Trance Lynx

• Builders are now smart enough to to reclaim features that block their buildsite, which weren"t there when they started moving to it
• Fixed issues with features with 0 metal and 0 energy
• Fixed crashes / desyncs when using area orders with a large radius
• Hold position doesn"t imply "don"t turn" anymore, and units with small firing arcs in general behave a lot better in this case.
• Units on hold position now don"t get confused by nearby invalid targets
• Smooth ground mesh for better aircraft behaviour (unit tag: useSmoothMesh)
• Wind fixed to stay in between map boundaries
• Momentum isn"t conserved anymore in unit-unit collisions
• Impulses decay every frame instead of every slow update
• Kamikaze units now do a visibility and 3d distance check
• Fixed ships were able to "climb" cliffs
• Fixed multiple issues with pathmap updates after terraforms

• Changed default binds of forcestart, singlestep, debug to Alt+f, Alt+o, Alt+b
• Non-reclaimable features show up as red squares now when placing a building
• Out-of-LOS features don"t show up anymore when placing a building
• Fixed icons not rendering properly when distance-to-ground method was used
• Better mipmap handling on SMF maps
• Fixed specular lighting calculation on SM3 maps
• Fixed "/shadows" command on SM3 maps
• Fixed SM3 map holes
• Fixed "/wiremap 0|1" (argument was inversed)
• Lots of other drawing fixes
• Far-textures fixed
• Load-screens preserve aspect ratio
• Added checks for insufficent gfx cards
• Added new shadow rendering option ("/shadows 2"): it disables terrain rendering in the shadow pass, which gives a huge performance increase
• Changed BumpWaterReflection values: 0 = disable; 1 = enable (no terrain); 2 = enable (with terrain - was "1" before)
• Fixed occasional hang when word wrapping text
• S3O transparency is now supported even with AdvUnitShading disabled

• Added AllowFeatureBuildStep call-in to included gadget handler
• Fixed typos in certain featuredefs.lua, weapondefs.lua that mutilated error messages
• Spring.Rehost fixed on Win32 when spaces in install path
• Added support for modifying CTAAirMoveType (gunships)
• Add GetUnitMoveTypeData(unitID) call-in, returns a table
• Fixed Spring.SetFeatureDirection

• Fixed incorrect startpositions in skirmish games
• Proper handling of mod dependencies
• MAN pages support (Linux)
• Support for external debug symbols (Linux)
• Fixed an issue with using the root of a drive as data directory
• Use less memory when reading from 7z archives
• Improved handling of spectators in case of sim slowdown and desync

• E323AI: CPU performance improvements & bug fixes
• KAIK: better D-Gun handling

• Windows installer
• Source (tar.lzma)
• Source (tar.gz)

Statistics: Posted by Tobi - 19 Jan 2010, 01:37 - Replies 33 - Views 715

We are having some gameplay issues with reproduction of wild animals, and I think it"s rather interesting stuff (this is the reason why we currently have a quite sophisticated system).

Wild animals shouldn"t just be there, and eat and reproduce randomly; they should in some way behave like acctual animals, such as they should die when deprived of food. Also, their number should correlate to the state of the ecosystem they live in. So if you have large areas for wood, where they find enough food, there should be a lot of them. This should lead to a natural understanding of users to the way animals in Unknown Horizons behave.

Those are the requirements, the current implementation works like this:
Every animal has a certain amount of "health", or you could also call it "inverted hunger", because the health increases everytime an animal eats, and decreases if it can"t find any food. As soon as the health reaches a certain lower bound, it dies, and if it reaches an upper bound, it reproduces, which works like cell division (there really *is* a border to how realistic UH should be ;).

The main problem we are currently facing is, that the number of animals decreases too fast, if a hunter kills some of them. But if we increase the reproduction rate of the animals, the island gets very crowded with them if you have no hunter.

A possible solution we thought of would be to make the hunter breed animals, that should balance the population he hunts. But that is nearly a hack, imo; what i would like is a system that balances itself. The idea that might help here is the ecological gap: if the hunter hunts down animals, there is more food for the remaining ones, so they should in turn reproduce faster. Yet this seems to be somehow difficult to implement.

Do you have any suggestion, how we could improve that? Could we improve the system by changing some mechanisms? Should we introduce something new that can somehow control the population, to increase it, when it"s small, and nevertheless keep a boundary to the growth? What do you think?

So long,
totycro

PS: i"m quite aware that i put way too much effort into this small issue, but i"m convinced that a kind of appreciation of details can make a game much more interesting.