Meat, Part Two

[Patuk]

no matter which way you cut it.

ehehehehehehehehehehehehe

[IntuitiveApathy]

To the butcherable creatures: It was definitely something we considered going into this project. In fact, if you look around the Gol Krathu, you can find at least two creatures that skin into a carcass in addition to items. That's where the evolutionary path took me.


Also, Bahamet got a touchup like you're talking about. I did decide to do that, but limit it to the massive critters. Thanks to Eukelade for working on that.


I quite like the idea myself. It's more realistic, cuts down on clutter, and is generally a pretty good one. The unfortunate problem with it is that it takes a -lot- of resources to make for everything. This is already a project I've spent over a year working on, and I'm not even halfway done. Adding an additional object wouldn't take too much time the first, or second, or third one - but when it's every. single. animal it gets a bit mindnumbing to make a carcass object each time. I've already seen that while I do have the drive to get this sort of project done, writing up steaks for every single animal is just as mindnumbing and hard. (Which is why you can enjoy a nice dusky dong from time to time. Creativity!)


The other hassle with the prospect of adding buterable carcasses was the crafting recipes. I can only put in so many crafts at one time, then they need to be approved. Every craft from the carcass would take up one of a very finite number of crafts I can make at once, and I am routinely hitting my limit -without- them. To add these crafts to the project would, in my mind, take too much time for too little gain.


It's a great idea, and I really wanted to do it at one point - but the reality of the situation meant it was something I needed to cut to get the project off the ground.

Would it be possible to enlist our help here in the form of a call for submissions?  We know what the critters look like, so I don't think it'd be much of a stretch for us to write up some carcass objects, or anything else?

Otherwise, it'd be happy enough to just have a filterable skin command and have it end up much like forage where all the other stuff you're not looking for is just gone (in the case of forage, other unwanted forageables don't "appear" even in the case where you would have otherwise succeeded for other items).

[Akariel]

Unfortunately, the -main- problem is that limit on craft recipes I was talking about. I have already got in touch with some players who seemed interested in the new skinning stuff and gotten some items from them - but carcasses are off the table for right now due to the limit, mostly. (I probably should have made it clear that was the main issue)

If you -do- have ideas for things to skin off of creatures though, or more particularly, if you think a creature isn't dropping something that it should (a form of edible product, a resource item described on the creature but not dropped) send in a request and we can talk there.

[Hauwke]

What do you mean thats the issue? Can the database not handle much more of that sort of thing?

[Akariel]

Our processes on staff require that every crafting recipe go through an approval process. I put in about twenty at a time, and then one of our admins needs to approve those twenty crafts. This is normally a mutli-day process. I cannot put in more than twenty recipes at any one time. That means that when I have my crafting list full, I need to wait for it to be approved before I can submit more. My list is normally full with a mixture of meatcraft, mastercrafts, and a few other things that pop up through the days. (Being a tribal staffer, whenever someone asks for something to be loaded, I try to make sure it has a craft, or I make a new craft.)

That means that that hard limit of twenty limits forward progress. So to try to cut some time off this multi-year project, I'm trying to stay away from things like having to craft carcasses into the parts people can get through just skinning. (Though the skinning files themselves is also a multi-day process to change since someone needs to go through and make sure I didn't make any spelling errors to any of the echoes you get, and I'm dropping the right object.)

Once my craft slots are freed, the objects I've made in that time normally require ~20 more crafts to be made, so it's another wait. Adding carcasses onto that would take up precious space in that, and turn this project from a period of two years to perhaps three or maybe four. We have quite a lot of animals in the databese, and we're not just doing the ones you see every day.

[IntuitiveApathy]

Our processes on staff require that every crafting recipe go through an approval process. I put in about twenty at a time, and then one of our admins needs to approve those twenty crafts. This is normally a mutli-day process. I cannot put in more than twenty recipes at any one time. That means that when I have my crafting list full, I need to wait for it to be approved before I can submit more. My list is normally full with a mixture of meatcraft, mastercrafts, and a few other things that pop up through the days. (Being a tribal staffer, whenever someone asks for something to be loaded, I try to make sure it has a craft, or I make a new craft.)

That means that that hard limit of twenty limits forward progress. So to try to cut some time off this multi-year project, I'm trying to stay away from things like having to craft carcasses into the parts people can get through just skinning. (Though the skinning files themselves is also a multi-day process to change since someone needs to go through and make sure I didn't make any spelling errors to any of the echoes you get, and I'm dropping the right object.)

Once my craft slots are freed, the objects I've made in that time normally require ~20 more crafts to be made, so it's another wait. Adding carcasses onto that would take up precious space in that, and turn this project from a period of two years to perhaps three or maybe four. We have quite a lot of animals in the databese, and we're not just doing the ones you see every day.

Are there any other staffers with less of an object load that we could rope in?  Sounds like you're hugely maxed out!

[Hauwke]

Huh, and you still found time to do echos when I was under your group.

[Rathustra]

The caracass system is building a square block (the objects themselves) as a solution to a round hole (how skinning currently works). The idea has some merit, but it should probably require adjustment to the underlying code instead of brute forcing it by creating hundreds of carcass objects and handling things via the crafting code.

This would be a sea change in how skinning is implemented in the game - so while I'm not saying it flat out /won't/ happen - it's a very large project even before we get into crowdsourcing things.

[Akariel]

I've taken a few steps that should alleviate the number of corpses being made in the desert. Seems there were some rooms with upwards of 50 bodies just lying there, so this should make sure that doesn't happen again.

[WithSprinkles]

    12/08/2016
        Chalton made more deadly. Beware!
        --Akariel


If this is part of it, just.. ahahahahahaha!

[Fathi]

Staff, feel free to edit this out if it's revealing too much, but back when I was a builder on Arm Reborn, 'skin' and 'butcher' being totally separate commands was an idea that was definitely mooted and I think possibly even accepted as the way we were going forward. The idea was that even an utterly unskilled hunter could still 'butcher' a carcass for meat at the expense of potentially salvaging the pelt/shell/etc, whereas if you had the skin skill you could skin it first.

But just like Akariel says, that involved a lot of work. I had a table I was putting together of what every single animal and humanoid in the game would break down into if you skinned it vs butchered it and was working on putting together a numerical table of what potential success/failure rolls would look like.

It's a decision that, like Rathustra says, would be a sea change. It's also a decision that is a lot easier to implement from the ground up rather than replacing piecemeal an existing system.

Annnnd back to the present discussion about piles of animal parts in the wilderness:

One reason why people may be leaving meat around is that now that meat spoils, there's no real reason to hold onto heaps of it. All the NPCs only buy five of each type of meat, and there's no sense in carrying around a bunch of food on your person that'll just go bad.

It's not personally what I'd do but I can kind of understand it.

"People are leaving animal parts all over the place" is a complaint that's cropped up several times over the years and it's always sorted itself out, i.e. there's probably only a couple people doing it and it'll stop once they just die or move on. Remember when everybody in Tuluk was so mad people were leaving gortok parts everywhere that some nobles tried to pass a law making it illegal?

Also, like Synthesis says, in the Vrun a lot of the aggro NPCs tend to kill each other, which could be causing some of the corpse pile-ups.

[Miradus]

I personally observed a few days ago an aggressive tracking mob that chased me into an area with a bunch of passive, weaker mobs.

I ditched his tracking code but when I came back the next RL day he was still in the spot where he ought not be and there were piles and piles of dead passive mobs.