Autumn DLC Speculation
- Thread starter AlexSea
- Start date
-
- Tags
- dlc speculation
300! Pages! Congratulations!
Even the diving animations are no completely free diving (there still is some kind of loop, because the game needs to stop the animation with enough distance to the barrier of the diving space).Yeah, and I could be the mythical Yeti playing Planet Zoo. It's unlikely, but I could be right?
I'm sorry for putting it that way, but I think these kind of reactions are unfair. You make it sound like people are prematurely judging something without having any information, but that's absolutely not the case at all. Here are the three facts we have so far.
Like, based on those facts, the assumption that the bats are looped animations is the most solid one of all. Yes, we cannot know for sure until we have them, but the assumptions aren't based on nothing and it isn't really a situation where the chances are 50/50. In my eyes, anyone who thinks this is something else than looped animations has the burden of proof here, because all we know so far points clearly towards it being looped animations.
- The bat takes the traditional spot of an exhibit animal
- Frontier themselves call it a walkthrough exhibit, and they've been very consistent about using the word exhibit and habitat
- Exhibit animals are looped animations with predetermined points
The fact that no Frontier dev so far has chimed in and said "guys, these aren't the traditional exhibit boxes" ( and they've done that, they've confirmed biome skirts cannot be changed for saves, they confirmed that brachiation would be possible with piece by piece building, etc.) just further confirms it for me.
Flight in a looped animation vs flight in free flying is pretty much apples and oranges. So this wouldn't really be testing out free flying for birds I'm afraid, in the same way that deep diving wasn't a test for water based exhibits. They could have done that from the start.
It definitely isn't the "traditional exhibit box", first of all, because it's a lot bigger and can be entered (what isn't possible with the standard exhibits....) and because the bats have a completely different way of moving around (while most reptiles aren't running around constantly the bats potentially will...and also a lot faster).
And because they move so much faster, I doubt that they will have only the "standard" animation loop that any other exhibit animal has (because it's way less noticable when the animal moves very slow instead of speeding through the exhibit all the time).
Our local zoo Olomouc, Czech Republic, also has walkthrough fruit bat exhibit, so they probably aren’t that rare. The bats were also surprisingly quite active, there were fruits scattered in the exhibit and the bats were flying around and eating on the fruits.
You're using the word loop in different ways, but it's important to use the same definition here.
When we in terms of exhibits talk about looped animations, we're talking about the fact that the animal has no AI to make it freely navigate through the world. The animal is confined to a predetermined set of points and performs a predefined set of animations. When we talk about habitat animals, we're talking about animals that have AI to freely navigate throughout the world. They are not set on a predetermined path, they can calculate paths on the fly and navigate the way they want. They will use a set of animations based on how to navigate that world, but the order of those animations are determined on the fly and are not predefined.
Deepdiving is not looped in this definition, because the animal calculates the navigable space on the fly because we as players define that space rather than Frontiers devs having predefined that space. It is not the same thing and it's important to use the same definition of what a loop means.
Whether or not the animations themselves are faster, whether they fly or just swim around in a little circle; it doesn't matter from a technical conceptual standpoint. They are looped, because they are predetermined. From a technical and conceptual level, the exhibit boxes we see in Planet Zoo are exactly the same as the aviaries that were present in JWE1. The animals are on predetermined paths, but with the right amount of randomization, you indeed don't notice it that much.
And it's this predetermination, these fixed amount of start and end points, that makes people who are into heavy customization not like these kind of looped animations. We like to have full control. It's not out of fear that it wouldn't look good or anything, it's because of the restrictions in terms of creativity that it inherently comes with this. It's the sacrifice you make in this particular design. The very same way that having animals climb in a clunky way from time to time is a sacrifice you have to make if you want to have fully customizable hand made climbing frames.
Again, said this several times and I fully mean this, it is 100% okay to not want this level of control. But it is equally 100% okay not to be happy with that lack of control. It's just two different ways of looking at the game and looking at what you want out of the game.
It matters in terms of the quality of the product...The animation has to be at least a lot more complex than for every exhibit we have so far, because you will notice this quite soon as bats are so much faster (and I doubt that the community will be happy if they can predict the fly path of the bats after a few seconds when it's always exactly the same).
The exhibits we have in the game don't have any randomization at all and if your point, that it will potentially be the exact same exhibit mechanic as we already have:
they would be always flying in the exact same path....
And that's what I mean, that I can't imagine, that the bat exhibit will work as the "traditional exhibit".
Exactly, say you have a colony of 75 bats, if they all had the same looped animations, they would be inside eachother and clipping everywhere
Oh of course, I was merely talking about the technical and conceptual part of it. In that case, it's irrelevant, it's still the same system.
Again, I'm talking about the technical and conceptual point of it. It has nothing to do with the randomization, what I was talking about that it is the exact same mechanic (predetermined points and paths, with fixed spots) and not a mechanic like a habitat. Besides, exhibits do have forms of randomization, just not that much.
If you have enough predetermined paths and enough randomization, this indeed will not feel like they're constantly repeating the same path. I'm 100% convinced that it will not feel like that, Frontier is good enough at this. The JWE1 aviaries worked well enough in that regard, they felt random.
But it doesn't change the fact that it is, from a technical and conceptual standpoint (I keep repeating it because it's important as that is the exact distinction between an exhibit and a habitat
), a loop. A randomized loop at that, but still a loop with predetermined paths and start and end points.
Yeah this happens with all animals with really high group numbers. The other day I did a test to see if 500 penguins was even feasible since someone asked on Reddit, despite the low fps the penguins were just huddling together with preset kind of areas . Preset areas in a habitat was very weird to witness , never mind the insane amount of penguins inside each other
what species of penguin did you use?
African penguin
What I don't quite understand yet is....is the cave in the trailer the final exhibit? It somehow seems to be a bit too big
So my birthday is tomorrow and my girlfriend and I are celebrating all weekend. We were out walking her dog last night and we saw a Raccoon. Could that be a sign?
i mean, sure. We already know raccoon was confirmed.. What do you mean?
You guys are talking about exhibit like if they were written in stone since the beginning of time, but literally half of the new content of the new update is about exhibits. Including a very important one that involves changing the animation system, and breaking the "loop", which is educators taking the animals out of their box. So new things are already happening with exhibit animations, we know it for sure. And we still don't know which extent the exhibit animation system will apply for these new big exhibits.
I concede that we know that the bat is not going to move as freely as habitat animals (they would have called it habitat animal), and I am thankful for that, because we also know that lots of free-roaming guests and animals waste a lot of computer resources. So better to find a way to optimize the flying animations based on an improved exhibit system, and that way more people with not-so-good computers will enjoy flying animals in Planet Zoo. Let's have in mind that aviaries need to be full of birds to feel alive, maybe 2 big aviaries have as much animals as the rest of a given zoo, give them free flying and that would make explode some computers...
Completely and 100% agree. If these ‘walkthrough exhibits’ are customiseable to a certain degree, I do think that this is the best possible way they could have done aviaries/flying animals!
That doesn't break the loop.
Exhibit animal is in position A and performs a looped animation. You go away and come back, and it's in position B performing the same or a different looped animation. You go away and come back, it's in position C performing the same or a different looped animation. The educator takes it out (or, more likely, spawns it from the talk point), and performs a looped animation with it, and then "puts it back" into position A, B, or C where it performs a looped animation.
At no point is the process changed from how it originally was.
Fact is...we don't know anything yet..so it could be possible that there are really major changes (I don't think for the small exhibits, but maybe for the new big ones)