Dinosaurs?
- Thread starter Svalteus
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Assuming the goal is to keep the roster realistic in some sense, then non-bird dinosaurs are kind of off the table.
Overall, extinct species at all are kind of the fringe of realism for present day.
In other posts along these lines I've seen a hostile response from some, so I'm not sure that it's a path that will be taken in any capacity by Frontier.
Just when it comes to cloning extinct animals generally there's a lot of difficulties with compatibility of the hosting animal, even with closely related species, namely the failure of a Pyrenian Ibex being hosted by a domestic goat as a real world example, but also the current methods give a pretty low success rate generally. When they do survive birth, it's not usually for very long either. Part of it might be incompatible epigenetics (extra pieces of DNA that effect the expression of genes, depending on environmental stimulus) of the host egg or the fact that it's quite a forceful process on the host egg, mechanically removing and replacing the nucleus, using electricity to simulate being fertilised, etc.
On top of technological limitations of the current day, the rate of decay for DNA is a fundamental limiter on what may be a possibility in reality. To get any DNA at all from something depends on it's age and the environment of preservation, with Warm, Wet environments being the worst (a max of maybe 5 thousand years), Warm Dry ones being better (a max of potentially 50 thousand years) and Cold Dry ones being the optimum (potentially 1 million years, but probably a bit lower). The majority of decay happens towards the beginning, being a logarithmic decay to my knowledge.
While finding any intact DNA makes potentially for a good paper, reconstructing an entire genome is a lot of work, considering a reasonable yield for ancient DNA is usually in the hundreds of base pairs, whereas a genome is in the billions of base pairs. It's not as simple as sequencing material from millions of bones either, as there's a lot of overlapping material that you'd get.
That said, there are near complete genomes that have been reconstructed, namely Wooly Mammoth, Dodo, Thylacine & a few Moa species, which are all pretty recent extinctions compared to the maximum their preservation allows.
While finding any intact DNA makes potentially for a good paper, reconstructing an entire genome is a lot of work, considering a reasonable yield for ancient DNA is usually in the hundreds of base pairs, whereas a genome is in the billions of base pairs. It's not as simple as sequencing material from millions of bones either, as there's a lot of overlapping material that you'd get.
That said, there are near complete genomes that have been reconstructed, namely Wooly Mammoth, Dodo, Thylacine & a few Moa species, which are all pretty recent extinctions compared to the maximum their preservation allows.
Overall, extinct species at all are kind of the fringe of realism for present day.
Old extinctions compared to their preservation environment (100% to ~26% of max), like the majority of Australian megafauna (Diprotodon, Thylacoleo, etc.), are theoretically possible to get DNA from, but are functionally impossible to get to the point where they could be cloned.
Middle aged extinctions (~25% to ~11% of max) like the later Madagascan (Elephant birds, Archaeolemur, etc.) extinctions are in a bit of a grey area, but you could maybe get away with them being the most difficult ones to get.
Young aged extinctions (~10% to 0% of max) like the Alaskan & Siberian Megafauna (Mammoths, Wooly Rhinos, Short Faced Bears, etc.), and recent extinctions in the last few hundred years, are pretty comfortably acceptable, with some even having real modern initiatives.
Middle aged extinctions (~25% to ~11% of max) like the later Madagascan (Elephant birds, Archaeolemur, etc.) extinctions are in a bit of a grey area, but you could maybe get away with them being the most difficult ones to get.
Young aged extinctions (~10% to 0% of max) like the Alaskan & Siberian Megafauna (Mammoths, Wooly Rhinos, Short Faced Bears, etc.), and recent extinctions in the last few hundred years, are pretty comfortably acceptable, with some even having real modern initiatives.
In other posts along these lines I've seen a hostile response from some, so I'm not sure that it's a path that will be taken in any capacity by Frontier.
Because those aren't especially realistic either. They're from a science fiction movie.
Many zoos are putting on animatronic displays of dinosaurs (Edinburgh Zoo had a really fun section dedicated to this), so that's something I could see them adding to PZ at some point, but if you want a Frontier-made dinosaur zoo game, then Jurassic World Evolution is where to look. I have it on PS4. While it isn't at the same level of Planet Zoo or Planet Coaster in terms of creative freedom, it does the job, and there are myriad species to choose from. Some of the features are even more advanced than in Zoo (such as the herding behaviour of large herbivores).
Personally I have next to no desire for extinct animals to make it into Planet Zoo, especially not at the expense of living real-world animals (which, let's face it, they would be - given the limited time in which games like this have support, we aren't going to be getting new content forever, and I'd rather not have one of the limited slots taken up by animals that no longer exist). This is of course while admitting that the thylacine is one of my favourite animals, and I loved having it in Zoo Tycoon 2, and pretending that I'd found a relic population or something that needed to be saved, but even that shouldn't be added if we don't get, say, the Tasmanian devil (as a close, living example).
Someone suggested this in another thread right after the game released, and some people got really, really rude on it. I hope that doesn't happen here.
Dinosaurs were tremendous fun in Zoo Tycoon 2. Maybe in a couple of years they might consider putting some in Planet Zoo, but so many people are wanting realistic modern animals right now, that if they do ever include a dinosaur pack, I have a feeling it won't be for a very long time.
Dinosaurs were tremendous fun in Zoo Tycoon 2. Maybe in a couple of years they might consider putting some in Planet Zoo, but so many people are wanting realistic modern animals right now, that if they do ever include a dinosaur pack, I have a feeling it won't be for a very long time.
I suspect Frontier already knows exactly what DLC is going to be released and when. Given how long it takes to create the kind of content we find in Planet Zoo, it's probable that they were working on both the Arctic and South America packs before the base game was even released. A good clue towards this is the fact that some popularly-requested animals were left out of both packs even though Frontier was undoubtedly aware that we wanted them (the ones that come to mind are the Arctic fox and the capybara), which suggests that by the time people started talking about it, it was too late to change it (in other words, Frontier wasn't ignoring our wishes, it's more likely that they already had things in the works and couldn't do any more).
So with all that said, for us to get dinosaurs in Planet Zoo in the next couple of years, Frontier would probably have to start working on it now. Personally my belief is that they are probably working on something like birds or underwater swimming mechanics for aquatic animals like the polar bear and crocodilia, and we know they're working on adding coat variants for existing animals, too, so we should expect to see those sorts of things first.
Even if you could magically clone a dinosaur tomorrow, when dinosaurs were around there were no grasses. Most dinosaurs loved before flowering plants. And much of the digestion process in modern vertebrates relies on the specific microflora associated with that species.
The plants that the dinosaurs ate are gone. The microflora that aided their digestion is gone. The very air they breath is different. If you magically resurrected a dinosaur it would likely die in short order.
Could we eventually engineer a living creature that looks and moves like our conception of a dinosaur? Probably -- designer DNA is already a reality, though we've got a long way to go. But what we make will match our idea of what a dinosaur is, not some objective reality from 65 million years ago.
And by the way the time between Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus is longer than the time between Tyrannosaurus and us.
If DNA magically preserved that long, you'd probably be able to resurrect a fair amount of the microflora too, the problem is more assigning coprolites to their source animals and differentiating between source & contaminant microbes. In fact generally it's the same sort of hurdle for any extinct species, especially those with specific low energy diets.
I don't think it would be wise to resurrect extinct microflora as that would probably lead to the extinction of other animals/mankind. There is no way, our immun-system could handle that. Look at covid 19 (and that is just one "new" microbe) and then multiply that with... .
(Not that I think it wise to resurrect any of the bigger dinosaurs. Not only T. rex would be deadly if let loose.)
(Not that I think it wise to resurrect any of the bigger dinosaurs. Not only T. rex would be deadly if let loose.)
I really think the Jurassic Park movies have skewed our view of this. There's no reason to believe a tyrannosaurus would be any more difficult to take down than a fully-grown bull elephant, for example, and we have guns that could do that in one shot. There's also no reason to think they'd be any more likely to attack a human than any other apex predator would (and there's some debate as to whether they even were predators, or if they were actually scavengers).
Tyrannosaurus would be difficult to keep for a few reasons -- its incredibly large but eats meat; depending on whether their metabolism was more bird-like or reptile-like they may need an absolutely incredible amount of food. And they'd be dangerous to get anywhere near, so you'd need to deal with an animal as strong as an elephant, carnivorous, and much less intelligent and social, therefore harder to train.
That doesn't make it impossible, but these are challenges that need to be considered.
Oh I'm not talking about keeping them captive, I'm talking about killing one if it got loose. Jurassic Park presented dinosaurs as these unearthly monsters, but at their core they were just animals, operating on the same instinctual levels as other animals.
No thanks. Honestly Dinosaur games are a dime a dozen, and there's a new "zoo" dino game that is coming out. Looks great, so we don't need Dinos here.
My thoughts exactly. Btw, It's still in Alpha and could be cancelled or take a few years. When you see the announced features/pics/footage, I doubt Frontier could do it better.
The other reason why I don't see this happening: Don't know much about licensing but i highly doubt if you are allowed to make a dino pack/dino expansion when you already have the Jurassic World license/obligation.
You know, I was as excited about PK as anyone but I didn't think it could truly compete with planet zoo -- that it would always feel unpolished or mod-like. But the latest videos really knocked my socks off -- they've built into their engine things we have asked for since PlanCo like resizing of objects, switching walls is as simple as changing their texture rather than requiring them to be deleted, etc -- their dino models keep getting redone and looking nicer each time -- and they're really polishing up the ui and the graphics overall. I hope they take as much time as they need and actually release a polished product, and it does look like that's what they'll do.
Of course, by then PlanCo 2 will come out and REALLY blow us away, I'd hope. A sequel hopefully means even more tweaks to the engine and is really something to look forward to.
Fair point, I compared it to the current games.
It's in my favorites list on steam - I like what I'm seeing but pre-alpha/alpha/unreleased are always a gamble if it eventually is good (maybe too outdated) or even released at all. Graphics looks fine but I can look past graphics if the gameplay is really good.
Rooting for this game, I like the underdog/indie companies for taking risks and being extremely creative.
It's in my favorites list on steam - I like what I'm seeing but pre-alpha/alpha/unreleased are always a gamble if it eventually is good (maybe too outdated) or even released at all. Graphics looks fine but I can look past graphics if the gameplay is really good.
Rooting for this game, I like the underdog/indie companies for taking risks and being extremely creative.
@ChicagoZohan Ive seen best in slot play the alpha to PK awhile back and it does look good. You mentioned resizing objects and stuff which are great features as well. I got a feeling now since PZ has been out for a couple months competitors will look at what PZ has to offer and what they could offer to compete. Not necessarily referring to PK but any serious zoo style sim that would come out would more than likely add the things PZ doesn’t have or couldn’t offer. As for PC 2 I think it would obviously be much improved but if things like the ability to create functional water parks and other shortcomings the first games couldn’t offer it would still be disappointing in that regard. I enjoy both games but like PZ for example people want underwater swimming animations and animals and zt2 which is much older offers both of these you have to start questioning the cobra engine at that point.