~Online Cattery Kibble/Milk Distribution~

[Giuliana Verrazzano]

I enjoy breeding KittyCats. No, let me rephrase that... I LOVE breeding KittyCats.

One of the things I love the most and that I find appealing are the many different options available to achieve a goal. For instance, to Break Up a partnership by using a break Up Vitamin bottle or wait out the days until the partnership runs out. Or to heal an ill kitty with a Get Well or feed it throughout a whole week and then watch it derezz it's blanket, pillow and thermometer and dash off walking again. You have options to choose from and you are not bound to do it "this" way or "this other" if you simply don't want to. You are given options to play with and to choose whatever suits you better.

I've been breeding in world ever since I joined KittyCats, but I have used the Online Cattery in many occasions when due to RL obligations I cannot log in world. It's a simplified way of breeding, practical and straight forward. However I felt I preferred breeding in world where I had more visual aids that made my brain work through breeding projects faster and when handling a large amount of projects I really needed all the help I could get. The cattery offers all the possible features I can think of to give these same visual aids (like the access to a kitty's pedigree with 1 click) but my brain works differently and I could easily remember which pairs are rezzed where in my inworld cattery and which are the pair's OS as I have them rezzed underneath, I could remember this even when I was not in world. This is why I never adopted the Online Cattery System as "the" breeding system for me, until now:

After a maybe-not-so-long KittyCats breeding pause I decided to give the Cattery another run, as it is the kind of breeding that suits me right now due to RL restraints that prevent me from logging from my computer and to the fact that I have considerably downsized the number of breeders I keep at any given time. The Online cattery is a brilliant nifty way to keep projects going and to breed in a productive way if you're organized and if you can log in world every now and then to add K$ through your dock.

Ever since the cattery was released I found the limitation that all cats in the cattery will receive Kibble and if available, milk regardless of their Love stat. They will drink milk from the moment they turn 7 days old until their breed switches off when they turn 121 days old. When I breed in world I have the option to segregate my breeding projects in groups using the Automatic Feeder, I rezz a few mats here and there and I change the settings to provide milk to a selected group of my choice, making milk available to kitties within range of the mat or rezzed under a specific group. These options help me feel I have an organized system that helps me control my expenses and be able to continue breeding the way I like it, keeping a few personal projects and others that bring the "kibble to the bowl". The current Online Cattery System makes this segregation impossible, so more often than not, I end up feeding milk to cats at 100% love who are waiting for their partners to catch up or sometimes speeding up a kitty to reach 100% Love by using milk when I know it's partner won't make it that fast. This is not due to disorganization but to the fact that I often swap a kitty's partner to get a certain offspring or to have more chances to discover a hidden trait with another partner and then I might move that kitty back to it's old partner or to another. I do this very often while breeding starters to discover their hidden traits. This is just 1 example, Love stats can get out of sync for a myriad of reasons and at the moment, there are not as many options in the Online Cattery as there are in world to sync them.

If I could have the option to manually select which kitties receive milk it would really help a lot to have a more organized breeding in the Online Cattery and to make available the same options we have in world.

I won't even attempt to make suggestions on how to do it, or how to do it as I have no experience in web designing and I am not aware of the technical limitations, but even having a simple "Feed Milk On/Off" button that is "on" by default to avoid user error and leave us to manually select to turn it off would be very useful.

I have seen other threads requesting the option to be able to stop feeding specific cats (or all of them) in the Online Cattery so they can use it as storage for Kitties pending for permapet or simply those we do not want to part with. I think this request can be tended to in the same way as mine.

Thank you very much in advance for considering this request and I welcome the input from the Community on this matter.

Giuliana.

[Tad Carlucci]

It would be nice if this were done.

In the meantime, many of us use ALTs for this. It's a hassle logging in to SL just to pass cats back and forth, but it's the only way right now.

My suggestion is to add a column to the Cattery SQL database named 'Area'.

The user can change this on a cat-by-cat basis, for live cats in the Cattery, ONLY.

While it would be nice to be able to define our own areas, a selected list would do:

1) the default .. what we have now, only partnered cats breed, consume milk, consume food
2) open breeding .. non-partnered cats randomly select an eligible mate, consume milk, consume food (this models in-world, which Cattery lacks)
3) slow .. only partnered cats breed, consume food, do NOT consume milk
4) slow/open .. non-partnered cats randomly select an eligible mate, consume food, do NOT consume milk
5) holding .. only partnered cats breed (but this is probably meaningless since they won't due to hunger), do NOT consume milk, do NOT consume food.

I was going to think up cute names for each of these five areas, but my name-thinker-upper kathunked and stopped working.

Partnered cats must both be in the same area to produce a box. For events such are the special kitties we're currently running, this allows us to prepare for the event by separating partners (between 1 and 2, probably, or 3 and 4) so they're ready-to-go at the start of the event. It also allows us to prevent a box and force auto-renew partnerships to stop, without break-up juice, like we can in-world.

When sending in to the Cattery:
- Cats on Pet food would be placed in group 3 since they do not need milk and won't breed
- Perma-pets would be placed in group 5 since they do not need food or milk
- Cats which were in an area return to that same area
- All other cats (and Cattery-opened boxes) go to area 1, just as they do now.

Rollout considerations:
- consider moving pets to areas 3 and 5 at rollout to reduce workload for users with lots of pets.
- consider a time-limited offer, subscribed before rollout, to transfer an entire Cattey from one ALT to another. User must prove ownership of both avatars. No-transfer cats should not be moved.

User interface considerations (Cattery live cats and Cattery->SL pages; if possible, omit from Menagerie->SL page for oopsie bottles):
- New sort/select options for live cats to sort by area or show only one area
- New hover-button in cat info block to assign to a different area
- Pop-up to verify correct cat and select the area (drop-down SELECT list), OK/Cancel buttons.

Pedigree pages:
- new column on roster to show Area (add "in-world" for not-in-Cattery and 'Cattery" for boxes in Cattery)
- sort/select by Area on roster

PedigreeView pages:
- new field on info block to show area for owned cats. Can replace "Menageried" field.
- sort/select option for offspring, (add "not yours" and "menageried" for non-owned cats, plus "in-world" and "cattery" as on roster).

[Giuliana Verrazzano]

Thank you Tad for providing the technical side of things...

Now to hope for a positive outcome. Fingers (whiskers and paws too) crossed.

Giuliana.

[Inia Soulstar]

(06-15-2014 06:44 PM)Giuliana Verrazzano Wrote:  Thank you Tad for providing the technical side of things...

Now to hope for a positive outcome. Fingers (whiskers and paws too) crossed.

Giuliana.

Thanks Giuliana to bring this up again which I suggested similar thing more than a year ago in this thread.

http://kittycats.biz/forum/showthread.php?tid=7398

Hope that something can come up a better solution from KC team

[Giuliana Verrazzano]

Thank you Inia for posting this one!
I spent a bit of time surfing through the forums trying to find other threads where similar requests have been made. I knew I had seen a few but it was just a matter of spending time sorting out all the sales and advertising posts to get to these.

It seems to me that people just give up asking or sending feedback (even replying to the ones other users make) after they have requested for a similar feature and no response was ever given. I really hope I am wrong!

Here are the posts I have found:

Request for "Rooms in the Cattery" by Olgita Ruby on 04-17-2014
http://kittycats.biz/forum/showthread.ph...ht=cattery

A "Storage cattery tab for kitties" by Fuyutsuki Resident on 03-31-2014
http://kittycats.biz/forum/showthread.ph...ht=cattery

Request for "Project Teams in Online Cattery" by Julia Merosi on 10-27-2013
http://kittycats.biz/forum/showthread.ph...ht=cattery


These two other posts might not have a similar request but they can be met following the same suggestion on the first post:
http://kittycats.biz/forum/showthread.ph...ht=cattery
and
http://kittycats.biz/forum/showthread.ph...ht=cattery
Both posts by neckcadaver Resident

If you have made a similar post or have read one I missed, please feel free to add it as a reply.

Thank you