Animals escaping since last update

[Britches]

I wanted to contribute this issue on the issue tracker, but it seems like the issue tracker has ... yeah... issues itself, since it always gives me a "the issue could not be loaded" error. So I decided to bring it up here:

Since the last update animals are escaping in all of the zoos I built before. Seems like now even giant rocks won't keep them inside their habitats anymore.
All of my previous zoos became unplayable. Especially for franchise zoos with no huge budget this is really nasty, since capturing the escaped animals costs alot of money.

Hope for a quick fix!

 

[FoxyDee]

It might be that hitboxes of animals got updated? I was checking my previously built habitats and alot of them suddenly had escape points where before update, they could not get.

I jist úadjustwd some rocks and it was fine again.

 

[Werewolfmack]

I did notice some monkeys were able to climb up & escape on trees on the outside of their enclosures in a way I hadn't seen before, but I had built a brand new zoo and I don't have an old file with monkeys to compare it to. Some fiddling with the trees seemed to fix it, I am in sandbox tho and had no issue using resources to catch and test the new tree placement over and over.

 

[Britches]

Here we go again. Same issue with the game and same issue with the issue tracker.
All of my franchise zoos became unplayable with update 1.11 since animals are totally going insane escaping their habitats. All zoos were completely fine before the update. Now they look like this:

Of course I submitted this to the issue tracker as well, but hey, surprise...

Since I have ~10 franchise zoos, my motivation to fix every single habitat in every single zoo, is below zero.
Please - whatever causes this, find a quick solution! Escaped animals eating junk from a trashcan, fine. But coding the animals to riot and bring Sodom and Gomorrah to my zoos by giving them supernatural powers that allow them to give a damn on barriers isn't.

x(

 

[Cocolori]

Here we go again. Same issue with the game and same issue with the issue tracker.
All of my franchise zoos became unplayable with update 1.11 since animals are totally going insane escaping their habitats. All zoos were completely fine before the update. Now they look like this:

View attachment 327998

Of course I submitted this to the issue tracker as well, but hey, surprise...


View attachment 327999
Since I have ~10 franchise zoos, my motivation to fix every single habitat in every single zoo, is below zero.
Please - whatever causes this, find a quick solution! Escaped animals eating junk from a trashcan, fine. But coding the animals to riot and bring Sodom and Gomorrah to my zoos by giving them supernatural powers that allow them to give a damn on barriers isn't.

x(

The update notes do include an update to both climbing and ability to escape over smaller objects. I hate to say this because I appreciate how unfortunate it is for existing zoos but since many of the community have been complaining that more animals should be able to climb over small ledges and make use of rocks in their enclosures (and hit box sizes etc.) it might not be reversible without losing the gains of a smoother, more realistic climbing system.
Long and the short is that if this has improved the climbing system then I doubt they will roll it back...

 

[Britches]

Well, if that's the case, I will take a break from PZ. A really long break.
Cause... all the efforts I had building up these zoos, the hundreds over hundreds of hours I put into them now have completely gone to waste. With all habitats looking like that one in the screenshot, honestly... I don't want to spend even more hundred hours fixing them without overdimensioning walls and barriers until every single zoo becomes completely ugly with unsatisfying patches on habitats that were completely fine before!

I'm really not a nag, but this completely kills all fun I had with this game.

 

[jip241]

Alas, I'm in a similar situation - a sizeable franchise zoo rendered largely unplayable until I spend a long time tweaking all of the enclosures.
I can understand why the devs might be keen to improve climbing and jumping....but this game is years old now, and most players are already heavily invested (particularly with ongoing franchise zoos). In such a state, changing the fundamental mechanics in such a zoo-breaking way is incredibly frustrating
If they don't want to simply roll it back entirely, I wonder if it might be possible to keep both sets of code, and add an option to pick the 'old mode' (in the same menu as adjusting animal aging rate)?

 

[jcp011c]

Haven't encountered this myself (as yet) but I've only opened 4 of my nearly 30 Franchise zoos. And of course, some of those animals in those might can escape and just haven't yet. Can definitely see it's a huge issue. Frontier can't win either way with this though. Larger hitboxes and the animals are prevented from going to spots that we'd like them to get to. Decrease the hitboxes and you have this issues.

I don't know how they could roll this back and set it to like it was, but maybe it could just be a new thing for new zoos and not affect existing zoos? I mean, I know it is now, they'd have to roll it back.

 

[Dukemon]

Next time Frontier could communicate this changes way earlier to get prepared for things like this.
But this update still has flaws. My lions can now escape to the moose, because Lions can now jump on Reeds.

 

[Ounze]

I'm running into this, just with three species so far, Amur Leopard, Siberian Tiger, and the Eurasian Lynx. Everything else is staying put, but it quickly ate 100k of my 500K saving mark through ticket refunds. I have at least one of them escaping every 3-4 months.
Glad I'm not alone in seeing this.

 

[Cocolori]

It's going to take me a while for my franchises as well - my camels, tigers, reindeer, moose, ibex and Dall sheep enclosures in one of my zoos is what i have had to fix so far. I didn't lose much money because I was very proactive about it - I went round each habitat and checked the traversable area and managed to find most issues before they became a real problem. So about a third of the habitats in that franchise zoo needed fixes and that is one of my 7 zoos and a small one at that.

On the other hand when I looked at my enclosures it was clear to me that most of them were jumpable / climable for those animals and always should have been. And I like that my Ibex can now actually scale small rocks. So on balance, for me, this is an improvement. I may feel differently in a minute when I open my really big franchise zoo (although that I made much earlier so for the most part it involved a lot fewer 'natural' habitat barriers.

I should probably say as well that I am not much of a builder in the sense that I don't spend hours over making beautiful habitats which might also be impacting how unbothered I am about this. In fact I really like having to change my exisitng zoos as crowd numbers grow and I need to move certain species to avoid them getting stressed etc. So I might also be unusual in taking a certain amount of relish in needing to re-do some of my habitats!

 

[Britches]

Since my reported issue on the issue tracker still "cannot be loaded", I submitted to the same issue someone else opened.
I'd appreciate it very much if anyone else experiencing the same problem could vote here too, so it will be looked at by the devs:

https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/54866

Thank you

 

[AlexVonHumbug]

It might be that hitboxes of animals got updated? I was checking my previously built habitats and alot of them suddenly had escape points where before update, they could not get.

I jist úadjustwd some rocks and it was fine again.

it must at least also be due to changed fence requirements, i had to raise the fences for jaguars, pumas, clouded leopards and cheetahs. furthermore, at least cheetahs and jaguars and red pandas seem to be able to jump higher.

 

[abigenius]

I had read this problem before but I was busy on sandbox mode and finally yesterday I open my biggest franchise mode with 300 animals from almost 35 species + the new dlc animals, and I was worried for the zoo and yes, some animals scaped and I lost almost $100,000 but i had a lot of money so I didn't have problem

But in fact the animals scaping makes sense, and it's a Great update to the transversal area, before some animals
they could not scape when the barrier for example was of 1m and it was unrealistic, I am not angry for this update, and yes I fixed and upgrade my habitats with problems and now all it's fine, I guess it's part of the management and the beauty from Franchise mode, don't think so?

 

[Ounze]

I had read this problem before but I was busy on sandbox mode and finally yesterday I open my biggest franchise mode with 300 animals from almost 35 species + the new dlc animals, and I was worried for the zoo and yes, some animals scaped and I lost almost $100,000 but i had a lot of money so I didn't have problem

But in fact the animals scaping makes sense, and it's a Great update to the transversal area, before some animals
they could not scape when the barrier for example was of 1m and it was unrealistic, I am not angry for this update, and yes I fixed and upgrade my habitats with problems and now all it's fine, I guess it's part of the management and the beauty from Franchise mode, don't think so?

True, and I'm not really mad, more mad about the fact there was no warning to the changes or that they happened by accident. My current franchise zoo is awesome, and if I hadn't had a substantial war fund on hand for it, it might have killed that zoo.

 

[jip241]

Well this is a novel addition.
I bit the bullet and spent a few hours redesigning my current franchise zoo to deal with the new-found jumping ability of my animals. It's a pain, but on the flipside the new mechanics do seem slightly more realistic - though I still think overall it was probably a mistake to make such a fundamental change this far into the game's lifecycle
...
However
...
I've just plopped a couple of new benches some distance outside the lion habitat, and, uh, this happened. The enclosure's edge at this location is a null barrier aligned with a line of simple 4m high standard walls. Previously, they were comfortably contained, but the addition of a bench 4m or so outside of their enclosure somehow means they can suddenly jump over the wall!

(with apologies to my now-traumatized zoo guests)

 

[jip241]

Oh, and now one of my prize female Indian Elephants has just been killed by (I assume) a stupid glitch. OK, now I'm grumpy

One male, three females, and a couple of little ones - all in an enclosure with almost twice the minimum required area. An 'infighting due to overcrowding' notice appears, and seconds later the bull has outright killed one of his mates!

My guess is that the game takes a few seconds to recalculate habitat space etc...and within that period it managed to trigger a fight. My zebras (sharing a huuuuge enclosure with the giraffes) are particularly bad on that front: they invariably start fighting (and often injure one another) the very second one of them matures, so even hovering-and-pausing to ship off the new stallion the moment it comes of age fails to stop it

Frontier devs, if you're reading this, I demand conservation credits compensation - and a very big apology to my digital Proboscidea pals! (and a pint next time we bump into each other at the pub...)

 

[Zoo Builder]

They need to fix this problem soon, Not been able to play the game for 1½ weeks now, Got an update today but the problem is even worse. Alerts of animal escapes every minute, some of them are still in the habitat, some are flying in the air and some have 1000s of escape points even tho the barrier is double the height of the limit. Something hasn gone very bad with this update, The game is unplayable. But for some people it seems to be working fine, If it's just a problem for a few of us maybe they don't bother to fix?, But then I need money back cause I can't play the game at all

 

[XT]

I had this problem for some of my animals and I think two changes (that, in the long run are good) is that some animals can climb on top of some plants rather than either get stuck or clip through them. And, if a barrier is either an inch too low, or there is the slightest rise in terrain (or a rock), that seems sufficient to allow escapes.

I hate that its broken so many zoos but the fact that the animals had massively unrealistic hit boxes has been a major complaint since the game began.

 

[Zoo Builder]

I had this problem for some of my animals and I think two changes (that, in the long run are good) is that some animals can climb on top of some plants rather than either get stuck or clip through them. And, if a barrier is either an inch too low, or there is the slightest rise in terrain (or a rock), that seems sufficient to allow escapes.

I hate that its broken so many zoos but the fact that the animals had massively unrealistic hit boxes has been a major complaint since the game began.

Sounds like I have a different problem than everyone else, There are no escapes because of a barrier too low or rocks or terrain rise, My Dholes have a completely flat habitat, no rocks or trees even close to the barriers, and I've raised the barrier to 2,5 meters but they still have escape points, Doesn't matter what I do, they just jump right thru the barriers. My park have 1000+ animals so every 15-20 second there is a new animal that escapes and I feel like I have tried everything but nothing works. So it's impossible to play the game, Anyone knows where I can contact Frontier to at least get the money back for the latest DLC, cause haven't been able to play it since I got that and doesnt seem like I ever will.