[1.1] Giddy-up!

[Canute]

I got an idea/suggestion:
Stable boxes.
You can assign an rideable animal to this box, and this animal allways stay at this box. (with Animal logic you can assign animals to animal spot/beds)
Storage filter for food item to store food for the animal so it get allways is full feeded.

Maybe you can expand this stable later, so your pawn can auto. take a mount if they are going out of the home area.
And leave it there when they return to the homezone.

[Roolo]

I got an idea/suggestion:
Stable boxes.
You can assign an rideable animal to this box, and this animal allways stay at this box. (with Animal logic you can assign animals to animal spot/beds)
Storage filter for food item to store food for the animal so it get allways is full feeded.

Maybe you can expand this stable later, so your pawn can auto. take a mount if they are going out of the home area.
And leave it there when they return to the homezone.

Cool idea. I especially like the second part of your idea. But instead of a box in the sense of a new construction/piece of furniture, I think it would be better to have it implemented as a zone that can be designated. That allows players to create their custom stable using existing constructions/furniture, and makes it possible to have multiple animals in one stable while also handing the food issue (players can just assign a stockpile with animal food in this zone). It'll also save me the effort of designing a nice looking stable/box, which is good since I don't have much experience with creating sprites.

This zone could either be the existing animal restrict zone with a new option added like "use this zone as a stable", that when enabled makes sure pawns use it as an animal drop off point, or it could be a new type of zone that always has that feature. I'll have to think about that.

Thanks for your suggestion!

[Canute]

I think you shouldn't be worried about sprites or textures.
If you managed to manage to create these feature, i bet you will find someone who can create something, maybe one of the happy user of the mod.

But i realy think you should create a furniture, rather then to create stockpiles.
Special these stables stockpiles could be exploided. Just create a 1x1 zone as stable and assign all rideable animals to them.
But with the stablebox 2x1 you need to assign space for it, not to speak about the when all these animals waiting in a row for their rider.

[Roolo]

I think you shouldn't be worried about sprites or textures.
If you managed to manage to create these feature, i bet you will find someone who can create something, maybe one of the happy user of the mod.

But i realy think you should create a furniture, rather then to create stockpiles.
Special these stables stockpiles could be exploided. Just create a 1x1 zone as stable and assign all rideable animals to them.
But with the stablebox 2x1 you need to assign space for it, not to speak about the when all these animals waiting in a row for their rider.

I didn't say I would like to implement it as a stockpile, I said I would implement it as a restrict zone (like the animal restrict zones you can create in vanilla). You could create a food stockpile inside this restrict zone to make sure the animals get their food (that's the only thing I said about stockpiles). I do agree with you that there are probably people that would be willing to help with creating nice sprites, but there are more problems with the furniture/construction approach. For instance, how to handle very large animals? For instance elephants, or even worse, T-Rexes? Would you need different stables for different animal size? Then you also have the matter of how many animals can fit in a shed. What if a shed with animals is on fire? Of course the animals should leave it then, but it all has to be handled. It all makes thing unnecessarily complex in my opinion.

As for your other argument about exploiting. People could indeed exploit restrict zones by making it a 1x1 zone. I could resolve this by setting the maximum number of animals allowed to the number of tiles in the zone. But I don't think I would even bother as I don't think the chance of exploiting is really a problem in a mod. If people want to exploit, there no way from stopping them, the could just install a cheat reactor to get unlimited energy (there's a mod for that), they could open the development console for a little help, and even in the existing giddy-up mod, they could exploit the configuration options in many situations.

[Canute]

Yes, when a player want the cheat/exploid noone can prevent him from this.
And most mods are cheats anyway, they made the life/handling for the player easyer then to give similar advanced to the raiders.

But if you can you don't need to force it, and you can try to balance it by your own design but only if you are able (codder quality) or if you want it.

Do you know the MARS mod from Dubwise ?
I special mean the EVA-suit station. Pawns can store their EVA suit in there, which the suit get recharged and the pawns auto. get adjusted zones so they don't move outside without suit.

Something similar for rideable animals.
Pawn mount an animal then they can interact with the stablebox to store the animal on it. The animal grafic appear then before the box.
XAAA   X = box,  A's = animal with different size.
XA
XAA
The stable-box need to be filled with food, then the animal auto. get rested and feeded slowly to max.
When the box get burned down, the animal is dead, like in real life. The problem is just how to handle animals from damaged boxes, does they should have reduced health ?

[Roolo]

Yes, when a player want the cheat/exploid noone can prevent him from this.
And most mods are cheats anyway, they made the life/handling for the player easyer then to give similar advanced to the raiders.

But if you can you don't need to force it, and you can try to balance it by your own design but only if you are able (codder quality) or if you want it.

Do you know the MARS mod from Dubwise ?
I special mean the EVA-suit station. Pawns can store their EVA suit in there, which the suit get recharged and the pawns auto. get adjusted zones so they don't move outside without suit.

Something similar for rideable animals.
Pawn mount an animal then they can interact with the stablebox to store the animal on it. The animal grafic appear then before the box.
XAAA   X = box,  A's = animal with different size.
XA
XAA
The stable-box need to be filled with food, then the animal auto. get rested and feeded slowly to max.
When the box get burned down, the animal is dead, like in real life. The problem is just how to handle animals from damaged boxes, does they should have reduced health ?

That's a pretty good solution to the problem of big animals, but I would still prefer just to implement it as zones as I don't see any disadvantages with that, especially when I would make sure people can't exploit it (by adding a maximum animal restriction dependent on how large the zone is), while I do still see disadvantages with the furniture/construction approach.

By the way, I even think it's possible to combine the ideas. Someone could create a nice looking stable implemented as furniture as a separate mod (even with the possibility to add food to it). If you place this furniture part on a "stable zone", you basically have what your want ^^, and even more, as non-Giddy-up users could also use it with regular restrict zones. 

[Canute]

Ok it is all to you, i just told you my ideas ! :-)

[Roolo]

Ok it is all to you, i just told you my ideas ! :-)

Sure, and that's appreciated

[Nekokon]

Most of the fun part of Rimworld (and a few other similar colony builder games like DF, Factorio or Oxygen not included) revolve around making creative solutions for our problems, thus I would prefer a more interactive way to deal with the stable. Just building a premade miracle feeding machine feels lazy and boring.

I'm seeing another potential problem with the idea of pawn getting on mount to get to somewhere else on the same map though. It might really hammer the game performance depend on how you're gonna implement the check, just like how we still can't have pawn check for things to haul before moving from 1 spot to another (we do have a mod for that, but performance is the main problem, not simply making it works). Imho, it's better to just limit mounting to warfare and caravan where it really shines, getting from 1 side of the map to another isn't something we do everyday anyway.

I have a few idea for abusing making use of those cute wags if you need some:
1. Wagon. Craftable item which, when used on a trained animal, would strap them (graphically) and increase hauling amount/weight but decrease movement speed. Maybe make it give timed hediff directly like the pulse artifact to avoid the surgery path, and respawn the artifact after the hediff ran out (let's pretend those animal shook off their shackles after a while).
You can also make one for pawn and dub it "cart".
2. Vehicles. Just craftable animal pawns. No food needed (or you can feed it chem fuel), no bleeding, no dmg, bigger size (to prevent wild animal hunting), always doing 1 single specified action "stay still" (to prevent "wandering" action) thus only "moveable" when a pawn mounts it, no berserk break (also prevent running around when catching fire). Good movement speed and carry weight.
3. This maybe hard to implement, but how about making your own fire dragon that actually breaths fire.
I'm assuming the way you make animal mountable was giving bonus to pawn, setting the animal to release so they can also attack if enemy gets into melee range and forcing the animal position overlap the pawn. If that's the case you can make an invisible friendly pawn (untargetable with some vehicle-type spec above so we can forget it exist) equipped with inferno cannon and force position overlapping your melee dragon. When there's enemy in range it will automatically fire at them (regardless of your actual dragon's action, but until Tynan release more codes it's the only way around giving friendly animal range attack). Reduce the weapon range to make them more realistic.

Regarding the sprite, I can help if needed. Artist MSPaint drawer by trade.

[Roolo]

Most of the fun part of Rimworld (and a few other similar colony builder games like DF, Factorio or Oxygen not included) revolve around making creative solutions for our problems, thus I would prefer a more interactive way to deal with the stable. Just building a premade miracle feeding machine feels lazy and boring.

I'm seeing another potential problem with the idea of pawn getting on mount to get to somewhere else on the same map though. It might really hammer the game performance depend on how you're gonna implement the check, just like how we still can't have pawn check for things to haul before moving from 1 spot to another (we do have a mod for that, but performance is the main problem, not simply making it works). Imho, it's better to just limit mounting to warfare and caravan where it really shines, getting from 1 side of the map to another isn't something we do everyday anyway.

I have a few idea for abusing making use of those cute wags if you need some:
1. Wagon. Craftable item which, when used on a trained animal, would strap them (graphically) and increase hauling amount/weight but decrease movement speed. Maybe make it give timed hediff directly like the pulse artifact to avoid the surgery path, and respawn the artifact after the hediff ran out (let's pretend those animal shook off their shackles after a while).
You can also make one for pawn and dub it "cart".
2. Vehicles. Just craftable animal pawns. No food needed (or you can feed it chem fuel), no bleeding, no dmg, bigger size (to prevent wild animal hunting), always doing 1 single specified action "stay still" (to prevent "wandering" action) thus only "moveable" when a pawn mounts it, no berserk break (also prevent running around when catching fire). Good movement speed and carry weight.
3. This maybe hard to implement, but how about making your own fire dragon that actually breaths fire.
I'm assuming the way you make animal mountable was giving bonus to pawn, setting the animal to release so they can also attack if enemy gets into melee range and forcing the animal position overlap the pawn. If that's the case you can make an invisible friendly pawn (untargetable with some vehicle-type spec above so we can forget it exist) equipped with inferno cannon and force position overlapping your melee dragon. When there's enemy in range it will automatically fire at them (regardless of your actual dragon's action, but until Tynan release more codes it's the only way around giving friendly animal range attack). Reduce the weapon range to make them more realistic.

Regarding the sprite, I can help if needed. Artist MSPaint drawer by trade.

Thanks for your advice and ideas.

As for the performance impact, I think if I implement it cleverly the impact can be minimal. One trick would be to perform the checks after a certain job is already designated, and replacing the job with a mount action if needed, and pick it up later. With the job target information that is available at that point, a check could be implemented so an animal is only searched for when the job target is far enough, minimizing any expensive pathing calculations. But this is all a bit premature, and I'll first focus on caravans and warfare. If that's done I might look further into the idea, as I think i can be quite interesting, and achievable.

As for your ideas
1. I would love to implement this at some point. It is not entirely within the scope of Giddy-up (this does depend on how its implemented exactly), but I think it can have a nice synergy with it. Especially in combination with the idea of letting pawns ride mounts to far-away targets.
2. Vehicles would be cool, but I prefer to focus first on all animal mounting aspects. Moreover, the creator of Yes Vehicles, seems to be working on a new version of that mod, so I'd first like to see how that turns out.
3. Also cool, but at this point I really love focusing on modding mechanics as opposed to creating content mods. This could change in the future though, so maybe I'll consider it in the future.

Edit: also thanks for the offer to help with sprites! Could definitely be helpful in the future, I'll keep you in mind.

[Nekokon]

Oh cool.
If you wanna focus more on mounting stuffs there's a few other ideas:
1. You can give abilities for rider after getting on mount.
Stuffs like Charge - boosting movement speed for 2s (you can teach the AI to use them when in set distance - x1.5 shooting range or something) or able to jump through walls (w/o roof) would be really fun to play with. Or heavy cavalry style - ability that moves mounted pawn in a straight line for a set distance (ignoring melee slow down) and push everything out of the way (like Rim of Darkness's psychic probe) with chance of stun. Raider can wreck some real havoc if they can use those abilities. 
Jesc's tools might help, and also there's dub's rimkit.
2. Make it possible to pack animal with items in any map without making a caravan and use them as a portable storage for extra ammo/medicine for drawn out fight/quick rescue. Currently you can do this in temporary map but cannot do it in your main colony for some reasons. There's already a movement and manipulation penalty for packing up stuff so you don't have to try to balance it again.

Btw just ignore those until you finish your caravan mod if you don't have time.

[Madman666]

2) This! You really should be able to make your guys pick some stuff in their inventory at all times, not just while a caravan exists. And of course that applies to animals as well. I don't how hard that can be to implement, but that would be an absolutely awesome addition.

[kubolek01]

2) This! You really should be able to make your guys pick some stuff in their inventory at all times, not just while a caravan exists. And of course that applies to animals as well. I don't how hard that can be to implement, but that would be an absolutely awesome addition.

Carrying everything you need to act even a mile off base... not too OP?

[SpaceDorf]

Thats exactly what I do when using Simple Side Arms.
Absolutely great.

Using animals for big construction projects would be awesome.

A trigger for using a pack animal could be, if the project needs more than one stack of material.
Instead of walking several times, the builder packs everything onto an animal and unpacks before the project ..
which in retrospect sound like quite the project .. maybe "hand me that brick" is the easier solution.

[Madman666]

Carrying everything you need to act even a mile off base... not too OP?

I don't think so. I mean, they already pocket meals all the damn time. They can pocket some drugs if you set it in drug policies. Not to mention, you can make them pick stuff up while forming caravans and cancel it before they move out of the map. So you can already have everything you need on hand, it just requires some weird micro first. Not to forget about weight restriction.

I guess it can be a bit OP if you stick several weapons in a person's inventory. But you still won't be able to switch fast enough or equip more than one for it to be effective. Thats why there is Simple Sidearms mod