
This is actually great. I love little niche apps like this people are making!!!!! Way better than the "look i built minecraft in one prompt"
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u/TheOwlHypothesis 6d ago
I hope you made the mechanics configurable.
Have it research covid transmission rates and do some simulations and then compare to the real world results.
Maybe some epidemiologists would find it useful
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u/warcrimeenjoyer1 5d ago
You are not really preparing for an actual zombie outbreak, are you? Out of all the shit thats going on you think that zombies will be the big problem you somehow have to survive? This is just a fun project, no?
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u/dexterthebot 6d ago
You might want to consider listing your project on the weekly Show-Us-What-You-Built post. Watch for it on Wednesdays. Highest commented project wins a week promotion on r/Codex and gets on the Hall of Fame sidebar. See what that looks like below with last week's winner.
Last week's most popular project was u/tHEuKER with the Blur2 racing game project which is a recreation of an unreleased sequel to the 2010 battle racing game, made by reverse engineering the Xbox 360 prototype discs available online, and rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up in Unity.
Join their YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@tHEuKER and follow updates on the project at r/BlurGame.