The bulk of this patch addresses dog hunger management. There have been a lot of comments about dogs not dealing with hunger on their own well enough, and many players have been finding this frustrating to manage. I spent some time reading through these comments, observing the dog AI, and looking into specific situations where dogs didn't seem to be doing what they should. These are the adjustments and fixes I've come up with so far.
This patch offers some legitimate improvements, but due to the complex and nondeterministic nature of the game, it definitely won't completely erase the need for player input, nor will it ensure every dog is self-sustaining (especially those with more extreme bodies). I'll continue to pay attention to everyone's thoughts about all of this and can absolutely adjust and fix things further going forward, but hopefully this is a good start!
Game Adjustments:
- Hunger and energy now decay at a slightly lower rate.
- Slight adjustments to dog hunger curves so that they'll prioritize eating a bit sooner than before.
- The hunger, energy, and boredom icons that show up on a dog's thumbnail when their needs are getting low now show up only when those needs are critical. Seeing these show up gives off the impression that something needs immediate action, which is not actually what they'd previously been indicating.
- When a dog wants to poop or lay an egg, by default it tries to route to an isolated location to do so. This is usually fine, but these are some of the highest priority behaviors in the game and when a dog's needs are getting low this can result in them routing far away for what appears to be no good reason while ignoring their impending starvation. I've updated things so that if a dog's hunger or energy drops too low while it's routing to complete one of these behaviors, it will now immediately run that behavior where it stands so that it can shift priorities.
- Dog AI has been adjusted so that they have a much greater preference than before for interacting with nearby objects. This change was specifically intended to address the issue where dogs would dispense food and then walk far away to go eat something else, but it has much larger implications and should result in smarter-seeming dog behavior in many other cases as well. The AI system still has some randomness to it, so this change won't completely eliminate the previous behavior, but it should reduce it a lot.
- Made it way easier for tall dogs to grab food off of the ground. Because this game is physics-based I do still limit things somewhat to avoid physics issues, so if your dog is tall beyond imagination then it still may need to be hand fed. However, this should make it possible for a much wider variety of dogs (as long as they can walk) to keep themselves fed.
- Added a slight lockout to dispensing food for the express purpose of eating. This is intended to stop dogs from standing in front of a dispenser while starving and repeatedly creating burritos instead of actually eating something.
- Lowered the default max den occupancy by 1. This is not a hard limit, just an internal suggestion, but it should help limit the number of dogs congregating inside of dens.
- Dog Storage will now show the selected dog's age.
- Added a bit more encouragement to digging holes for no reason.
Bug Fixes:
- If a dog was trying to interact with an object that it was already carrying in its mouth, and this interaction did not require that the dog grab said object, it would often report that it was not yet close enough to the object to interact with it, resulting in that dog continuously walking directly into a wall. Dogs now check to see if they're already holding the object they're attempting to walk over to.
- After the last patch that made dens smaller, some users reported that their dogs had stopped using the dens altogether. There was a bug in my routing portal generation code that caused portals to fail to generate properly in certain cases, and making the dens smaller made this more likely to happen. This bug may also have been the cause of other miscellaneous routing failures, and has now been fixed.
- There was a bug with my dog AI Fixations system causing lockouts to not be respected. This meant that dogs could sometimes chain fail at running a fixation and end up standing around doing nothing for long periods of time. Lockouts are now functional again, which should make the AI feel snappier in certain cases.