Untamed wildlife

[SáT]

In the thread "Wishing for animals" over there in the BAT requests forum, I have outlined some ideas for generally improving the fauna in SC. The possibilities are numerous and relatively fascinating, e.g. we can tweak the animals' behaviour. frequency of appearance, relative distribution, etc. At the friendly encouragement of Jeronij and Badsim, I decided to start this thread here.

Now, I realize this all caters only to few of you; I mean, we're here to erect huge cities and destroy the wildlife in the process, n'est-ce pas? That, and I'm very new to modding SC. As you can plainly see, I tend to be longwinded when posting  . Worse, I always lose the thread of my thoughts halfway through. Also, my Engish sucks (did you know Hungary has the lowest percentage of English-speakers in the EU?  ). In other words: bear with me. That's about the excuses.



So, anyhow, let me now list here some general concepts you may or may not be aware of:

The land animals in SC are automata, like the vehicles and pedestrians. The birds are, however, effects (though note there's no real reason we couldn't have flying animal automata), and are thus outside the range of this project (in other words, I don't know rubbish about effects). While in play, the land animals are created by the so-called wildlife generators, invisible and unclickale "lots" that you place when you plop animals in God mode. Now, here things start to get messy: as I see it, Maxis originally planned to let the player plop different kinds of generators; but, like so many other things in SC, this went unfinished. No matter what you plop, horses, wood animals or exotic animals, you always plop the same kind of wildlife-generator, the one that was, IMO, originally intended to create the wood animals (and that's why the generator survives only if you plop it on top of flora). While there's no way I could change this (or at least none that I know of), the generator proper can be easily tied to any other lot. I have vague ideas about making lots that would generate a certain kind of animals, allowing for greater flexibility when placing animals: you could have llama in the mountains and horses on the plains in the same city, for example.

The behaviour of animals is currently limited to walking randomly for 60 seconds, then fading off. While this is actually quite awesome for animals intended to provide a pleasant background effect (glimpsing a deer walking in the forest is fun), I wouldn't mind having animals showing some more realistic behaviour (and here I mean herds), or programmed to do certain tasks (like going off to drink from Peg's ponds). I tend to call the latter "actors", and I certainly plan to make some. I'm also toying with the idea of persistent animals, meaning that they'd remain active for much longer than now; that may have some issues, though.


But either way, to kickstart this thing, I decided to make a much more basic thing, viz. a modular plugin that allows you to easily customize what kind of animals should be generated in your city. Get it here. To install, install the pompously named wildlife_master.dat and one or more of the files from the "Animals" folder. And that's it. Not playtested very vigorously, it's pretty much in beta. It comes with all the standard and exotic animals, and a fixed kangaroo and polar bear to boot. I used the GUID of 9625 to group the animals.

Any feedback is appreciated. Suggestions and requests are welcome too, but bear in mind I can't do any modelling.



Cheers,

SáT

[Badsim]

Hi Sàt,

Even if you've already gave me the fauna mod I desired , I'll follow this thread with great interest .

[jeronij]

Yes, I think this idea has a great potential. I am short of time to play with it now, but I'll keep an eye here 

[c.p.]

This looks very interesting.  Will this make it possible to add new animated animals do you think?  (I've been hoping for herds of bison for a long time  )

[Shadow Assassin]

C.P - It should be possible, since some people figured out a while ago how to make animated stuff. But I don't know if we can add anything extra in terms of new animals. But yes, it'd be so cool to have bison roaming the plains.

[sobol]

Sounds very interesting.  I'd be interested in farm applications.

[zero7]

The behaviour of animals is currently limited to walking randomly for 60 seconds, then fading off. While this is actually quite awesome for animals intended to provide a pleasant background effect (glimpsing a deer walking in the forest is fun), I wouldn't mind having animals showing some more realistic behaviour (and here I mean herds), or programmed to do certain tasks (like going off to drink from Peg's ponds). I tend to call the latter "actors", and I certainly plan to make some. I'm also toying with the idea of persistent animals, meaning that they'd remain active for much longer than now; that may have some issues, though.


But either way, to kickstart this thing, I decided to make a much more basic thing, viz. a modular plugin that allows you to easily customize what kind of animals should be generated in your city. Get it here. To install, install the pompously named wildlife_master.dat and one or more of the files from the "Animals" folder. And that's it. Not playtested very vigorously, it's pretty much in beta. It comes with all the standard and exotic animals, and a fixed kangaroo and polar bear to boot. I used the GUID of 9625 to group the animals.

Any feedback is appreciated. Suggestions and requests are welcome too, but bear in mind I can't do any modelling.

For herd behaviour the best place to look would probably be riot.lua as it defines leader and follower behaviours.  Theoretically (and it is just theory as I've not experimented with lua scripts except to strengthen the stadium attractor) you should be able to create a fauna generator lot for the herd and a fauna attractor lot as a target to create a herd migration.

Daeley is the LUA expert, but certainly generators/attractors/repulsors seems to be an area that hasn't really been explored fully yet (unless I've just not noticed!).


Just a quick addition to this ...

I just dropped your wildlife mod into my plugins and then created a lot with the 'fauna_generator' occupant group, at the times defined in the wildlife_master script I had all sorts of animals appearing around the generator lots (including kangaroos and polar bears).

When I get time I'll take a look at the attractor side of the equation.  maxis.lua (Building: Maxis occupant group) already attracts sims and llamas, so if I use your mod together with my generator lot to create a variety of animals and I can get a boosted maxis.lua to pull all the llamas to it, then there's the start of migration behavior.  Or cows that go to be milked at certain times of the day.

[jeronij]

It is fantastic to see some progress around this idea. Thanks zero7 

[sobol]

ooooooooo, nice.  Can't wait to see the results of this.