How flying can work

[Iben]

So firstly we would need to create closed habitat with proper roof (no holes). Add flying space just as we do with water. It could require places to sit and rest. So climbing=sitting elements.

The "issue" ( I can't find a better word for it), was never really making the animals fly. We know that the engine supports free flying in a 3d space because Planet Coaster had free flying pigeons. The same goes for JWE, they can perfectly fly outside the enclosed space.

The two major hurdles they had to jump through were making an enclosed space as boundaries and not let animals fly into each other. Now JWE2 clearly shows that they found a way to create an enclosed space using the new aviary tool, which makes me think that the aviaries build in Planet Zoo will most likely also be a kind of fence based tool. Of course I assume that it's going to be with more complexity as JWE2 is often dumbed down a bit.

So whilst I don't think flying is just "swimming in the enclosed space", I do think they were able to use something else that they made for swimming and that is having animals navigate in a 3d space whilst avoiding each other. I think they mentioned in the devlog that hurdle specifically was one of the harder things to do do, but now that that's out of the way the same base algorithm will probably be used for flying.

 

[Roxxsmom]

@Roxxsmom
Please, restrain yourself from posting irrelevant and inappropriate content. This doesn't relate to topic, it's a bug. Post it in bug tracker, not here.
It doesn't add to discussion.

@NZFanatic
Complex? It's mostly copy-pasta of already existing code.
JW2 in terms of animal behaviors is a lot more simplistic than in PZ. I wouldn't want anything from JW2 to be put into PZ without any serious improvements.

I know it's a bug! I was just inserting a bit of humor, jeez.

But to be serious, it does illustrate a bug they still can't fix related to animals moving in three dimensions, even without needing a barrier above. Climbing animals also have lots of bugs where they are considered escaped while still in their habitat.

So how to prevent flying animals from bugging out in flight mode and registering as escaped or simply flying through barriers meant to keep them in from above and the sides? I've been told that animals that simply walk through barriers in habitats isn't really fixable and it's my fault for designing enclosures a certain way, but a three dimensional aviary will provide even more opportunities for creating issues like this.

One possibility is to not have them truly fly at all, but to have an animation where they hop from branch to branch while fluttering. This would be realistic for some birds in a zoo setting, but it would be limiting for birds that truly do fly in aviaries.

 

[Leaf Productions]

We already have flying seals, or floating ones anyway. We're already halfway there

View attachment 276957

Cant wait to see my Macaws diving when/if we get them lmao

Even in JWE2 though my pterosaurs keep flying out out of nowhere though, I hope we get a serious update to the barrier system in both games.

 

[Roxxsmom]

One thing that may be different from the JWE game is the range of sizes and flying styles real birds have.

Do people think there would be a most practical size for flying birds in PZ? I have not played JWE, but obviously pterosaurs are much bigger than most bird species. Will be be limited to hornbill and larger sized birds, or would parrot sized flying birds work better for the game dynamics? And what about smaller, songbird sized birds?

From a realism standpoint, I've never seen a free flight aviary large enough in a real zoo to allow a condor, or even an eagle, to truly soar, though they do flap around in them.