Pet names retained?

[satomz]

Is it just me or do pets retain their names now?

[Mehtis]

If that is true, then all rangers can rejoice! No more Juvenile this and that! Except if you're super-lazy.

[Lady Rhonwyn]

That would be a nice bugfix indeed! I can't check though...

[BrettM]

I'm not seeing any change in behavior. I replaced my stalker (Amos) with another species, named the new pet, then brought back the stalker. The stalker was once again a juvenile with no name.

The system remembers exactly where we tame each pet. I can see that my whiptail came from Devourer's Mouth, my red moa from Chief Otyugh's camp, etc., etc. How hard would it be to remember the name we give it as well?

[raspberry jam]

I'm not seeing any change in behavior. I replaced my stalker (Amos) with another species, named the new pet, then brought back the stalker. The stalker was once again a juvenile with no name.

The system remembers exactly where we tame each pet. I can see that my whiptail came from Devourer's Mouth, my red moa from Chief Otyugh's camp, etc., etc. How hard would it be to remember the name we give it as well?

Storage space. A name string takes up 20 bytes or however much space you want to give the player, while the location where you tame a certain pet can be placed in just a couple of bits.

Also imagine if someone would call all their pets the same name. There would be confusion.

[shawn]

I guess this means Prettiest Pink Pony will have to never swap pets so he can always have Lush Lilac Leopard by his side.

Unless I charm a beautiful brown bear... Hmm. Dilemma.

[RD]

That's unfortunate. I wish this is something they would address. All my pets have different names, from Razor the fish, to Gak the jellyfish, Boo the bear, and Rawk the moa.

[shawn]

Pssh, the only proper name for a bear pet is Teddy Ruxpin.

[BrettM]

Storage space. A name string takes up 20 bytes or however much space you want to give the player, while the location where you tame a certain pet can be placed in just a couple of bits.

True, they do have to be careful about runaway storage needs. Yet, let's assume that there are 50 species (there aren't quite that many yet) and that a ranger collects them all and gives every one of them a max-length name of 20 characters so that little storage compression is possible. That works out to around 1K needed to store all 50 names, even if you allow a two-byte length prefix on top of each 20-character name. If the ranger is using names like Razor, Gak, Boo, and Rawk, then the storage needs are a great deal more modest than that. Now suppose you have 2,000,000 ranger characters all with 50 pets that have max-length names. You'd need a whole whopping 2G of disk space to hold all that info. Somehow I'm having a hard time seeing this as a problem.

[Alaris]

It's pretty easy to say "hey what's an extra byte" here and there, and before you know it you need a lot more storage space and bandwidth due to your lazy game design.

Generally, the space held is constant regardless of whether it's used... it speeds up information access and storage to have constant-sized things.