Hare

Thank you for the offer. What datatype can I use instead of INT? Here is a screenshot of the data for one rabbit's genetics. Each column has a number for the allele. And then we display the alleles as letters (which are specified in another table). I recently switched these over from CHAR. The images are rendered based on the genetics using imagemagick and are not stored in the database. It finds out whether a rabbit has Aa or aa (for example) with a code I INCLUDE. The genetics determine which layers are turned on, etc. No images stored in the database except for the layer pieces for each breed. The rabbit data has 74 columns per rabbit, most are INt but some are DECOMAL, DATE, CHAR, and VARCHAR. There are a few other tables with data associated with rabbits such as events, show results, and some other that take up some space. The rabbit table itself is only about 24 MB (used to be about 29 MB before I switched the genetics from CHAR to INT). The database as a whole is about 150 MB. We keep 2 backups of the site, one daily and one weekly. We lose about 1 Gb every 5-10k rabbits in the DB, though (when I check up on the disk space usage).

Thank you everyone for the advise. I have looked into many options and spent many hundreds of hours recoding the basic structure of the site and optimizing the database. I recently made another huge optimization. unfortunately, it's not enough. Right now, we have a thing called 'legacy accounts' that allows old players to keep thousands of rabbits because those were the site's original limits (I regret this now). I want to eliminate the legacy's, but it's too late. The staff and players say it will ruin the site if the legacy players are reduced to the normal limits (150 basic and 600 upgraded). The site can't handle this though. We lost about 1.5GB in the last few weeks from gaining 10k rabbits in the database. This means that it would take about 20 legacy account holders coming back online and having 1000 rabbits each to cause the site to crash from lack of disk space. It would take 200 basic players players the same if they have more like 100 each. I've done all I could. I can't seem to fix it, been trying to fix these space issues for ages. Most of the rabbit data is INT to save space and I keep as few backups as possible. Maybe there is something else I'm doing wrong, I don't know. I've hit a dead end with this site though. I love it dearly, but it's going to crash and die at this rate. A word of caution to anyone making a new site. Don't allow players to have thousands of animals before knowng how much space this takes up and having a longterm plan for your resources.

After working on my first game for 5 years (Leporidae), I wanted to try my hand at another game. This site is eggadopt.com and will focus on eggs and the creatures that hatch from them. I was inspired by the adoptables community, such as on deviantart, and people who collect images of their adoptables on their profiles. I envision them showing off the adoptables from eggadopt.com and actually having the eggs hatch and grow as they're being viewed and shared offsite. Here's the features it has done so far: - Eggs hatch and creatures level up with page views, even off site. You can post the image on a deviantart or other profile and they will level up as other people view your page. - You can see the name your gave your creature in the image. You can change their name any time, though I'm going to probably remove that for the Egg phase. - Thousands of variation in color and patterns are possible. You can tell what species an egg will hatch into, but color is a surprise. - Breeding system that allows offspring to inherit the colors and patterns of their parents. - Adoption center where you can drop off a creature or adopt one that someone else dropped off. - Basic features like registration, login, email/password changes, forums, private messages, site news, notification system, etc. Planned: - Improvements to the site layout, the sidebar is a mess right now. Also different layouts to choose from. The black one shown below is not going to be the final or default one. - More creature species, right now I'm just testing it with this wolf. Also more patterns for colors! - Battle system? (not sure how this will work yet). Looking for feedback! Any feedback, ideas, or criticisms are appreciated! I'm pretty unsure about some of this, not sure if it will launch, but it's shaping up so far and I look forward to getting more work done on it. Here's some previews of the wolf creature and the site so far:

I commissioned Pepper-Head for some artwork for my site. I was very impressed with the quality, the work is fantastic! Easy to work with and it was a pleasure to work with them, great experience.

Such a shame about those features not picking up speed. Thank you all for everything, though! I love that we have this forum and hope to see more activity pick up later.

We usually have about 5-10 online at any given time. Last I checked, there were about 150 'active' accounts. We don't make any money really, but sometimes it breaks even with the server costs.

Thank you, Digital! We've considered turning the genetics into a blob. We constantly view and update genetics, so that may not be an option. I can look into caching. And thank you for the info on Novilar's limits. I've been looking for any sites that have higher limits on allowed number of animals for basic players. I haven't found any that allow significantly more yet (i.e. in the thousands) but am still looking around.

Thank you everyone for the advice! We resolved the issue by removing starter money and binding starter items to the account holder. There is no longer incentive and we're not seeing multiple accounts like we used to. I also wrote an autoban script to help deal with obvious multiple account holders, and another script that brings up suspect accounts for the staff to look at. Staff can take notes and catch cheating quite easily now. I'm still considering DigitalOcean or other servers to host the database separately since we have other ongoing space issues.

How many animals do other sites usually allow players to have, and does the limit include offspring? How many offspring do they have? What kind of restrictions are on players and their number of animals? What techniques are used for coding and database for breeding games that save space? Leporidae (a rabbit breeding SIM) currently allows: - A regular player to hold up to 150 animals. - If upgraded, can hold up to 600 animals. Rabbits can breed every 3 days and have 2-12 offspring per litter. Limits include offspring, so if a regular player has 50 rabbits, they can breed about 10-20 of them. If they have 100, they can breed about 5-10. Players are requesting that we not include offspring in the limits. This would bring a regular player's animal count from the restricted 150 to 1000+ potentially. I considered making the offspring have 'temporary data' that takes up less space, but I'm not sure how to do that because they need to have genetics. The genetics take up a lot of space in our rabbit table. We store each allele as CHAR 5 because they can be things like A, cchd, En, etc. There's 36 alleles in total. We can't change it to integers without completely recoding most of the site. I know I've asked about space-related issues before. I've taken quite a few pieces of advise and am still considering others like hosting our database on a different server. But I'm really curious about animals in particular and common practices or obstacles that other games face.

Hi. I've worked on breeding and image generating code in PHP/MySQL. I haven't done anything like that with Javascript, but the concepts might be similar. You provide the genetics of each parent, it randomizes between the two, and then outputs a genotype for the offspring based on Mendelian law. Then we have another script that determines which genes are expressed based on a ladder of dominance for each allele. This part of the code assigns a name to each different type of expression. If A == agouti pattern and a == self, but A is dominant, then Aa expresses as agouti. The program then applies the agouti image and name.

Hello everyone! If anyone wants to add me on Discord, I could totally use some TGL buddies. =D Mine is: Lunar Eclipse#6934 If you want to hit me up to chat about art, code, development, or anything else, feel free.

Hi! Good to meet you! I was just thinking about making an 'in search of friends' thread myself =3 You sound nice, feel free to add me. Welcome to TGL!

That's what we do, too. We also have another table for shops and collections.

This is wonderful! Happy birthday to TGL! ^^ Thank you, Digital! And to all the forum goers, thank you too!

We have this on leporidae.org. I use PHP with Imagemagick and and a MySQL database. Feel free to message me if you need any info on how to implement it. When breeding, we get alleles from each parent and give 50/50 chance for offspring to inherit them. For mutations, maybe add a random chance to mutate. For displaying the color, we have an include file that orders alleles by dominance, that's where it determines expression. Imagemagick is easy to wrk with, so you do something like: if (A gene expresses as black) { change the base layer to black }

Thank you very much! This is great to know. I'll look around and learn more about it. =D

This is a good idea. I added a one month wait period recently for new accounts on sending money. Will definitely add the alerts list for staff, that should make the funneling issue much easier to deal with. Ooh, and I had no idea about having a database moved elsewhere. Do you recommend a service? Or does this type of database hosting have a special name I can look up to find one?

I agree and would like to remove this rule we have. It's a pain to police and there shouldn't be a problem with multiple accounts on the site. What drives users to create them should be removed. Most players on our game are creating multiple accounts for the starting money (I can see them funneling the money to their 'main' account. We tried changing the starting money amount many times and no matter what the amount is, this still happens quite often. I'm thinking of eliminating starting money altogether and just having a starter pack. The animals issue I'm not sure how to get around though. We allow each player to have a couple hundred animals and they can increase the number with an upgrade. We used to allow thousands of animals though and still had problems, some players would have 15k+ animals and it caused the server to crash (maxed out disc space) which is why we had to limit it. I've been optimizing the code and database as much as possible =D Dead animals don't have unnecessary data and are deleted after a while. Data that isn't necessary for every animal (such as whether an animal is neutered) has its own table, therefore reuding the amount of rows. Careful use of datatypes. Things like that. Images haven't been an issue though I've been meaning to add caching. We used to have issues with the aging cron, but I switched us over to a date aging system and no longer have any issues with queries/processes. So our only issue now is with data and disk usage. I've been trying to improve the staff features to make policing it easier, but it's still a lot of work that I feel could be spent on more important things that would improve the site.

Are multiple accounts allowed on your game? Not allowed? If so, why? If not, why? And what do you do to deal with them? I'm having a problem on my game. I would prefer if multiple accounts were allowed, but we need to be able to limit the number of animals each player has so the site doesn't break. Right now, players are allowed a set number of animals per account. We are getting a lot of people signing up multiple accounts, though. We are banning them accordingly, but the amount of work involved in banning people for this is ridiculous. Any suggestions? Or even if you don't have any advise for this, I'm interesting in hearing what everyone else thinks of the topic.

I have strong opinions but am always interested in hearing what others think. I've been involved in animal welfare and husbandry for many years and have entertained the possibility that breeding is abusive with deep concern despite the fact that I breed rabbits IRL for show. I would stop if I suspected there there was abuse involved, but with all the arguments I've looked into, research, debates, and experiences, I strongly support ethical breeding. When people benefit, so do animals. We love to be charitable and help animals, but symbiotic relationships creates an even more enriched life for many people and animals. Less people are bit or troubled by a frustrated animal who doesn't fit their lifestyle, working dogs have greater opportunities for homes where they won't get bored, and many other animals don't have to tough it out in the wild. Living in the wild is no Bambi-style Disney movie. Most animals don't survive past their first year. They're subjected to torturous deaths and disease. I'll never understand why some groups like PETA think that this is the ideal life for them. The more animals who have caring homes, the better. Most know PETA for killing animals so they can be 'free,' but what a lot of people don't know is that PETA is affiliated with a lot of smaller, less overtly extreme groups like the Humane Society of the United States, which uses less than 1% of its donations to find homes for animals and sends a lot of its donations PETA's way. There is an animal rights philosophy (see Peter Singer's book 'Animal Liberation'—basically PETA's Bible) that PETA and these other groups follow. It preaches that animals should have NO involvement with humans. No service animals, no pets, and no conservation. Ideally, the human race ought to go extinct because we are bad for the Earth. They have been pushing these ideas into the minds of the general public, their main focus is legislation and propoganda. They spread whatever misconceptions it takes, many of them being about breeders. Animal rights groups love to target breeders. It creates a villain, good for marketing and pushing a cause, and since breeders actually don't make much or any money (most of them lose money), they can't always fight back. They use shock videos to get their lies out to the public, one of which is that angora rabbits have the wool brutally torn out of them. This has caused angora wool to be taken off the market even though angora rabbits are some of the most well cared for. They have to be or they simply don't produce wool. The shock videos they had from China were an animal cruelty case, but not enough people knew about angora rabbits, so it turned into all an angora rabbits are tortured and anyone who raises them for wool is evil deal. There are definitely bad breeders out there, but far fewer than there are good ones, and there will be a whole lot more bad breeders and unwanted animals if all breeding is condemned. Here's why. 1) People would be getting animals with unexpected traits. A lot of people don't mind surprises and mix breeds, but the people who go to breeders are usually looking for specific traits to suit their lifestyle and needs. 2) Criminals breeding animals illegally to meet demand left behind after good breeders are banned will result in animals who are poorly bred, which has a detrimental effect on health and behavior because criminals don't care. Again, more animals being abandoned (health/behavioral issues are one of the leading causes of abandonment). 3) A lot of breeders do rescues. Some rescue more animals than they pet out. As for purebred animals, inbreeding isn't necessary to maintain a breed. The American Rabbit Breeder's Association allows crossbreeding and it has been wonderful for the rabbits and breeders alike. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck as far as their rules are concerned. People have entered crossbreeds into shows and won (though this usually requires moe generations). It's a matter of experience and knowing genetics. A problem I have is when a breed is designed to be deformed, though. In rabbits, Belgian Hares are supposed to have thin ankles so they look like elegant hares. The breed has joint problems in their ankles as a result. There are breeders who have noticed this though and are working to fix it, which is relatively simple and easy. As for 'forced' breeding, idk about that. Mr. Fluffbucket over here will breed to a pinecone if it's vaguely lady shaped. Animals don't take breeding seriously like people do. I assume in games when the player 'breeds,' that just means they put the animals together in the same room. To support animal welfare, I think it's better for animals to go after specific problems in the industry/hobby rather than throwing baby out with the bath water.

This is fantastic, I'm gouing through all these laws. Thank you for posting!

We have similar plans for Leporidae. My main concern right now is bug fixes, making the game more accessible to newbies, and preparing it to be a more finished game. We need to finish transitioning all of the breeds to the new layer system and adding Guinnea pig art.

Thank you chutkat c: These are still available if anyone's interested.

I wish I could contribute, but I can't commit to doing stuff on a regular basis. This looks so cool though! =D Best of luck to everyone!

Making pretty rainbow winged bunnies. Also have a generator for testing (doesn't require login) that'll show you different colors every refresh. It doesn't change the alleles, but randomizes the hidden modifiers that can change colors. http://leporidae.org/fpreview.php