HGG Community Forums

When this game was created 20 years ago appaloosa was the most commonly used term to talk about horses with the LP gene. That's why "Appaloosa Project" whose goal was genetic research into LP, used it in their name. It's why PATN1 is still called Appaloosa Pattern-1 by UC Davis, and why so many scientific papers use the term.

As the world is becoming less US centric, the genetic discourse is moving away from using appaloosa as a color term and instead moving towards LP Spotted. It is time to start doing the same with the game.

I have two options for how to update the color naming system.

1) Name Swap
"Appaloosa" in the name becomes "LP Spotted". "Bay Appaloosa" becomes "Bay LP Spotted". This is the cleanest, most straight forward way to do this and I think will cause the least amount of confusion.

Note I will not be using Leopard Spotted because "leopard" is it's own pattern name and that will cause confusion.

2) Variant Names
We use names based on a horses LP and PATN1 status. Note this is likely to cause mislabels as the game can see the genetic code only but not what the actual image looks like. I think this will be more confusing in the long run for people but it is something that is possible to do.

LP/any -/- Bay Varnish or Bay Snowflake (non varnishing solid LP horses would also be called varnish)
LP/- PATN1/- Bay Blanket
LP/LP PATN1/- Bay Snowcap
LP/- PATN1/PATN1 Bay Leopard
LP/LP PATN1/PATN1 Bay Few Spot

Please let me know do you prefer option one or two.