Creatures Community Chat

Thursday, December 16, 2010

I have a dream...

Or more accurately had a dream.

I woke up this morning very abruptly and it took me a brief moment to figure out where I was. This was because I was having such a lovely dream where someone had come along and made a massive update to Creatures3/Docking Station and I'd been having a great deal of enjoyment playing it. Can you imagine my disappointment when I realised I'd just woken up :(

Now obviously this is just a dream (both in the sense I was sleeping and the fact it'll never happen), but that doesn't mean there isn't some stuff we can learn from it! So here's a couple of things I remember from my dream. Sadly I don't think it is everything, but I've got a few good ideas from it.

The Norns were all using teleporters and doors with ease. They were able to traverse all areas of the ship and seemed a great deal happier for the ability. I've always hated it how my Norns get stuck in crowded areas with a teleporter at their feet and never use it. I vote for Norns being able to use teleporters just as easily as they use doors now.

There were certain foods that actually changed the Norns appearance. Now in my dream these were rather significant changes and I don't think this would be a great idea ingame. That said, I'd definitely push for foods similar to C1&2 where plant types had a much great impact on a Norns health, perhaps even granting them temporary abilities.

A new rock based species. This Norn kind of had a bolderlike head, with insect or fly eyes. Again, not necessarily something I'd specifically implement, but a greater variety of species with specialised genetics (rock-Norns could have tougher skin making them resistant to heat and Grendel attacks) would be great.

At one point I saw a cross breed Norn sneeze and it shot a small gust of fire out it's nose. I instantly knew (in the way you can only know in dreams) that this was a Magma-Norn. Some specialise traits and animations for specialised species would be kind of novel.

Norns and Grendels actively battling each other. Admittedly this fight scene of my dream was a little too Pokemon for my liking, but more specific fights which are more combative than random slaps and Norns running away aimlessly would be pretty cool.

The final (and I think most interesting) part of my dream happened just before I awoke. This was a look at a whole heap of new CHAOS commands that had been added to the game for players to customise for new species. Sadly, although the list was quite massive I only got a look at one of the new pieces of code before waking up. It was something like:

if (allDead in radius X) then do Y

Which for those of you who are not programmers was a new command directed at Grendels that encourages them to kill all the Norns within a particular distance to receive some kind of benefit, presumably an increase in happiness or something similar.

Now I don't even know if this kind of command could be implemented with the way creatures brains and CHAOS code is currently set up, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does. Perhaps with a little outside of the box thinking we could come up with some unique new characteristics for current C3/DS creatures?

So has anyone else had some interesting Creatures dreams? I'd love to hear about them.

2 comments:

  1. Pirate-rob: Thats slightly creepy as i was also thinking it would be great if C3 got a huge update and I had thought of rock grendels before. And the bit you said about the new CAOS commands, as far as i know that is what OpenC2E is based upon: creating new commands for creatures(they first have to make the old ones though).

    But i think it is possible to make an artificial stimulus using codes:

    enum 4 0 0
    setv va00 posx
    setv va01 posy
    setv va02 targ
    targ ownr
    mvto va00 va01
    esee 4 0 0
    doif targ = dead
    targ va02
    chem # 1
    next
    next

    (I wrote this code on the spot so it might not be perfect)This code (as far as i know) will give a norn a chemical whenever it is near a dead norn.

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  2. Ah thanks for that. I'd never quite rapped my head around what OpenC2E was for, but that makes things a lot more interesting.

    And thanks for the code. I doubt I'll do anything with it, but hopefully it can inspire some others for future breeds.

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