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[NW_Kohaku]

Right now, butchering and slaughtering animals provides units of meat based upon a simple threshold value of muscle before you can get a single unit of meat.

With the addition of several animals, like rabbits, chickens, and others that are relatively small, many of these creatures are unfortunately not even large enough to produce a single unit of meat.  Likewise, meat is only available in an "integer form", how muscular an animal is only matters on larger animals like cows, since animals like goats have to cross an entire threshold value to get from 9 to 10 meat on slaughter. 

In order to fairly easily simulate a "fraction" of a meat, why not make a percentage chance for meat to be produced?  If something has 90% of the amount of muscle to produce a unit of meat, give it a 90% chance of producing a meat item, and if something has enough meat to produce 9.20 units of meat, make it give 9 units of meat with a 20% chance of an extra 1 meat.

This way, you can't get a full unit of meat from a rabbit, but butchering 20 should at least give you one or two.

Similar methods could be used for the other animal components, so that you'd eventually have a pile of some other things like rabbit intestines.

It would still be reasonable, of course, to have a threshold value before there are any materials that can be gathered, however, such as preventing dwarves from killing a fly and having a million-to-one chance of getting a prepared fly brains barrel.

[Granite26]

Meat = muscle = ropes = thread.

Just leverage the thread code to allow a cow to produce 4592 - 5768 'strands' of meat, where meat is used in units of 1000

[Max White]

NW_Kohaku idea is a lot better for a programmer, because it means Toady only need change the function that figures out and returns how much meat you get. For Granite26s idea, we need to change the nature of meat itself, a lot larger of a task. In theory, making this a probablity based thing should be a quick change.

Support.

[JohnieRWilkins]

Or maybe DF should start moving away from these silly values and just move on over to mass of meat, measured in the dwarven gammas. And that should apply to all things that can be clumped together physically in real life without affecting anything.

Clumping scepters together based on mass doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but doing it to jelly from the jelly blob monster makes perfect sense.

[Granite26]

NW_Kohaku idea is a lot better for a programmer, because it means Toady only need change the function that figures out and returns how much meat you get. For Granite26s idea, we need to change the nature of meat itself, a lot larger of a task. In theory, making this a probablity based thing should be a quick change.

Support.

I'd agree with you if there wasn't an established trend of moving to smaller units(thread, bars, etc)

[NW_Kohaku]

How strange, I find myself on the other end of the same argument as the Volume and Mass thread.

Well, having a volume-based measurement of meat is of course something I'd also support and even champion, being as I've already sort of done so, but the thing is that requires, as the opponents of such systems are keen to point out, a reworking of the stacking and hauling code. 

This suggestion is basically the quick-and-dirty method of having something functionally similar to a fraction of a meat without having to actually track a fraction of a butchery by product of a total of about a dozen potential animal by products that have to be tabulated on a per-animal basis.

IF we were to have the stacking and hauling rewrites as a prerequisite (seriously, Toady, we really need those for just about every suggestion I've been in for making DF more realistic), then such a thing wouldn't be such a problem, since they could just be thrown into a stockpile barrel to conglomerate into a pile of actually useable "whole numbers" of meat.

It all basically depends on whether Toady is going to do the stacking and hauling rewrites sooner rather than later that this would be a reasonable stopgap measure.

[Granite26]

fair enough.  We're also on exact opposite positions in the genetics discussion too.  I don't think the percent is a bad stop-gap by any means.

[Sowelu]

Anything that lets me use my precious cavys for meat is a good thing to me!

If I have to slaughter a hundred and one of them to make a single coat for a noble, then that's fine by me.

[Granite26]

Anything that lets me use my precious cavys for meat is a good thing to me!

If I have to slaughter a hundred and one of them to make a single coat for a noble, then that's fine by me.

That's what you said about elves too....

[NW_Kohaku]

Anything that lets me use my precious cavys for meat is a good thing to me!

If I have to slaughter a hundred and one of them to make a single coat for a noble, then that's fine by me.

That's what you said about elves too....

Wait, you get stuff for killing elves?  I thought we did it just for the exercise.

[Granite26]

Anything that lets me use my precious cavys for meat is a good thing to me!

If I have to slaughter a hundred and one of them to make a single coat for a noble, then that's fine by me.

That's what you said about elves too....

Wait, you get stuff for killing elves?  I thought we did it just for the exercise.

Shows how out of shape you are...

[Dutchling]

I think it's a good placeholder until we get more complicated volume/mass systems

[Max White]

I think it's a good placeholder until we get more complicated volume/mass systems

Yea, this pretty much. Reworking the entire system would take an arc, but what is suggested here in an afternoon job at most, if Toadys code was realy poory written and he had to run around changing a few things, rather then just the part that figures out how much meat you ger per unit of mass. To work meat into smaller units wouldn't be feasable by next release, this is.

[Uristocrat]

Why not make butcher's shops work the way smelters do with fractional bars of whatever?  That way, it would be more realistic that you butcher X rabbits to get a hunk of meat, rather than getting lucky with one rabbit and unlucky with the next.

Of course, unlike smelters, this fractional bit should probably get zeroed out every so often, due to the fact that meat wouldn't keep forever.

[Max White]

Why not make butcher's shops work the way smelters do with fractional bars of whatever?  That way, it would be more realistic that you butcher X rabbits to get a hunk of meat, rather than getting lucky with one rabbit and unlucky with the next.

Of course, unlike smelters, this fractional bit should probably get zeroed out every so often, due to the fact that meat wouldn't keep forever.

Well this would make for a great implmentation! My greatest worry is that there are only a few types of metals, compaired to the many types of meat. A single creature could have meat + a few prepaired organs, now times that by every creature in the game and that's a lot of potential meat fractions! Managing these meat fractions would cause a greater FPS drop then making a random estimate.

Of corse I don't know how much of a FPS drop, it could be negligable, and in that case this would make for a nicer way, but otherwise I'm not dropping my dwarf count just to make up for some extra meat.