How do guests pathfind?

[bonobo]

I was so close to finishing my dream zoo! A large map just stuffed with stuff, with a wide spiralling path that leads to the centrepiece exhibits. Nearing the inner part of the spiral just before the centrepiece I ran into a problem. Guests are getting trapped in a corner! A hundred of them at least, and more and more as more guests find their way to the centre. They then get hungry, thirsty, crowded, exhausted, and eventually furious. The guests were even leaving the path to cram themselves into a little employee access area. I thought maybe they were going there to try to see the animals better or something and roped that off, but now they just crowd in that corner alongside the rope. There are also many little access areas in the zoo, but only this one has the issue, so it must not be that. This is really a problem! My zoo rating has dropped more than 10 points, from high 90s to mid 80s, and steadily declining as more people are sucked into the black hole. What on earth are they doing? Are they trying to find the shortest route back to the entrance or something? Attached are some pictures of this problem area (with the rope, and a few seconds after deleting it) and this area's location in the zoo. Excuse the sparseness, that part wasn't decorated yet! How can I avoid this problem in the future? Do I have to keep the path to a circular shape? How exactly do guests choose where to go?

 

 

[mrspiggy]

Hi,

 

On the one with the rope removed, there is not enough room for the guests to get around the foilage or walk through the openning. Some objects need a 2 tile distance between the item so guest will walk without causing problems. Also it's hard to use a path that is not in a straight line, a zigzag path causes guests to bunch up unless you have a wider path. If that makes any sense.

 

Delete the path in that back area try again this might help.

 

laura

[jbl89]

I had a similar issue.

 

My zoo was something could be described as something like this:

*________________________

x_______________________|
|_______________________
_______________________|

 

* = entrance

X = where guests got stuck.

 

It seem at some point, if they were in the zoo for a long time, or also quite often after a show; they wanted to leave the zoo as soon as possible. They seem to want to use the shortest path to the entrance/exit again. And they do wander around just a bit, but I think that ZT1 has some sort of method to check if they are getting too far from their "target" (going to the exit) again. At that point, they turn around, and walk right towards the "trap spot" again.

 

Not much one can do about this behavior I'm afraid.

[bonobo]

I guess they must not be able to walk away from their goal to reach it, looks like your issue is exactly the same. Circular zoos it is then, back to the drawing board! Time to bulldoze everything. Cheers, good to know!

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

I wonder, if you just removed one square off of each of those exhibits there at the 'bottleneck', if the guests wouldn't just flow out of there.

[bonobo]

Oh, they go in and out of it fine, they act like jbl described with walking to and from the 'trap spot'. The go in, circle the rock, go out, walk up the path a little way, then turn around and go back round the rock and up the other path. They still get stuck in that corner of path even when they can't get into the access bit with the rock! I think they'd be getting stuck there no matter what I put there, they're trying to take a shortcut to the exit and can't fathom walking away from the exit to get there. Doesn't matter too much now, I bulldozed everything and made them a nice square path that they can't possibly get lost on!

[pukkie]

i jad this in my christmas zoo they went in a corner where ther was absolytely nothing no idea why as ther was nothing there I wasn't even builing anything

but yeah it ruined my rating and prevented sending in a zoo that went majestically fine

[bonobo]

How irritating! Were you very far into building the zoo when you discovered your black hole, were you able to re-route everything or did you have to start from scratch?

 

Semi-related followup question: How do guests decide where to go? I redid my zoo as one big easy loop that guests can't get lost in and everything is going well, zoo rating slowly creeping up into the 90s (it was lower because half the animals have been sitting around in crates for a few years without food, understandable, haha) and then decided to follow one guest around the zoo to try to find any spots with few animals or restaurants or whatever other issues. I picked someone newly arriving and expected them to just walk around the loop of path seeing everything on the way, but they went left at the entrance to see one thing, then a fair bit to the right right to see another thing, then back left again, etc. What a time consuming way of doing things! No wonder they end up staying in the path for so long. How do they pick what to look at next? Do they just go to a random thing within 10 spaces that they haven't looked at yet, no matter what direction?

[Fern]

I thought Jay would word it better than me so........

I do not know how ZT makes decisions. That is inside the program itself. Randomness is involved to some degree, but I do not know how much. It also involves what is within a certain distance and in line of sight. The guest needs are also taken into account. But there are probably lots of things taken into account in the decision making. The zoo staff do not always do what is the most efficient, so it would not be surprising if what guests do also is not the most efficient. I do not know how animal attractiveness is used. For a guest's preferred animal, that makes a guest more happy when seeing one than when seeing some other animal.

- Jay

 

Guests needs consist of: hunger, thirst, bathroom, gift, tiredness (need bench, etc), fun

[jbl89]

I'd concur with Jay. I'm guessing it's mainly hardcoded - although I haven't explicitly searched for values in the .AI-files. If the line of sight is somewhere available to us, we might be able nowadays to get better guest rating. Don't forget that those limits were often in place for technical limitations or performance reasons. Some things are just programmed in a certain way (e.g. a byte is 0-255), others were just limited at a reasonable number (1000 guests) to make sure the game ran smoothly. But let's face it: after all those years, PC's have more RAM, better CPU.... I'm currently experimenting with a long time zoo [also the one where I had a "trap spot"], I've gone up to 1700 guests. No issues, except I needed to add more restaurants etc.

 

Marine Shows seem to be very bad for ratings, probably because they make guests too needy. I'm toying a bit with show intervals now. But it seems that after some time, they just want to get out of your zoo. I think ZT1 calculates the shortest route to the exit (this would explain all guests coming from far from the exit, following mainly the same path). Then, if guests deviate too much from it (perhaps it's also the same number as the line of sight, which seems to be around 15), they turn back.

 

And yeah, guests are stupid, wandering around from left to right to left again...

 

I'm sure, knowing what they know today, they would have done quite a lot a bit different back then.