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[Uristocrat]

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.

In practice, I never have more than, say, a dozen or so things that I actually butcher and maybe 4 butcher's shops.  What do you guys build?  Also, like I said, you zero them out every so often.  Doing it at season change would probably be the easiest way.  So all those crazy meat fractions wouldn't sit around forever.

And if you're still worried, make it global instead of per butcher's shop, just in case someone builds 80 butcher's shops and slaughters critters en masse to eat RAM or something.  I doubt you'd lose much FPS, though, except as a side-effect of having the meat fractions gobble RAM.  Just how many times per second are your dwarves slaughtering things?

It's the crazy things that trawl through the list of every job/item/creature or pathfind their way to one of those every few frames that are really slowing us down, after all.  And every increase to one of those lists multiplies the slowdown.  An object that doesn't technically exist for someone to haul shouldn't be much of a worry.

[Max White]

Well I the amount of butchers shops I use depends on how hunter happy I am feeling. Have a few hunters going out oftern and your going to need one or two full time butchers, and in some biomes they will produce a vast array of food types. Combine this with a reserve of interesting animals the elves bring, and using butchering to keep there numbers reasonable, and I normaly lose count of the types on meat I produce.

But you make a good point, the number of frames that nothing new is being butchered far outweigh the single frame that would calculate how much meat you get, so that calculation would go almost unused next to pass finding or cave in detection.

[Granite26]

Also remember that the meat 'fractions' aren't floating points, they are they are large ints.  Doesn't save you anything to make it a small int(shorts, otoh, but that's just silly).

IIRC, The reason the stacking with bolts is so bad is that bolts each contain manufacter data and quality and maker.  Meat doesn't have as much of that.  It would be entirely appropriate to have the freshness of a stack set to the oldest piece of meat in the stack.  (i.e. when combinijg two piles just use the older number.)

[NW_Kohaku]

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.

In practice, I never have more than, say, a dozen or so things that I actually butcher and maybe 4 butcher's shops.  What do you guys build?  Also, like I said, you zero them out every so often.  Doing it at season change would probably be the easiest way.  So all those crazy meat fractions wouldn't sit around forever.

And if you're still worried, make it global instead of per butcher's shop, just in case someone builds 80 butcher's shops and slaughters critters en masse to eat RAM or something.  I doubt you'd lose much FPS, though, except as a side-effect of having the meat fractions gobble RAM.  Just how many times per second are your dwarves slaughtering things?

It's the crazy things that trawl through the list of every job/item/creature or pathfind their way to one of those every few frames that are really slowing us down, after all.  And every increase to one of those lists multiplies the slowdown.  An object that doesn't technically exist for someone to haul shouldn't be much of a worry.

The problem with that is that you can't build a program for an "average" case, you have to build it for the worst possible case. 

What if someone wants to ensure that there are no random wandering creatures around, and so butchers the one domestic creature that individual migrants might bring, and also has hunters who kill dozens of different types of creatures.  And what if someone modded in hundreds of different kinds of creatures, which now glut your butcher's shops?

Maybe it would be a little odd to have your first bunny produce a meat, and then your next 30 produce nothing, but generally speaking, law of averages should produce results that are good enough for anyone not specifically watching every single animal they slaughter to track the exact amount of meat they produce until we can get in the system of having exact masses of meat.  If you're slaughtering bunnies, you probably are only looking at throwing a dozen at a time under the cleaver, and only caring about the average rate of return.

Also remember that the meat 'fractions' aren't floating points, they are they are large ints.  Doesn't save you anything to make it a small int(shorts, otoh, but that's just silly).

IIRC, The reason the stacking with bolts is so bad is that bolts each contain manufacter data and quality and maker.  Meat doesn't have as much of that.  It would be entirely appropriate to have the freshness of a stack set to the oldest piece of meat in the stack.  (i.e. when combinijg two piles just use the older number.)

What if you put your freshly prepared meats in a stack next to the meat one second away from going bad?  Then you get meat that rots just a couple seconds from when the animal died.

[Neowulf]

Have a single meat fraction counter per shop, when it reaches 1 make a Mystery Meat stack.

[Granite26]

I'm ok with losing the new meat too.  After it goes bad, no new meat will be added to the stack, so you're good there.  Worse case scenario is a large animal being added to the old dregs of tye previous animal, it rots and you lose the whole carcus.  Might want to find somethig to prevent that.

Long term, might want to add more catagories(fresh, normal, stale, bad) to help with this, but that's added code.

Short term... maybe a stack rule that limits the time difference?  Refuse to stack with items too close to an expiration date?  Early trashing for units less than 1 food?

You'd have to be doing something pretty squirrely to not be cooking the meat fast enough for this to be more than an occasional problem.

As an aside:  hauling even small animals is crazy slow.  Is butchering rabbits at all time efficient?

[NW_Kohaku]

Butchering rabbits provides nothing but a skull, so no, not really.  There's really no advantage to rabbits at all, except as a pet, and you better kill all the rabbits of one of the two genders or you'll hit pop cap right fast.

I kind of think that maybe a half-life system for meat might be a good way to go.  Instead of having a "going bad" timer, have some sort of food "freshness points".  Every some-odd number of frames, a certain percentage of the food loses a freshness point. Hit zero, and it rots.  Can be used for everything, just give longer-lasting food more fresh points and/or a lower percentage.  That way, not all food of the same sort created at the same time goes bad at the same time.

[Granite26]

I meant...

Even if butchering a rabbit gets you .1 meat every time, can you kill them fast enough to feed the butcher who is kiling them?

[NW_Kohaku]

If you put the cage right next to the butcher's shop, you should be able to drag them from the cage to the butcher's shop quickly enough, although I haven't payed too much attention to how long the butcher takes on a really small animal.  You only need 1 food per dwarf per 4-5,000 dwarven turns, so you'd have to go really slow or have really slim pickings in butchering to not make that kind of pace.

Also, something I just found out recently in another thread is that meat is calculated per body part and not by the total amount of meat on the entire animal, thus causing a 1900 size quadropedal animal to produce 2 meat, but a 2000 size quadropedal animal to produce 6.

[Granite26]

So maybe just adding in a stew meat catagory for the fractions and dumping the remainder would solve the problem

[penco]

Hey... didn't I make this suggestion in your Improved Farming thread?

[NW_Kohaku]

Hey... didn't I make this suggestion in your Improved Farming thread?

Ummm... *goes back to read what you had said in the Improved Farming thread*

I don't see anything like this relating to livestock.  The closest thing I see is when you were talking about making a percentage chance that plants not give you seeds as a way of making farming certain crops harder. 

These are two fairly different things.  This is trying to solve the problem that some creatures give no meat at all, ever, while that was about how to make the decision of what to farm more interesting.

[penco]

2) Rebalanced meat industry

Any change attempting to rebalance farming needs to be accompanied by a rebalance to the meat industry. The only product absolutely unique to the farm industry is booze, since clothing can come from leather/silk and food can come from meat/fish.

First of all, the meat yield of an animal should be based on a logical idea of how much a dwarf consumes. Since a dwarf eats twice per season, one piece of meat should be equal to half a season's worth of food. Therefore, a kitten should produce just a fraction of an edible piece of meat. The butcher's shop and fishery should be reworked to track these fractional meat amounts and then finally give you an edible piece of food after enough meat has accumulated.

So...

-a cow should produce maybe ONE piece of meat
-an elephant should produce 2-3 pieces of meat.

Hide yields should be reworked accordingly based on the size of a dwarf relative to the size of a creature. It should take 5 or so cat hides to produce 1 cat leather. Likewise, a single elephant hide should produce several elephant leathers.

This would make meat and fish MUCH more scarce and, as a result, MUCH more valuable. It makes sense both realistically and economically. I've always thought it dumb that a single elephant can basically feed a fort for a season.

Not exactly the same, but extremely similar. My idea was that butchering produces fractional meat/skin/bones, rather than what you suggested with the %chance.

No biggie though.

[Uristocrat]

Have a single meat fraction counter per shop, when it reaches 1 make a Mystery Meat stack.

Call it "Dwarven Sausage" and you get my vote   But yeah, that's better, I think, than having to keep track of all 8,000,000,000 meat types.

[Granite26]

Have a single meat fraction counter per shop, when it reaches 1 make a Mystery Meat stack.

Call it "Dwarven Sausage" and you get my vote   But yeah, that's better, I think, than having to keep track of all 8,000,000,000 meat types.

You are a disgrace to the name Urist