Animals

[sanchez]

What about hawks needs to be in line? Their populations in most inhabited areas is quite small. And their eggs are too valuable. If they are a hazard someplace and this is considered important can't their attack be reduced instead?

[The Sociologist]

What about hawks needs to be in line? Their populations in most inhabited areas is quite small. And their eggs are too valuable. If they are a hazard someplace and this is considered important can't their attack be reduced instead?

Exactly. Once upon a time base breeding populations were reasonably stable and hence all the laws "don't hunt numbers 4 or less" and so on. This amounted to a kind of "domestication". Control was possible. Then we were given "animal individualization" supposedly as a prelude to true animal domestication. Well the result was pure shite.

What happens now is that there are 4 healthy animals in town and one elderly dying one. So you hunt an animal because numbers are 5 or above but of course you can't see which one. You kill a healthy one. Next day the old one dies and another two elope together seeking romance over the horizon. Leaves one and one can't breed. I've seen it again and again.

Let me be blunt. Players can't control the animals, RD can't control the animals, probably even ProgD can't. And as any SciFi fan will tell you, uncontrolled ALife experiments aren't a good idea, let alone in a roleplay game.

[Doug R.]

Luk,

I plan to have the Polish zone's problems addressed before you will even notice the effects of this change. Once I get that information from Marol, it will be my top priority.

In the mean-time, we are going to be working on an under-population control that works essentially the opposite as the over-population control. Locations with few animals will see decreases in migration rates and increases in lifespan.

Finally, once these two issues are addressed, I'll start seeding "dead-end" areas like Akypor forest and Plaekur with animals that do not migrate. I'm sure these areas also exist in the other language groups, but it will be harder to identify them since I'm not familiar with the regions.

Adjustments to overall population levels of animals will be an ongoing process. Scarabs already seem to be leveling out, while Hawks and Lemmings are still increasing despite the adjustment.

[sanchez]

Where is it that hawks are a problem? I would like to see many more of them on the populated English islands.

[Frits]

When two animals are in a location, there is a % chance they will spawn another.

Accounting for player hunting is a crap shoot that can be focused to some extent with math, but will never be perfect.

Also, remember that the population numbers I see account for all animals in a species.

Ok, so two animals in a location can spawn another. Is a roadsection a location as well?

Population numbers for a char are hard to gauge, if you're in a town with a few roads on K-island you'll find about 100 buffalo in each neighboring town also and between 2 and 12 or so more on each roadsection. The next day the distribution might be different but the total number near you is level or only a bit higher. It seems more important than it is to the char.

I thought there was another factor, availability of food or how many can the location support?

In hunting natural armor is a decider tho, when 10 chars hunt every day with bone spears they will kill lots of unarmored animals, but hardly hurt the boars and they're useless against elephants. If they all have sabres the unarmored go extinct, the boarpopulation gets hurt and the elephantpop stops expanding.
You could go many ways, like halve the value of every natural armor and double the number of animalhealthpoints. Or apply a randomizer that allows every fifth shot to pass the armor. Or apply a randomizer to each shot; If my char hits 20 with the bone spear he'll hit a hawk for 20, a healthy boar for 15 and do no damage to the elephant cos it has 24 natural armor. A between plus or minus 100 percent randomizer however produces a hit between 0 and 40 healthpoints. Then you might fail to kill the hawk even if it was badly hurt and you would do some damage to the elephant every once in a while.

[Doug R.]

Road sections do count as locations for animal spawning.

I thought there was another factor, availability of food or how many can the location support?

Not currently.

[Frits]

Ok, and i read wounded animals do not count for spawning, is that right?

[Pie]

WE should be able to see if an animal arrives or leaves. It's more realistick, and It shows newcommers that animals are actually "alive", and not just -there-.

[SekoETC]

Good point Pie. I remember the feature was removed around the time I joined Cantr, maybe even before that but I remember seeing a message of such happening. I've never personally seen animals coming and going but I've seen old logs that might have things like You see 2 raccoons arriving from road something to something. The animals don't seem alive when they just stand there and attack people randomly. Kinda like Cantrians - we can understand that the animals are not "online" at the same time with us so there can't be an instant hit back. But since Jos gave the animals a memory, they remember who has hurt them, the next step would be to make the animals strike back, try to hurt the person who hurt them. Though cowardly animals would be more likely to avoid the person who hurt them, but aggressive ones would target the true threat instead of some sleeping newspawn.

Randomization of attacks would also be a good thing. But this would have to mean that to cover for the chance of dealing only a scratch, it should be countered by a chance of scoring a critical hit. The same would go for fighting against people. Pretty much every game includes an element of randomness, only the poor ones like this toolkit you could DL and make your own games with, it was totally linear because the damage was always the same, only limited by your armor. So basically the only tactic maneuvering would be to choose which enemy to kill first, if you manage to eliminate the one that deals most damage then you would get wounded less, but in the other hand, high power critters also tend to have more HP and a better armor, so it might also be better to get rid of two smaller ones in the same time.

[Doug R.]

Ok, and i read wounded animals do not count for spawning, is that right?

Wrong. Wounding only affects the animals in that the most wounded animal never migrates, and only 50% of any other wounded animals in that location have a chance to migrate.

But since Jos gave the animals a memory, they remember who has hurt them,

They do? That's news to me.

[SekoETC]

I have a pretty clear memory of chatting with him on YIM one day and he said he had just implemented such a feature. It was some time ago already.

[Black Canyon]

So it wasn't my imagination.

[Piscator]

If the feature of seeing arriving animals would be reimplemented, we would need some kind of message filter too. It would be quite annoying to see dozens of lemmings arriving and departing every day and I think that's the reason why it was deactivated.

Or perhaps you could include a little extra list of all animals migrated in the last day in the animals section.

[Doug R.]

:shock:

So it wasn't my imagination.

No, it still is, and it's my imagination too. Animal attacks are random, even though they don't seem that way. I have the code right in front of me

[chadpants]

I love the attacking animals, especially on the Burgeo and Aki islands. It adds an element of survival and struggle, as opposed to the flowing fountain of iron making resources we see in some locations. Let us earn our keep, let us work hard to gather the things we need to grow and expand and survive.

I've lost a well-loved character to animal attacks. It was like a jump in a cold pool... very exhilarating.

Has anyone considered filling the animals with candy instead of bones and dung, like a piñata?