Use “Bred In Captivity� Trait As A New Creature Count To Fix Hunting

[violetann 43]

many people are annoyed at lack/low number of wild animals on servers due to animals being bread. please use the new “bred in captivity†trait as a 3rd creature count limit.

aka:

aggressive creature count, none-aggressive creature count and bred creature count. this will allow the creatures bred in captivity to not effect the normal aggressive and none aggressive creature count, thus letting you bred but not effect the hunting.

[Margul 1]

... except the point of the creature count in the first place is to limit thr number of creaturs the server has to process. So this wouldn't help anything at all

[Maximustehgreat 353]

+1 Brilliant way to separate the creature count

[Margul 1]

How does not counting player bread animals help the fact that the server can only effectivly procrss a certain amount of animals? I fail to see what this would help with

[Wulfgar 1,128]

Good idea, it would allow for at least some non-aggros to be found in the wilderness.

There are ways to still keep the numbers down, by increasing failed pregnancies or increasing disease where multiple "bred in captivity" animals are kept close together.

[Sir Arowhun 473]

Animals like deer should be hard to keep alive in captivity. That would be a way to make them wild again.

[Rasu 561]

All this would do is spread out the spawns that are in the wild out over the server instead of in the areas that most people hunt in now because there are spawns.

[Margul 1]

Ah that makes sense. Something has to be put in place to limit the animal population not in the wild. Failed pregnancies increasing as the bred in captivity count gets too high would be cool.

[Theodis 339]

There are ways to still keep the numbers down, by increasing failed pregnancies or increasing disease where multiple "bred in captivity" animals are kept close together.

I have a 59x59 area for horses to roam in. They all cluster in a dozen or so of those tiles. Anything like this has to wait until after the animal AI has been fixed so that they don't cram themselves in corners.

[outlander 30]

Ah that makes sense. Something has to be put in place to limit the animal population not in the wild. Failed pregnancies increasing as the bred in captivity count gets too high would be cool.

In addition making animals eat more or need more grooming along with your idea would trim the "herds" so to speak. If the animals need more food and making a groom a requirement to hold off sickness the animals would increase the death rate unless someone was taking care of them. It pains me to see a locked stone pen in the middle of no-where with 5 traited horses, 5 traited cows, 5 bison and 10 chickens all starving with the farmer's house close to ruins. Not that I care about the little digital animal it is that I know there are people looking to hunt and noobs who need those starter animals in the wild. I understand it is a fine line between not keeping animals a "chore" and making it too easy to keep animals.....

Edited March 8, 2013 by outlander

[Radni 1,089]

Edit; after thinking this over, I like it. Horses in the wilds on epic are hard to find.. Cows too

Edited March 8, 2013 by Radni

[Kegan 3,926]

I am not sure how to control the animal population people like keeping animals nothing you can do about it. I am not a major hoarder but I have my share we keep them for looks, skills and the martials we get from slaughtering them. If you stop births then you will keep more breeding pairs so if one does not give birth the others might we tried that it does not work. We tried nurfing enchanted grass a few times that does not work either. The crowding does not work people just keep them in one tile pens to keep them away form other animals. I would like to see even more animals in the game we have sheep on the way and I have seen a lot of other suggestion for new creatures that would be cool too. It is a hard one for sure. The hunting server seemed like a good way to give everyone an even hunting ground no deeds only a large starting town where we can all stay and use. Its the only way I can see to have a place to hunt.

[Wulfgar 1,128]

Hunting server and then remove all aggros from the normal servers or how is a hunting server going to solve any problems with the current servers animal population?

[Kegan 3,926]

Hunting server and then remove all aggros from the normal servers or how is a hunting server going to solve any problems with the current servers animal population?

Well I think people are upset that they don't have a place to hunt more then anything I think the hunting server would just be a good place for them to go and hunt till their hearts content.

[thenewcndo 528]

Edit; after thinking this over, I like it. Horses in the wilds on epic are hard to find.. Cows too

lolololol

[KunAlt 844]

Hunting server and then remove all aggros from the normal servers or how is a hunting server going to solve any problems with the current servers animal population?

No please, whatever they do, removing aggros from the normal servers will be the worst solution ever

[yarnevk 257]

Thats not going to do it, since the goal is capping total creature count.

The right way to do it is total creature count and establish target percentile ranges for each creature, over freezes spawns of that creature, under increases spawns of that creature. If breeders breed too many horses, it should not stop pheasants from spawning, only the wild horses vanish, yet mysteriously the domestic studs do not feel up to getting it on until a balance of wild/bred is restored.

It would be even more interesting if predator/prey balances was used to affect percentiles. If wolves are killed off too fast, rather than respawning wolves the deer spawns.

Edited March 9, 2013 by yarnevk

[violetann 43]

Thats not going to do it, since the goal is capping total creature count.

The right way to do it is total creature count and establish target percentile ranges for each creature, over freezes spawns of that creature, under increases spawns of that creature. If breeders breed too many horses, it should not stop pheasants from spawning, only the wild horses vanish, yet mysteriously the domestic studs do not feel up to getting it on until a balance of wild/bred is restored.

It would be even more interesting if predator/prey balances was used to affect percentiles. If wolves are killed off too fast, rather than respawning wolves the deer spawns.

it would make the sql query slower if you did a count for each type of animal and if it was bread in productivity. since you'd need a view or a query for each aka 2 for each type of animal - (dear bred), (dear none ago wild), (Croc bred) and (croc gro wild) etc for each server.. so a psodo code SQL statement might be:

SELECT COUNT(CreatureID) FROM Creatures Where animal = deer & type = bred

SELECT COUNT(CreatureID) FROM Creatures Where animal = deer & type = noneagro

SELECT COUNT(CreatureID) FROM Creatures Where animal = croc & type = bred

SELECT COUNT(CreatureID) FROM Creatures Where animal = croc & type = argo

etc for each creature...it would get very long.

that would cause more lag. my suggestion of bred, argo and none argo would be 3 sql queries and only 1 type check per server aka:

SELECT COUNT(CreatureID) FROM Creatures Where type = noneagro

SELECT COUNT(CreatureID) FROM Creatures Where type = agro

SELECT COUNT(CreatureID) FROM Creatures Where type = bred

to do a total creature count you would just add them together so for my example it would just be adding 3 together aka

total creature = bredresult+argoresult+noneagroresul

where as the whole for each animal the adding would be longer too aka:

total creature = dearbredresult+dearnoneagroresult+crocargoresult+crocbredresult etc it would get very long if you added 2 on for every animal.

having a bred creature count would give a good idea of how many animals are bred, he could do once per month or every 6 months etc counts on per animal distribution but it would probably be too many queries to do every hour like the creature count stats page.

Edited March 9, 2013 by violetann

[Protunia 735]

-1

[Joanavon 553]

The breed animals need to be separate from the wild animal caps. When the breed animal cap gets near full dramatically increase miscarriages, amp up disease fatality and triple the quantity all breed animals eat until the pop via abandoned, poorly cared for and unmaintained animals drops from the cap. Thus the wild population remains unaffected.

[Rathgar 959]

-1

Id like to know what would be the bad side of what the OP suggested. I cant see any, but a more experienced player like yourself might see something that the rest have not yet noticed.

[Kuro 41]

Is this really such a large problem?

Maybe optimizing the server code and/or upgrading the servers them self would come a long way. Better then any strange soft caps or killing of and increasing the chores we have in wurm by adding animal baby sitting... Wurm Tamagotchi

Id like to know what would be the bad side of what the OP suggested. I cant see any, but a more experienced player like yourself might see something that the rest have not yet noticed.

I think your right, i'll wait here a bit for the gold nuggets of knowledge protunia will give us.

[yarnevk 257]

etc for each creature...it would get very long.

You do not recount all the creatures when it is time to spawn a new one, that is really bad polling programming. Instead when the server next reboots you count the creatures of each type, and then when it is time for one to die, or one is killed it is time allowing one to be bred or respawned you +/- the count. This adds one server call only when one of those events occurs to update this global count table. This is something it already does, it is just only counting aggro/non-aggro so it is a simple extension beyond those two types when it is time to +/- the count

I see no problem of breaking out bred in captivity as a seperate count if it is percentile limited like any other type. If people do not like the allocations, they can campaign for Rolf to change them.

Edited March 9, 2013 by yarnevk

[violetann 43]

You do not recount all the creatures when it is time to spawn a new one, that is really bad polling programming. Instead when the server next reboots you count the creatures of each type, and then when it is time for one to die, or one is killed it is time allowing one to be bred or respawned you +/- the count. This adds one server call only when one of those events occurs to update this global count table. This is something it already does, it is just only counting aggro/non-aggro so it is a simple extension beyond those two types when it is time to +/- the count

I see no problem of breaking out bred in captivity as a seperate count if it is percentile limited like any other type. If people do not like the allocations, they can campaign for Rolf to change them.

I never said when they died or re-spawned i was talking about populating the stats, which are used by rolf and his code to say if something should spawn or not.:

aka: http://jenn001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/creatures.html

it dose a count of how many creatures per server, I think about every 5mins since the stats are recording every 5mins minimum listings and the update time of the graph only changes every 5mins. currently it only shows agro and none agro, i was talking about adding 1 extra line on the graph called bred so that we can see how many bred creatures on the server.. it wouldn't effect anything if it was just the bred tag because it can already handle the argo/none agro fine.

[Lightonfoot 58]

I have a 59x59 area for horses to roam in. They all cluster in a dozen or so of those tiles. Anything like this has to wait until after the animal AI has been fixed so that they don't cram themselves in corners.

Great comments by everyone about all that. However, one way to reduce this is to "corral" your horses into smaller pens so they don't crowd up amongst one other. This of course requires more work, but is a way to compensate it.

After all, you can't expect horses to not intermingle if given the option to. And that's the whole thing with disease. The reason viruses and diseases survive is because we're social creatures and tend towards intermingling.

What you bring up here is more of an excuse to allow people to pen large numbers of animals and not have to put in the extra work. You want the whole cake but you don't want to pay the price for the cake. You're like the guy that says it's a good idea to put limitations on things, but you can't seem to agree with any of the limitations.

There has to be concessions because the server cannot do infinite creature AI instances. The trick I think is how do you limit what players are doing without ruining the experience and chasing them away? Players, by and large, lack attention to detail. So you can't make things too complex. It has to be accessible somehow.

What I think will happen is that the developers will choose not to make your job more complex, but will instead limit how many animals players can have some other way. Perhaps they'll make it so that captive animals do not move and do not attack or feed on their own (to reduce processing cycles). Or they could reduce the benefit of captive animals enough so that players will be discouraged from having large numbers of them. So only those who're making a zoo for roleplaying reasons will want large numbers of them. The rest of players will see no reason to do it.

Edited March 9, 2013 by Lightonfoot