Amaikokonut and CAs

Recently Amaikokonut over at Naturing::Nurturing did a couple of posts covering CAs in Creatures 3 and Docking Station, including how they work and how to create them for 3rd party rooms and agents.

For anyone creating addons, or just wanting to understand how their Creatures navigate the world I cannot even begin to express how important this is. Watching a Norn starve to death despite there being a hoard of apples a quick lift ride away is incredibly frustrating. As I'm constantly trying to find ways to get Norns to migrate around the world, this has been a bane to me for years.

But, thankfully that can now be a thing of the past! This article assist future developers in creating more accessible rooms and agents. You can read the article here:

http://naturingnurturing.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/cas-and-you.html

This information is so vital to the well being of your Norns, I think I'll be putting a permanent link somewhere on my blog so people can find it long into the future.

But amazingly, that's not all! Anyone familiar with Amaikokonut's work will have heard of 'Magic Words', essentially a list of commands the Hand can 'speak' into the game. Well, she's added commands to the Magic Words agent that allows you to manipulate the world. This mean that any 3rd party rooms that don't have correctly set up CAs can now be manually edited in game to work correctly!

I've already started editing my C2toDS world and the Norns have instantly started navigating to the top floor for apples and to the lower floor for a feed of seeds. I've been so frustrated with my Norns for ages, trying to get them to move about the world in an intelligent way and much to my amazement they're actually pretty darn good at it when the room is set up right.

The Magic Words addon can be found here:

http://naturingnurturing.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/magic-words-room-edits.html?showComment=1337416824827#c5780797895292512610

I'd also suggest learning some of the basic CAOS commands in the first article (CAs and you). For example:

outv prop grap mopx mopy #
-Where the "#" is a number from 0-19.

Will allow you to see how much of a particular CA is present in a room. This was particularly useful as I've found the cheese in C2toDS doesn't emit a protein smell, meaning the Norns can't find it unless it's in front of their face!

A full list of the CAs can be found here:

http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Cellular_Automata

Again I can't emphasise just how important an understanding of CAs is to developers. If you want Creatures to be able to navigate your rooms, or be able to sniff out food items you create you NEED to include this code.

Seeing this stuff in action has got me extremely excited. I for one, am off to try and create a C2toDS world where my Norns can successfully navigate from one corner to the other.