Animals going through fences

[BetterThaLem]

Hi everyone!

I'm having some issue with animal ignoring the fences (mostly with turtles and fennec).Unfortunately i can't upload screenshots because it says that something went wrong.I wanted to buy a DLC but this issue is so annnoying that makes me stop playing the game every time it happens.However in the turtles case there is a corner of the fence which they can pass through and after 5-10 seconds the turtles come back in passing through a wall.For the fennec the case is a bit different.I have a glass wall and sometimes when they are next to the wall they escape and start running even if they are still inside and running next to the internal part of the wall(basically the game counts as they are outside).Of course after 5-10 seconds it's all over.I tried to disable that setting in the gameplay for the animal collision(sorry i can't remember the exact name),to raise the wall,to remove objects near the wall,to replace some walls but nothing worked.I hope that someone can help me with this bug because it's very annoying and it doesn't make me enjoy the game.I apologise for my bad english guys...hope that someone can help me.

 

[jcp011c]

I had this happen with my baby nile monitors. They were clipping through the corner angle of a barrier. I ended up having to just put rocks in those spaces so they could not move close enough to clip the area and be considered escaped. You may want to try the same thing with the turtles. The fox is a different issue and definitely more complicated sounded. Unfortunately I have other instances of escaped animals (like being on the ground in the middle of the habitat and nowhere near the barrier) but fortunately those are few and far between.

I agree it's definitely annoying though how frustrated you get by it likely varies from person to person. Hopefully some re-designing will help in some way with some instances. Good luck!

 

[LadyHen]

Always happens to me. Usually with peacocks and flamingos.

 

[Roxxsmom]

I get the issue with lemurs, monkeys, and other smaller animals in some habitats. They walk through glass barriers and construction walls with null barriers in particular, especially when the barriers are sort of inset to create sort of notch in the barrier parameters. They often have this weird climbing animation as they move across this space and re-enter their habitat.

I also have had baby reptiles that can just walk through the glass barriers, or swim underground and pop out of a path that is right next to a habitat that has a water pool that is nearly to the edge of their enclosure.

And I occasionally get a tapir that can just walk through glass and sometimes will even happily stand half in and half out. Arctic foxes do this too.

This seems to happen most often with glass barriers, but I occasionally get it with concrete barriers that have glass viewing windows too.

 

[GRAMPERS62]

It seems related to the habitat calculation and how close the animals can get to the barrier itself. Most often it seems to be an area where there is a barrier that projects into a habitat and the sharp angles that are created. The animal pathfinding seems to often get fouled by this.
Work around is to avoid those situations or use curved barriers on those inside corners.
In the image posted above this it appears that the animals are funneled into a narrow path with a dead end that fouls the path finding
Work around is to check the heatmaps and be certain you do not have theses narrow points and that paths for the animals do not dead end without a clear area for turning around.

 

[Roxxsmom]

I agree that it seems to happen most often when a barrier has a portion that is inset into the habitat, as when one makes a viewing area that is off the main path. I find it can help to make the inset portion have angled sides instead of square as well. I haven't tried curved, but that's because I tend to like to make those inset path sections gridded, and I don't think it's possible to make a very thick path/plaza area that is a circle. I have a heck of a time getting curved paths and curved barriers to "match."

The screen shot, however, is a straight, flat barrier all the way across the front of the habitat. It's possible the landscaping inside creates issues sometimes if it blocks the animals from maneuvering in the space. This habitat is inside a building, and I hadn't had escape issues with similar building/habitat designs before

 

[GRAMPERS62]

Let's break down why these things cause the escape and clipping. For those inside corner issues it seems to lie in how the bounding box or noclip zone is created from the face of the walls. This means that there will be an area where the walls meet with no bounding box. This compares to using construction walls where the walls don't connect in the corner and leave that open space. With the narrow and dead-end spaces we need to look at the animation sequences of the specific animal. How much space does the animation need to much space does the turning animation need to complete it's cycle? And how much space is required for distance from an object's noclip zone? In both cases these are more than twice the width of the respective animal's body width plus the area of the animation's spline/path. Note that traversable area heatmap calculations are only an estimate to give basic info on where an issue might be.

 

[Kutterköter]

My Fennec Fox just escaped. The Bamboo Food Enrichment Item rolled through the fence which seemed to allow the animal to escape.

 

[GRAMPERS62]

Yeah, I forgot about that one. It seems if enrichment gets too close to a barrier it corrupts the barrier logic all together.

 

[Arrakai]

Yes, movable enrichement items are the worst as they often cause the animals to escape. I try to avoid them as much as I can (only use balls in water etc), but some animals like the fennek only have movable food enrichement -.- They really need to fix the problem with movable enrichement items or just make it so that they can only be moved a short distans and then they reset to the original position.

 

[Roxxsmom]

It still doesn't explain why you can have two virtually identical habitats--same shape and dimensions, but one produces constant escapes (or those fake escape alarms when the animal is still inside) and another doesn't. With those foxes, I can play for hours and not have an issue, then I'll go through a period with constant alarms.

It's frustrating to have to avoid certain shapes that work in a given building or on a gridded zoo, or that creates a certain aesthetic effect, simply because the animals might start walking through a barrier.

 

[GRAMPERS62]

All of these things relate directly to how the animations work and relate to surroundings. Movement is a series of animations moving on splines strung together. each of these animation steps takes distance and time to complete. For instance, a walk animation is a full cycle of movements that has a preset length following a mostly straight line and a turn animation follows an arc. Checks for legal positions seem to be for the end points of the animations which allows any point between to become illegal or out of bounds. This also leads to situations where the animations get to a spot where there are no legal options for movement except to move to an illegal spot. For those crazy times when enrichment items cause escapes the animations seem to disregard the legal area checks and simply begin the interaction routines at the spot where the enrichment item is. Each species has different size animations and different distance from objects and these are also different for sex and juvenile within that species. With those tiny foxes they seem to be allowed to get very close to objects which means there will be more chance of getting one of the previously discussed issues.
I hope this gives you some insight as to how to approach stopping the escape issues in your zoos. But know that even understanding all this Planet Zoo sometimes has a way of befuddling the mind and throwing something unexpected right in the middle of a grand creation that we thought was a sound plan.