Aquatic animal pass through fences
- Thread starter Antonin
- Start date
In general there is something with the habitat borders. In one of my franchise ZOOs I have bears and I've placed them researched climbing thingies.
3/4 times when I load this ZOO, there is an alert that one or more bears escaped. But they are in their habitats and either climbed tree or just walking on the climbing frame. Often climbing down.
As others mentioned - the animation of doing something is recognized as animal doing it outside the habitat. So maybe when animal is starting the swimming animation near the habitat border, it can swim through it. And then it just continues because the water outside is treated as a part of the habitat.
3/4 times when I load this ZOO, there is an alert that one or more bears escaped. But they are in their habitats and either climbed tree or just walking on the climbing frame. Often climbing down.
As others mentioned - the animation of doing something is recognized as animal doing it outside the habitat. So maybe when animal is starting the swimming animation near the habitat border, it can swim through it. And then it just continues because the water outside is treated as a part of the habitat.
Well, hope this 2 years issue (!!!) will be solved with all these new aquatic animals in the next pack
I came to this thread wondering (and hoping) the same thing. It wouldn't at all surprise me if this appeared either as a part of the full list of things, or even generally just as something they might have worked on in preparation for this pack as part of "general bug fixes".
Since I'm beginning to build for the wetlands pack now, I think I'm going to limit myself to separate bodies of water, away from habitat border edges, whenever they aren't specifically sight lines for guests.
One question for folks: have we found that the swimming through borders happens equally for all types of borders? Would a concrete border wall, with two separate bodies of water on each side, produce fewer escapes than a single lake with just a fence between it? (for example).
I tried every type of barrier/item set/foliage/stones - nothing other than a slice (it can be very thin) of ground (= seperate bodies of water) is gonna stop them from ignoring the border and swimming happily miles away from their habitat until they starve. But my testing was before the european update - but I'll test it again after the wetlands-update.
Over a year later...
Source: https://youtu.be/eHi09Y2tISk
This is on a "vanilla" version of the game (no DLC or anything).
What's worse is that it's on a tutorial-map, which is designed by the developers.
As you can see, I tried to create blockage with rocks, but they ignore them just as hard.
Seriously, Frontier?... You can't get them to recognize objects or even flag some sort of clipping for them?...
I mean, why does it work for some animals, but not for some?... Why don't these also just fall through the map or anything?
Thát is prevented from happening, why isn't it prevented that they casually swim through a bunch of items?...
I'd be more upset if I paid for the game, as well as the performance.
I've pumped over 30 hours into the game already, cause it is pretty good. But it needs a lot of improvement before I'd buy DLC.
Update: I've found by chance that they do avoid the glass panels as shown in the included screenshot.
I just don't understand, then, why not the fences. Perhaps because this panel is not part of the border?
Cause I didn't try to replace the fence, I just put these glass panels in front of the outer border. Perhaps that's where the issue lies.
This is on a "vanilla" version of the game (no DLC or anything).
What's worse is that it's on a tutorial-map, which is designed by the developers.
As you can see, I tried to create blockage with rocks, but they ignore them just as hard.
Seriously, Frontier?... You can't get them to recognize objects or even flag some sort of clipping for them?...
I mean, why does it work for some animals, but not for some?... Why don't these also just fall through the map or anything?
Thát is prevented from happening, why isn't it prevented that they casually swim through a bunch of items?...
I'd be more upset if I paid for the game, as well as the performance.
I've pumped over 30 hours into the game already, cause it is pretty good. But it needs a lot of improvement before I'd buy DLC.
Update: I've found by chance that they do avoid the glass panels as shown in the included screenshot.
I just don't understand, then, why not the fences. Perhaps because this panel is not part of the border?
Cause I didn't try to replace the fence, I just put these glass panels in front of the outer border. Perhaps that's where the issue lies.
Attachments
![Planet Zoo_2022.05.12-18.13 [scaled].png](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/attachments/271/271136-2475a65b7b1aae4c53c8aaf11026b568.jpg)
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So the gharial avoid the glass fence? Maybe the gharial doesnt recognise the barrier like the water passes in certain barriers.
You mean as in when a barrier isn't "water proof", animals will go through them as well?
I'm not sure if the game is programmed like that, but there could be something to that.
My hunch is still that perhaps the barrier needs to not be a part of the surrounding/looping habitat-barrier.
But yes, I saw them go towards this glass barrier and stop and turn around, as well as go around it (in this screenshot across the sand on the right).
Then I decided to put it back more, closer to the fence and bridge, to actually block it off. It seems to be working.
I haven't tried to replace the fence with it yet, as I said, so I might try that next. - But damn, I feel like a play-tester again.
Update: Bad news. What I claimed did happen, but they eventually went through anyway.
I guess they somehow just glitch through anyway. At least they ignore the fact that there's something there.
Still don't understand why that can't just be programmed in properly.
I'm not sure if the game is programmed like that, but there could be something to that.
My hunch is still that perhaps the barrier needs to not be a part of the surrounding/looping habitat-barrier.
But yes, I saw them go towards this glass barrier and stop and turn around, as well as go around it (in this screenshot across the sand on the right).
Then I decided to put it back more, closer to the fence and bridge, to actually block it off. It seems to be working.
I haven't tried to replace the fence with it yet, as I said, so I might try that next. - But damn, I feel like a play-tester again.
Update: Bad news. What I claimed did happen, but they eventually went through anyway.
I guess they somehow just glitch through anyway. At least they ignore the fact that there's something there.
Still don't understand why that can't just be programmed in properly.
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I assume that since it's such a widespread and long lasting bug that Frontier isn't able to solve the issue. Best as I can figure, there are two possible reasons:
- A single body of water is generally treated as a single body of water for animals with diving capacity, regardless of any barriers in place.
- Only solution seems to be terrain.
- The animations that involve deep swimming/diving tend to create a clipping escape where the animation moves the animal through a barrier and creates an 'escape'. I've also seen clipping related escapes when animal enrichments are placed close to a wall and they clip through via their enrichment animation, same for climbing animations (also, I guess, the reason we see animals get boxed when climbing around inside their habitat).
For the first point: Then it's up to Frontier to figure out how to turn that single body of water into two entities, for example.
If that means there will need to be a new barrier for it, so be it. Or they could make it so that existing barriers change their (or the animal's) flags to behave differently.
Surely they can make AI-entities recognize a barrier they aren't allowed to pass, regardless of it being in that entity of water.
And again, they don't go through land, like the bottom of the map. They also don't go through barrier on water-less land.
Why is it that water causes them to ignore barriers all of a sudden?... They should be able to figure that out in their own programming.
It only loops back to the theory that it's because the body of water is seen as a single entity that kind of "clears" or "ignores" any obstacles that are placed inside of it.
And so, that's why I suggested that perhaps they should let barriers split bodies of water into multiple entities so that animal-AI knows it's "the end" of the water.
If it's the latter: Program them to leave some space between their character-models and barriers so that the animations don't get the chance to physically glitch through the barriers?... I mean, these people made an entire simulation involving complex systems with their wrinkly brains, how can they not come up with a solution?...
Even so, first of all the AI needs to be taught to not even ignore barriers, as they clearly just go straight through them like there's nothing.
How can it be that when testing this game nobody went like "Well, that's not supposed to happen. Let's fix that first.", but instead they did like 90-95% of the things well and simply left stuff like this in?... - Baffling. - (I don't know if it got broken later on, though, but I'm just saying...)
It might be that it didn't happen when they were testing it. I'm experiencing the Bug almost never
That’s how it’s programmed now, if you look at traversable area you can see quite the gap of un-traversable area next to barriers. So I don’t know what the problem is.
Yea, it could be. I'm not saying they were just ignoring it necessarily.
However, I observed this happening during a tutorial-park, all the while I was supposed to be focusing on objectives the game gave me.
This doesn't only break one of their own maps, as well as the tutorial, it also leaves a very bad impression.
Ah, so it is that way. - Wow, that's a stubborn issue then. - Yet, they should try more. I just hope they still are...
Same. I submitted a video of it happening during the Bear Essentials tutorial. Hoping this will be fixedView attachment 216866
When two water enclosures are separated by a fence, my aquatic animals (Crocodiles / Gharials / Grey Seals etc) pass through like if there were nothing. Even if I put a ton of physical objects, they don't care ! One other surprising thing is that the escape alarm sounds only few minutes later.
Do you have this issue too? I'm very embarassed, because my enclosure are built in a giant lake around my zoo, and I can't remove the water without destroy anything :/ !
Thanks !
It's making the tutorial a huge pain!
Yes, it's happened to me. I abandoned an entire zoo because I had one planned around the idea of a central watery area with aquatic habitats separated by fences. My otters in particular would not stay in their own enclosure, and the alarms were ringing constantly due to the escapes. I also get the seals and penguins occasionally diving through the viewing windows (and hovering in the air over the guests) in habitats that allow guests to stand in a lowered area and look into the underwater area at eye level. I don't know why it's unfixable, but evidently there is some diving mechanic that is incompatible.View attachment 216866
When two water enclosures are separated by a fence, my aquatic animals (Crocodiles / Gharials / Grey Seals etc) pass through like if there were nothing. Even if I put a ton of physical objects, they don't care ! One other surprising thing is that the escape alarm sounds only few minutes later.
Do you have this issue too
Thanks !
If they can make it so that animals on land won't go through barriers and the like, or even swimming on the surface they won't go through... well, surfaces, they can make it so that whenever they do the diving-animation (or are at depth) they won't just ignore any barriers (including just any significant items).
If there truly is some kind of "god mode" (or "noclip" mode) when animals dive, they should probably re-design that. - I don't understand how they're just OK with this happening. I know they probably have a lot on their plate, but how did issue even end up in the game.