Ah! My favorite topic! Cantr lag and animals!
The only advantage to individualised animals now is hunting and migration.
This is not true, AFAIK.
There was hunting and migration before there was individualized animals.
The difference is that before the migration was in packs instead of one by one.
Ejample:
We have 100 individuals of a particular specie in a place, and we want that 15% of those animals migrate toward other places.
We can go one by one throwing a dice and deciding if the particular individual migrates or not (100 dices), and in which direction (another 100 dices). Or we can throw one dice per directions and decide how many individuals migrate towards each direction, so that around 15% of the individuals migrate.
There are likely very interesting things to do with individualised animals that probably will never be done.
I think most of this interesting things are related only to domesticated animals, those that can/should be iddentified by characters (your horse, your dog, your herd or flock).
We currently have ALL the animals individualized. I mean: even the last lemming, in the last herd of a hundred lemmings, in the last uninhabited island, has its own entry in the DB.
Do we need that any particular grain of the beach has its own identity?
NO.
The only reason to have the current system is, from my POV, that:
1. We didn't know the real size that the Cantr DB was going to reach, and the real workload that the server was going to suffer.
2. So the idea of having any and all the animals with its own identity didn't appeared a bad idea, even if less that 1% of those animals will really need that identity.
3. Human beings are not willing to accept and correct our errors when there is another alternative.
As I have stated many times before, this and the past year, I think that having two different kind of animals would allow us to have all the benefits of the husbandry, without any of the inconveniences of the all-animals-individualized system:
- Wild animals: one pack-of-animals object per each specie and location, containing the health and age state of the herd, number of individuals in the herd, etcetera.
- Individual animals (domesticated or not): a new kind of object, one object in the DB per each one, as with vehicles, items and characters, containing its name, its state, and its type (like "tamed horse", "dairy cow", "tamed dog", "tracker dog" (one with special abilities), "wild dog" (maybe it was tamed or not, but now is a fierce dog), "pet lemming"...
And all those individual animals would come from wild animals thorough particular taming projects. For example, in a place with horses (animal-pack) you could start a project for cathing a horse with a lace, and if succesful, you will get an "untamed horse". Later you will start a tamming project, and the "untamed horse" would disapear and a new "tamed horse" would take up his place. If eventually the tamed or untamed horse gets lost, it could disapear definitively becoming again part of another horse animals-pack.