A How-to Guide to Horses as Vehicles

[Savanik]

There are many, many ways to make this more complicated. Simplicity was part of my design requirements.

Only three things need to be added. The only slightly sticky part is the project, which requires that the project subtract one horse from the animal population when started - to my knowledge, no project thus far does this. However, it does not seem like an impossible requirement.


New Tool: Saddle
Time to create: 4 days
Resources needed:
4000g Leather
1000g Hide
400g Medium Rope
Tools needed: Hammer, Knife, Needle


New Project: Capture and Tame a Wild Horse.
This project is initiated with the Saddle tool and can only be done in a location with horses. A horse is subtracted from the wild animal population when this project is initiated. You can give a horse a unique name, just like with other vehicles.
At the end of the project, a new Horse vehicle is created with the given name.
Tools needed: 800g Medium Rope, Saddle
Time: 8d
Note: Consumes Saddle in addition to rope.


New Vehicle: Horse
Riding Horses are treated purely as vehicles. They graze on grass and don't need to be watered. They can't be attacked and don't die of old age.

Passengers: 2
Weight Capacity: 140 kg
Vehicle Speed: 15 units


Questions, comments, flames?

Sav

[SekoETC]

I think when travelling on mountains or deserts, the horse would need to be fed with something you bring along or it would die. And I'd want them to be attackable, just like any other animal.

There would also be a chance of the horse throwing the rider off it's back, in which case the rider ends up on the ground and suffers a random amount of damage not affected by the shield. The chance of horse getting out of control would depend on the rider's skill of handling animals, and the time it has been tamed. If a horse gets attacked, it would most likely throw the rider off it's back. But horses could be trained to endure pain and avoid getting shocked (warhorses anyone?), and their wounds can be treated with healing foods just like people.

It would be cool if horses when not tied to anything or held behind fences could eat resources left on the ground. Would people accuse them of theft too? And oh, if they could chew on notes, that would be just hilarious.

[theguy]

Jos said that he wanted to make sure no note would be destroyed other wise you could just leave one note on the ground to get rid of it

[Nick]

I think rather than a simple adding of animals as veichles, it will be implemented along with individualisation which is being worked on.

[Agar]

If they're going to be attackable, they should also be capable of attack.

But that could wait untill we have the horses at all. Cool idea for the future, but let's get them first, ok?

Doesn't hunting, or at least animals travelling remove animals from a location? That may be one way to go about this, although when you tame a horse, you should also end up with a pile of meat and large bones, as that would be odd.

There's lots of ways to spiffy up the horse idea, this seems like an outline for a basic way to get riding horses in the game. We all want to spiffy up vehicles with radios and lockable compartments to store cargo/passengers/prisoners/enraged elephants set to destroy the nieghboring lands, I'm sure after we get riding animals (rhino) we'll think of different ways to make them neater.

[Nick]

No, wait until invididualisation. Or else you'll have new "real" horses, and then old horses based on this system.
And this one I'm sure you'd agree is not really realistic, just an attempt to get horses ASAP.
Not only would having the "fake" horses be stupid, the other option, destroying all those when the "real" ones are added, is also a bad idea.

Wait until individualisation.

[Savanik]

No, wait until invididualisation. Or else you'll have new "real" horses, and then old horses based on this system.
And this one I'm sure you'd agree is not really realistic, just an attempt to get horses ASAP.
Not only would having the "fake" horses be stupid, the other option, destroying all those when the "real" ones are added, is also a bad idea.

I don't feel it's an exaggeration when I say, that could take years.

Especially if it's implemented as an 'in-place' migration, rather than starting over fresh with an entirely new world. The complexity of the code will pale entirely in comparison with the complexity of trying to transition every location in the game over to the new system. And if we're transitioning all the buildings, tools, vehicles, resources, and animals anyway...

I personally think that the new code is going to be excruciatingly complex on its own. It's effectively an entirely different game than the current Cantr, and far more complicated to boot.

How close are we to implementing this new system? We have a roadmap - do we have a timeline?

Sav

[Nick]

I don't feel it's an exaggeration when I say, that could take years.

Regardless, the point is it will be implemented.
And we can't have two different kinds of horses running around.

[Racetyme]

We have two different kinds of boats, you can't build buildings on them anymore but there are still ones around with buildings. Why not two types of horses?

[Jos Elkink]

How close are we to implementing this new system? We have a roadmap - do we have a timeline?

No, we explicitly do not have a timeline. If we had fulltime programmers I would set one, but we don't, so ...

Although you are right about the complexity of the roadmap, it is not true that all those are needed for the individualisation of animals, because:

1) we could implement individualisation of animals within the current system first;
2) animals could walk around freely without needing everything else to be adjusted (my preferred option) - the only downside would be that animals can run away from characters, without the characters being able to follow them.

I totally agree with all your other points, though, and that's exactly what I'm thinking about most of the time I'm thinking about Cantr ...

Individualisation would be the very first next step on the roadmap, though, although I must admit it's not going very fast. I think I have to drop the idea that I will do it, and convince another programmer to work on it ...

[Pie]

hmm... we could have a horse wipe.. and have every place that had a horse start out with a horse. Of course.. that could take too much time.