Too many animals spawns, incorrect behaviour of arrassivity

[Quadnick]

My friend and I are seeing way too many predators in the game, which is making it too tedious to play. For instance, while walking from the big house in Milton to the gas station, we counted nine wolves. Then, when we went to the cabin in Mystery Lake, there were three black bears within 100 yards of us. This is in game version 2.01-2.02, mod version 12.0, running on Steam, with no mods, voyageur difficulty, and me as the host.

The wolves behave abnormally too. During that walk I was attacked by a wolf twice. The first wolf came at me even though I had a lit torch in my hand. The second wolf attacked me while I was standing right next to a well lit fire I had started. Also, none of the wolves went for any piece of decoy rabbit meat that I dropped.

We became frustrated and quit. But before ending, I decided to host a new game in pilgrim difficulty. The wolves ran away as they should, but as you can see in the screenshot below, there are still way too many of them. There are six in view, one off screen close to my right, and two more off screen to the left, over by the church. Making a total of nine. This was our biggest issue when we played back in March, but I was hoping it would be fixed by now.

[Filigrani]

AI behavior has been slightly alted, because there wasn't any other options to make it work in multiplayer and making re-target interaction works. Spawns and save/load of animals has been recreated from scratch, because once again, vanila spawn system wasn't suitable for multiplayer at all. Multiplyed spawns is not intended thing, but seems to be happend because of ping, when client and host manage to spawn AI twice (or more) from same spawner. Decoy mechanic isn't working, because once again, whole system of dropped gears has been writen by me from scrath to be able to sync all gears on the floor, decoy logic never been ported from vanila code to the mod because of various problems. This is interation number 6 of the animals sync, and I feel, that I will not be able to make it work better. It took me years to reach current result, and now I simply gave up on trying to improve it any future.

[Quadnick]

That's too bad, but I get it. As I mentioned before, the high amount of predators makes the mod too tedious to play. I'll be keeping an eye on the discord though to see if there is any breakthroughs in the future. Despite that however, I appreciate the work you put into this mod. It really is amazing.

[ljans]

@Filigrani is it a possible option for you to disable spawning of wolves and bears completely? I think this would be much better than the current situation. I highly agree to Quadnicks statement that it's very hard to play the mod with that many predators.

[Filigrani]

Decoy now re-implemented in 1.13!

[Quadnick]

I'm not a coder, so I didn't fully grasp what was being discussed in the "Prevent too many wildlife and predators #81" thread. But I was getting the impression that the spawns may have been toned down. Is that right? Are there less predators in the newest version of the mod? I'd love to play it again.

[ljans]

It's indeed the expected result, that there are less predators now. Every player is encouraged to try it out and tell about their experience. Based upon that, some adjustments on the balancing are possible.

[ljans]

My experience with this update so far: There is a notable difference, but there are still too many predators. Even after cranking up the percentage for blocking a spawn from 23% to 75%, I encounter 3-4 wolfs simultaneously on a regular basis. I also had two bears at the same time in one location. For now, I saw no other option than putting my dirty workaround back in place, that counts all currently spawned predators and prevents spawning of more than 1 per player.

[Quadnick]

Thank you for the update. Might be dirty, but it's better than the alternative. Good work.

[ljans]

@Quadnick just to be clear: the dirty workaround ist only active in my test-build right now. I'm no author of the mod, just a player with the same problem as you, but a little coding experience to somehow tackle this issue.

[Quadnick]

Ohh I see. Thanks for clearing that up. Well that's a bit of a bummer. I was hoping this was implemented into the mod. Is it something I could plug into mine so my friend and I could pick this up again? Would you mind sharing?

[ljans]

I get your point, and that's probably okay as a temporary solution. After updating the mod to version 13.2, you can apply the workaround by overwriting the file SkyCoop.dll in the directory Mods of your game with the one in this attachment: SkyCoop Workaround.zip For it to work, all players in the lobby have to overwrite their file. Keep in mind that this build is experimental and not supported by SkyCoop's author.

[Quadnick]

Awesome. Thank you!