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[Craftling]

Cows, dogs, cats etc. should have different breeds with their own respective attributes.
E.g. a rottweiler would be better war dog than a fox terrier but the fox terrier would be a better guard dog than the rottweiler. An alaskan malamute would give more meat than a fox terrier.
A freisan cow would give more milk than a jersey but the jersey would give more meat.

[Impaler[WrG]]

We can already add more animals and presumably we could mod in a dog called rottweiler and make it faster with a bigger bite (but a quieter bark) but they wouldn't be able to breed with other dogs.  Theirs been a lot of discussion about inter-species breeding mostly with respect to Half-elves, Half-orcs, Half-Tentacle demons etc etc, but most of these hybrids will be sterile ware as 'breeds' are always fertile with each other. 

But this presents a lot of potential complexity with respect to mixing and blending of traits so I recommend they be completely avoided, when ever two breeds of an animal reproduce each resulting offspring has a 50/50 chance of being of the breed of each parent.  Thus we won't have any rotterrier or fox weiler's or any other stuff.

That being said, the ability to specifically 'breed' an animal to create something new.  At the very least I would allow an Animal Trainer to create an instance of breed that's defined in the raws from parents of a different breed, example two rottweiler's producing a fox terrier.  It would be a long process but would allow you get the breeds you want.  Actually mixing attributes and creating a new breed that's far more complex.

BTW: Milking needs to be fixed first but it would be a nice idea for milk production to be variable, probably by adding a value that would reflect the 'cool down' time necessary for the animal to be milk able again.

[Mel_Vixen]

I advise to read this Post of toady one and the 3 or 4 following pages of the thread.

Also the devlogs from the 11/12.Jan.2009 might interest you:

•            01/12/2009: 852. Finished up the inheritence I was working on yesterday. Right now it'll do dominant-recessive stuff with the color variables, and it can also do that with the appearance variables or do averaging. It's pretty simple at this point, but what's there now could be used to, say, breed your dogs toward certain colors and body dimensions, as well as whatever facial features there end up being (though the colors and patterns would be limited to whatever is in the raws). Of course, the process might involve a lot of culls as there aren't a lot of controls on which animals breed.
             
  I also handled the starting "wounds" for skeletons and zombies, wound pain (so the original goal which initiated the wound/layer rewrite, getting rid of phantom limb pain and other annoying permanent pain situations, has been met), sever stub wounds, and some edge cases concerning parts melting off leaving other parts that need to become severed limbs and so on.
•            01/11/2009: 856. Took a break from wounds today to add "genetic" inheritence for appearance variables. The day ended with some kinks left to be worked out, though I've come a long way from where I was this morning with nobody having kids and all the gods dying of old age.

[Sensei]

Why not just making a [BREEDING_CLASS:X] Raw, similar to ammo?

If this is added, then the species can breed amongst itself (default) AND with other creatures in that section. So you program terriers and rottweilers separately, but give them both [BREEDING_CLASS:DOG], for example.

[chucks]

Mastiffs, pit bulls (the oldest, most famous mutt breed of the western world), larger terriers, spitz, pointers, hounds, collies, retrievers.

Crossbreeding is easy.  The offspring of two parents of the same breed stays the breed.  The offspring of two parents of different breed purebreds is a mutt.

If two mutts are bred and they share a common breed ancestry, there is a slight chance that the offspring can revert to a previous mutually shared pure breed.  If a mutt has offspring with a purebred dog of a breed that mutt descended from, there's a slight chance the offspring reverts to the pure breed again.

If attributes such as size and mass and strength and aggression come into play but are independent of breedings, you could wind up with a 120-140 lb teacut poodle at some point.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Not completely silly, either, since poodles are some of the smartest dogs in the world. They were bred as water-dogs, for hunting, originally.

A poodle that big could be the perfect anti-carp device.

[Fossaman]

A poodle that big could be the perfect anti-carp device.

The idea of armor-clad dwarves shouting commands to fluffy poodles which fight monster fish is absolutely brilliant. I want this.

Anyway, yeah, sounds like Toady's on top of this one. All we need now is spay/neutering at the kennels and some way to view each animal's traits.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Crossbreeding is easy.  The offspring of two parents of the same breed stays the breed.  The offspring of two parents of different breed purebreds is a mutt.

If two mutts are bred and they share a common breed ancestry, there is a slight chance that the offspring can revert to a previous mutually shared pure breed.  If a mutt has offspring with a purebred dog of a breed that mutt descended from, there's a slight chance the offspring reverts to the pure breed again.

If attributes such as size and mass and strength and aggression come into play but are independent of breedings, you could wind up with a 120-140 lb teacut poodle at some point.

Far too complex, you haven't defined what will characterize a 'mutt', will every creature which has breeds defined for it require a 'mutt' definition?  If the mutt is defined with 'average' characteristics and I cross two breeds that both have a characteristic in-common yet which is deviant from average how dose it make sense for offspring to fail to reflect their parents in-common characteristics?  Spontaneous re-appearance of breeds from mutts requires each individual to contain some kind of heredity information adding more complexity at the code level, furthermore will the player get to see this data or will it be an annoying mystery?  It all sounds soooo over complicated.

[Silverionmox]

I prefer the annoying mystery , but the outward characteristics should be fairly straightforwardly linked with the genetics, so you can easily breed by selecting the right stock.

[SirHoneyBadger]

It may seem overly complicated (my purpose in this post isn't assessing it, however, so I'm not doing that here), but that's one good reason that we post ideas to the board: It gives the originator the opportunity to not only have ideas discussed, but also improved upon.

It's not easy, posting ideas publically, and opening yourself to criticism, or just plain rejection. It's a brave thing to do.

So if an idea is too messy, then it's our job to help clean it up, and whenever we can, if it's possible for an idea to do so, to do whatever is necessary to help it thrive. The payoff for us being the possibility that we might get a better game out of it--if not this idea, specifically, maybe an idea that's spawned from talking about why it is or isn't something that could be good for the game.

[chucks]

Far too complex, you haven't defined what will characterize a 'mutt', will every creature which has breeds defined for it require a 'mutt' definition?  If the mutt is defined with 'average' characteristics and I cross two breeds that both have a characteristic in-common yet which is deviant from average how dose it make sense for offspring to fail to reflect their parents in-common characteristics?  Spontaneous re-appearance of breeds from mutts requires each individual to contain some kind of heredity information adding more complexity at the code level, furthermore will the player get to see this data or will it be an annoying mystery?

You misinterpretted what I wrote, and I think you entirely skipped the last line of what I wrote:

If attributes such as size and mass and strength and aggression come into play but are independent of breedings, you could wind up with a 120-140 lb teacut poodle at some point.

I was saying that hereditary characteristics are passed to offspring independent of breeding.  If you have two different large breed dogs reproduce, you wind up with a large mutt dog as offspring.  If you have two different small breed dogs reproduce, you should wind up with a small dog.

The breed is just a tag, and my suggestion for the re-appearance of breeds is to keep the world from exclusively being populated by mutts after a certain point in time.

There's no reason to define mutts in the raws, because their characteristics would be derived from their parents characterics.  I think that just having a mutt breed automagically generated by the game for creatures with breeds is sufficient.

As for individuals carrying hereditary information, I believe that this is a development goal (can't find it in the devlogs or notes ATM), so carrying information about ancestors is a logical extension to that.  Memory size needed to store hereditary information can be kept to a minimum by defining a MAX_GENETIC_GENERATIONS to some limit will keep creatures from killing the game engine with too much information.

The player shouldn't have access to a creatures genotypes, only phenotypes and known past breeding.  If you find a mutt wandering in the forest and tame it, you have no idea what it's ancestry is.  However, if you have a mutt that was bred from your purebred poodle and your purebred cockerspaniel, you should be able to access your dwarf's knowledge of the animal's ancestry.

As for re-appearnce of breeds, this does occur in nature.  There are a few modern breeds of dogs that were artificially recreated by man through crossbreeding for selective characteristics.  The Keeshonden is one dog that was lost and later recreated through creating breeding.

It all sounds soooo over complicated.

This is Dwarf Fortress.  Expect complexity, hidden or not.

True representation of genetics and breeding is impossible to fully capture in a game (and the game wouldn't be fun if it was too real), so little tricks and game mechanics like this are necessary to simulate real-world processes without too closely simulating every mathematical equation that governs the real world processes.

[jaked122]

I'm going to breed Chihuahua war dogs.

goblin cancels gut dwarf, nipped by tiny dog.

[Fossaman]

I wonder if Toady will add consequences for inbreeding. It seems like something that wouldn't be too difficult to keep track of, and it would add some extra challenge.

[alfie275]

So basically a tag in a 'caste' of an animal that says what its pairs of parent breeds are?

[Sunday]

Another option would be to have several different scales (aggressiveness, curliness of fur, length of fur, bark loudness, size, strength, etc.), with different levels on each scale representing a breed.  You could even randomize the levels required and get totally random dog breeds.  This way we could have fantasy breeds unique to each fantasy world.

There could be a short-furred, straight-furred, aggressive, loud bark, small, strong (terrier analog) called a Crabwalker.  Or something like that.

Man, I didn't sleep much last night.  Is that reasonably articulate?