Thursday 9 May 2013

COB Variations

Hello Creatures universe! My apologies for being gone for so long; I've been a little busy with school and work and various other aspects of life. Today I have some COB variations for you, as I've had some requests for alterations.

These versions will be posted here on my Blog, (but not my COB website) as they are modified from their original, intended versions, and I don't want to clutter up the main site with too many different options! If you would prefer to use these versions over the old ones, please remember to remove the existing COBs from your game beforehand to avoid any conflicts.

The first is an anti-ugly tomato version of Muggy. He operates exactly the same as the old Muggy, but the ugly tomato has been removed from the list of foods he can dig up. The reason for this request is that as the ugly tomato is classified as a weed, it can be problematic to allow creatures to eat it.

You can download this version of Muggy right here.



My second update is for the three flowers COBs I've made. Normally, only the player can click on the plants to drop flowers, and not the Creatures. This was done intentionally, as I found that generally the Creatures in my Worlds would click on the plants over and over again and never eat the flowers, and just clutter up the garden. This generally happens because the Creatures cannot connect the actions of "pushing an object" and "creating an object". They don't realize that after clicking the plant, a new object is created in the world which they can eat. The Creatures will try to eat the actual flower stalk instead, over and over and over again.











Objects like carrots have mechanisms in place to prevent cluttering. Even if the carrot is removed from the garden, a new one will not grow in its place until the old one is eaten. My flowers do not use this mechanism, as unlike carrots, once clicked on, new objects are added into the world which prevents me from using this type of mechanic.

To be fair, most Creatures are pretty good at not ruining your game, but sometimes you get some that just go "push happy" and muck things up all over the place. Since the game crashes once too many objects are detected in the world, the original design disabled Creature interaction as a fail-safe to ensure that too many objects were not created without player consent, and to prevent confusion for Creatures that try to "eat" the plants.

However! Who am I to tell you how to play your game? Here are the Creature-enabled versions of all three of my plants. They work otherwise the same, just Creatures can click on the flowers as well.


Download Happy Pink Flowers here.

Download Bliumea here.

Download Rodirea here.





In other news! As I will have some free time this Summer, I plan to get back to Cobbing for C1. My first plans are to create more food, (of course) that work more like carrots so that Creatures can pick them up and eat them on their own.

These baby deathcap sprites were originally just placeholders, but I am finding that they are growing on me. (No pun intended.)



Oh, I also received news that one of my COBs may have caused a script error and a game crash. I tested my COBs and was unable to recreate any issues myself. If anyone has encountered any errors with my COBs, please report them here!

3 comments:

  1. It's nice to see you around again. :)

    Do the default versions of the flowers give any stimulus to the creatures who push them? If not, they probably should - aids learning.

    Or, alternatively, you could make the flowers act like the default C1 plants do - a creature who pushes them bites the flower right off the plant, for the same effect as giving them a flower the hand got off the plant.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you :)

      The default flowers do not give any stimulus when pushed, as the action of being pushed by the Creature is disabled so it is my understanding that they would never receive the stimulus anyways even if they tried. (Or is this incorrect? I know they try to push things sometimes even if the script disallows the object to be pushed).

      I like the idea you've suggested for the flowers, and had thought about it myself actually. I just did some research and figured out how to write a doif command to determine whether the action was from a Creature or the user, so that's definitely a possibility as well. (This is one of those things you wish you knew about earlier.) I'll test this out tomorrow :)

      My other thought was to allow Creatures to "pull" the plant to eat it, and disable the push action for them, but I find that messes with Creature learning.

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  2. Awesome, Jessi! Thank you for these! I usually keep a close watch over my Norns and Grendels, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and allow them to pluck the flowers themselves. We'll see if that's a bad decision in the long run... Ha ha!

    I've noticed that my Creatures tend to try to interact with the default flowers, but I'm not sure if they're pushing/pulling or just reaching out and not actually performing an action. The idea of having a Creature bite off the flowers directly, rather than having the flower fall to the ground, could also be a good idea! I didn't know objects could have different commands based on whether a Creature or the hand interacted with it: Could be quite useful!

    Thank you for these updates: I'll be interested to see if you can implement the direct eating. As always, great job with everything, and I look forward to more releases from you this summer!

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