Announcements

Announcement #35 by circlejourney • 29 November 2024

All fluffed up for winter

The new gene set is here!

Try the new genes in Chickrew | Get the splicers at the Eggschange

Chuffed body Puff comb Pompom tail

As part of this update, accessory positioning has been revamped! Relevant accessories will now reposition (and sometimes resize) based on the chicken's comb shape, body shape, and other features.

Announcement #34 by circlejourney • 18 November 2024

Hate math? No problem

Cluckulator, a breeding calculator

A screencap of the cluckulator interface showing a parent on the left, the desired offspring on the right, and possible colours for the second parent at the bottom.

I started writing a breeding guide, then realised I could help people skip the math by making a tool that does it for you. Use the Cluckulator to:

  • Calculate mate colours needed to produce the desired offspring colour
  • View the full range of offspring colour possibilities for a given pair

Feature is still being tested!

(Yes, I'm still on vacation! I just needed something relaxing to do while I recovering from walking too hard lol)

Announcement #33 by circlejourney • 13 November 2024

Dev on vacation—let's play a game [WORD FOUND]

16/11/2024 update: The answer has been found by @Azu! The gene name is Chuffed. GOOD WORK...everyone will be getting genes sometime on or after the 26th of November!


I will be on vacation until the 26th of November! Expect fewer updates (or even none). When I'm back, I'll be releasing 3 brand new feature genes. Here's the catch: I will only release them if someone correctly guesses the name of the new body gene before I'm back.

Hints:

  1. It's a real word.
  2. It starts with "ch". Surprise surprise.
  3. It has one syllable.

Guess in the comments of this announcement! I will let you know when the word has been found (there may be a delay though). If somehow no one's got it by the time I come back from vacation, I'll start adding hints.

Rules:

  1. One guess per person per UCT day. Keep it fun for everyone!
  2. It has to be the exact word and not 1-2 letters off—there's not a lot of one-syllable words starting with "ch" so you should get it via numbers alone!
Announcement #32 by circlejourney • 6 November 2024

Paging all ChickenPet users...

Pages are here! Every user can create up to 5 HTML/Markdown-formatted pages, linked directly from your profile. Chicken embeds, polls and user @ tags work there. Head over to your profile to create your first page.

As a side note, we will be opening the site to more users on 11/11 at 11am (make a wish...). There will also be an email-only open at an unspecified time before that.

Other recent changes:

  • The new icon in the top right corner is a link that takes you straight to your profile. It uses the first flair badge in your badge ribbon.
  • I've been fixing up nest hatching on the back-end, in an effort to deal with the pesky bug that causes eggs to lose their parents seemingly at random. I still have not figured out what is causing it, but I have tightened up the hatching mechanics, fingers crossed that that fixes it. please send a ticket if it happens to you.
  • Released chickens now show up with their ID number in lists of relatives, instead of their name.
Announcement #31 by circlejourney • 30 October 2024

It's Chook Spook Season 👻

Halloween is my favourite not-holiday!

New accessories

Cape
Horns
Veil

New filters

Penumbra
(darkens chicken)
Will-o'-the-wisp
(flame overlay)

Try them at the Dressing Room | Buy at the Eggschange


As a reminder (since the previous announcement wasn't up for very long), trades have changed: currency is now deducted when the carton is created! Read Announcement#30 for more information.

Other recent changes

  • Added forum search (check Forums to give it a spin)
  • There's now a Recent Threads feed that aggregates threads with recent activity from all forums from the past 24 hours.
  • Added guest block and notification badge toggles to Settings page
  • You can now reply threads without bumping them. Simply check the "Don't bump" checkbox.
Announcement #30 by circlejourney • 30 October 2024

New trade system

I just pulled the new trade system changes into the site after testing them for a few days!

Important: this update changes how trades work. Now, when you start a new trade or add a carton to a new trade, all currency (eggs, seed and chickets) will be deducted from your account immediately. This is to reduce the memory work needed to track every pending trade and keep your egg amount in your account above that until every trade is accepted (previously, a trade would simply fail with an alert if either member had insufficient funds to complete it).

Pre-existing trades have not been migrated to this system, and it will be noted in an alert above the trade if it has not been migrated yet.

This feature has been reasonably well tested, but there is nevertheless the possibility that something will break for you. If you lose any currency from a trade, please let me know in a ticket under the Refund Request category!


Other recent changes:

  • There is now a search box to start a trade with any user from you trades page.
  • Updated the Clucky Clicker script to block all clicking between when the previous round is solved until when the new batch of chicks is loaded. This hopefully prevents all the bugs associated with clicking during the load time.
  • The Toyhouse world is now linked in the footer!
  • Fixed the sanitiser to handle certain blocked elements without erroring out.
  • Debugged retrieving user's "next username change" timestamp on the settings page
  • Your chicken can now only pick up seeds from forests if stepping onto the forest tile cost you steps.
Announcement #29 by circlejourney • 26 October 2024

Welcome newcomers! Are you ready to be Famous

Hello to those who have just joined us! Let me welcome you with a classic ChickenPet experience...a new feature that will probably create bugs in parts of the site I forgot to check.

Wall of Fame

Show off your loreworthy chickens on the brand new Wall of Fame! Each user can feature one chicken, for any reason, be that because the chicken created site drama, has fun stories attached, or just because they're your fave and you want people to perceive them. The list is randomised every 10 minutes, so everyone gets their fair share of screentime.

I hope you (continue to) have fun on ChickenPet, and I can't wait to see what players do with this new feature!

Announcement #28 by circlejourney • 22 October 2024

Sepia filter changes

tl;dr: Sepia calculation has changed after it has emerged that Imagick's sepia function changes the white balance based on what colours the image has, leading to an inconsistent effect when different accessories are applied. The new Sepia algorithm is being tested with a brand new filter called Seepier!

Try it in the dressing room | Buy at the Eggschange

There has been a Situation with the Sepia filter. Thanks to some helpful bug reports, I have realised that Imagick's sepia transformations are applied differently for every chicken based on the image's white balance. The same chicken with slightly different accessories or a different flair colour can end up looking completely different with the same sepia filter applied (image 1).

I don't generally like that there are inconsistent colour transforms for the same filter, so the solution has been to write my own sepia tone algorithm, which applies the same colour transform regardless of the chicken's overall colours.

HOWEVER, this might mean that your currently Sepia'd chicken appears differently from how it did in the Dressing Room when you bought the filter. As such, for the next week (until 29th October), Sepia filters will resell directly from your inventory for the full purchase price. I hope that this helps, let me know if you have any feedback on the new Sepia appearance!

This new Sepia calculation has been added as the new Seepier filter! Thank you all for your patience!

Announcement #27 by circlejourney • 19 October 2024

All cooped up? Buy more space now!

As a couple of people have hit the coop limit, I've now added the option to:

  1. Buy more coop space starting at 800 eggs (increments of 800 for each successive expansion)
  2. Buy more roosts starting at 200 eggs each (increments of 200 for each successive roost)

Each coop expansion gets you room for 20 more chickens. Note that you can only buy more coop space if you have 5 free spaces or less in your coop!

Other recent changes:

  • In case you missed it, all flair badges can now have their colours customised, and only one Bias badge can be set now.
  • Added an actual bot role so my bot user @notabot can have a name icon.
  • Fixed blush 50px thumbnail rendering (if you noticed they weren't rendering blush in map sprites, this should be fixed now)
  • Invite-related notifications now get cleaned up when they expire.
Announcement #26 by circlejourney • 17 October 2024

A flair for decoration

Show off the outstanding chooks of your coop! You can now set customisable username flair (this link can also be found under your username dropdown). Select up to 5 chickens who have earned flair to display next to your name on your profile, forum posts, and comments. Take a look at the Flair page to see what flair you have available and which chickens are eligible.

Additionally supporters (people who have bought eggs) will also get the option to add an emoji-based flair badge to their names!

Other recent changes:

  • Under the hood, I have completely revamped chicken ordering. Most chicken select menus should now show you chickens in the following order: featured roost > unsorted roost > other roosts in sequence. If all went well, you should not see any changes other than the order of menus changing. But if you get 500 errors in random places where you're trying to view a list of chickens, it's probably because of this update—do let me know in a ticket.
  • I've built a system for generating smaller versions of chicken thumbnails. You should now see these smaller chicken images in Eggspedition as well as on flair badges. Hopefully this can reduce load time on these images.
  • Farmhouse listing descriptions now break words in the middle so that they don't overflow the card.
  • Poll results are now hidden from logged out users to prevent using it as a loophole to view the results.
Announcement #25 by circlejourney • 14 October 2024

Now, you too can make your chickens blush

These Cheek eyespots are technically the chicken's ear...but here on Chicken Dot Pet, we've dialed up the blushy energy. Because we can.

Try it in Chickrew | Buy splicer at the Eggschange

EDIT: there is now also a blush accessory! It is a very low opacity version of the blush gene. Try it in the Dressing Room | Buy at the Eggschange

Announcement #24 by circlejourney • 8 October 2024

Get your chicken ready for formal

Other updates

  • Nest prices have decreased to increments of 800 eggs. Everyone who has bought any nests will have received a refund on the difference. Check your notifications!
  • After many people accidentally double-clicked eggs leading to errors, I have updated the hatch routing so that clicking on an already-hatched egg instead sends you to the hatched chick.
  • Better error handling with egg hatching—if anything goes wrong during the hatching process, you just get sent back to the nest page with an error message, instead of removing the egg's parents. Will monitor for how well this fix works.
Announcement #23 by circlejourney • 5 October 2024

Rule the roost

Roosts, a.k.a. coop tabs, are here! This update adds the Roosts feature - these are tabs that you can organise chickens into! I have been working on this for a few days so I wanted to get it out of the way before addressing the other bugs. You can create roosts at https://chicken.pet/coop/roosts/create and then sort your chickens into them at the new and improved coop sorter.

This is a hefty and pretty complex update, so because of that and the fact that there have been a lot of puzzling bugs cropping up recently, I will now be taking about 5 days to attend to existing bugs before I resume adding any features - thanks for your patience.

Other important updates

  • Because of a slew of bugs with daily rewards, I have now added reward logging, and I have reset everyone's dailies so you can collect them again today. If you run into the bug where it says you've already claimed it, please do not send a full report (as it has already been reported a lot).
  • Daily reward claim button also now has a double-click guard, just to hopefully rule out any double-click-related errors.
  • The pullet pool now spawns chicks slightly faster. The reward for releasing to the pullet pool is now 30 eggs, and the general release reward is now 25 - 40 eggs.

I will now be taking about 5 days to attend to existing bugs before I resume adding any features - thanks for your patience!

Announcement #22 by circlejourney • 30 September 2024

Forever 2.1

A filter that makes the chicken appear as a chick.

Try it at the Dressing Room | Buy it at the Eggschange

This filter has mechanical effects besides altering the chicken's appearance:

  • The chicken wearing the filter cannot be bred.
  • The filter can't be applied to any chicken that currently has a nest egg.
  • You can't equip non-chick accessories on it.
  • If it has any existing accessories that chicks can't wear, those will not be displayed. They can be removed from the chicken on the Customise page.

As an aside, I have also changed the pullet pool and farmhouse to generate new chicks at 1am and 1pm (and half as many each time) instead of all at 1am.

Announcement #21 by circlejourney • 28 September 2024

Welcome new members + map overhauls

Welcome all! We now have 100 members on ChickenPet tada emoji

You may have noticed that the Eggspedition maps have gotten...really crowded. So I've introduced a few changes:

  • Two new maps: Northeast Town and Northeast Outskirts!
  • New Forest tiles. They cost 2 steps and feed chickens that walk on them.
  • Inactive chickens (>3 days since last activity) are now temporarily hidden from the map.
  • When a fed chicken steps on a feeding tile, you receive the seed to your inbox instead.
  • Eggspedition rewards now update every 5 minutes (instead of 3).