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 Bifrost  |
I like it! Hopefully, I'll have the map updated with your additions some time tomorrow. |
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 Geat_Masta |
Yeah it would be drawn without the parts that sway in the wind. I like it too! |
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 Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla  |
You could have the water from the geysers form a stream all the way to the left of the mountain, through the mountain city, lower the swamp a little more, and have some kind of waterfall near the swamp that hides the entrance to the mushroom cave. like this  I'm glad you guys like it.  - Also, critique all you like. Can't improve if there are no critiques. <3 Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Bifrost |
 Are we getting closer to home? |
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Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla |
Looking good! It might be a good idea to connect the underwater area and the root area, so the water of the geysers seep through the roots and make for a drizzling waterfall thing inside the root area. There could be some kind of 'plug' between the underwater area and the root area that, when pulled, would put the root area completely under water. I'm also thinking about the crypt, maybe it would be more interesting to just have an outdoor graveyard in/near the swamp instead of a crypt? Where the ghosts of some of your deceased kreatures appear at midnight and scare the crap out of those who are still alive. GM wanted less underground area and more open spaces, so maybe the root area would look better with just 2 levels? I added a picture for clarification for the root/underwater area :p  Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Bifrost |
I'm not quite sure what happened between the underwater area and the root area. I had planned to connect them with a waterfall down into the pond. Somehow it missed the cut. I'll get it in there. I like the idea of a plug! I want to keep all levels in the root cave, though. Swamp graveyard! I love it! The Bone Marshes! Looking at the background now makes me believe that it was the Daoine spacecraft crash that wiped out the kritters, leaving us with only a few eggs... |
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Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla |
Yay! Also, since GM wanted some room with 'artifical' gravity, I was thinking that the spaceship could have a (broken) gravity engine. When you repair the spaceship to use the advanced functions, the spaceship gravity engine starts working again, and you would be able to walk along the walls in the spaceship. Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Geat_Masta |
IP Lawyer wrote: Looking over the documents, I'm not seeing any relationship between the patents and creatures, I'm starting to wonder if cyberlife didn't take out any patents at all. But the trademark cyberlife is up for grabs! Possibly related: patent 8650253 patent 7983895 patent 8554526 The creatures trademark is available in America, but not the EU. |
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Geat_Masta |
Steve grand confirms there are no patents on the Alife subsystems! |
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Bifrost |
The subsystems being genetics, brains and chemicals, right? |
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Geat_Masta |
@bifrost correct |
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Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla |
So um, maybe we could talk about the ecosystem. I would love to make some concept sketches of some details and some areas but I don't know what ecosystem we will have. Are we gonna have earthlike plants? Trees that look like... trees? Or a completely fictional ecosystem with completely fictional plants? Would there be a specific color scheme for the plants? For the earth? What is the planet made of? Will the mushrooms look like mushrooms, or something... else? Mushroom-ish but with pretty colors and light effects? Blacklight? Fluo? What kind of critters and flying and swimming creatures will there be? And the skeletons for the graveyard/swamp/skeleton pathway thing? Any ideas?  Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Geat_Masta |
@pearldragoneess The purpose of the mushroom cave is that it's like a forest, but there's no light source. So that's a completely fictional ecosystem. |
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 Merboy |
Aw, so I shall stop working on my crypt/underground castle thing? Otay. I am very interested in hearing about the dead creatures that come back to life. I very sincerely wanted to do that for Ainarda but I had absolutely no idea how it would work. But I will throw my opinion into the ring that I think it would sooooo cool if the game would randomly "remember" creatures that have lived and died and then mimic them in the cemetery area. I'm not sure if the game needs to take a sort of picture of the creature at a certain point in its youth or adulthood stage and then "zombify" or what, but I do think that would be interesting. The player would be like "oh snap crackle pop, I remember that one! I loved that guy! Aw, look he's undead now, oh well, thriilllleerrr thriller night and no one's gonna save you from the beast about to strike you know it's thrillleerrr" etc. The Lantern Light.com |
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Bifrost |
Don't stop working if you have anything you want to add. Right now we're rounding up the line drawing, and I'm guessing I'll enlarge it soon now, to the actual game size (or a bit larger), and start colouring before it's time for textures. Do you have any wip you want to share? |
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Geat_Masta |
Probably we'll need a larger scale line drawing and a few revisions of it. I think the current map is good, but the scaling of the different places is a bit off. @merboy technically possible once skells are separated from creatures a bit more. But it wouldn't be able to mimic them, it would just be a typical agent that looks like a creature that was around once. |
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Bifrost |
Personally, I'm not really a fan of ghosts in a game like this, as I feel it breaks with the concept of the game. I like the idea of graveyards and crypts, though. Primitive kreatures having rituals for their dead is fitting. Hopefully, I'll get to blowing the world up to full size and start adjusting proportions and scaling real soon now. I'd really like to see what you're working on, Merboy, to see where it might fit. (Perhaps a crypt underneath the swamp?) |
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Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla |
 Would this kind of ceiling height work? Do the tunnels have to be taller? Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Bifrost |
As for ecology, I like the idea of wuzzles - mixes of different types of animals. The same concept could be applied to plants. (And between plants and animals.) Tiny mosquito elephants, anyone? How about berry bush mushrooms? Frogmonkeys? Manta ray butterflies? Spider flowers? Bunny bees? Imagination is the only limit. |
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Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla |
The wuzzles are a wonderful idea. Love it! Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Bifrost |
One thing I think we should consider when deciding the ecology, is wether the life forms evolved or were created. The latter gives us all the freedom in the world to create whatever shapes and forms we want, while the latter gives an overall more wholesome world. Different genus types fall into the same families; different families can belong to the same order, and different orders to the same classes, with consequences for similarities, just like in real world taxonomy. Personally, I prefer the evolutionary approach. |
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Geat_Masta |
I think that ceiling height is fine. @bifrost they were created 10 million years ago, and have evolved since? Is the spaceship the player's? |
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Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla |
The 10 million years and have evolved since sounds good. No idea about the spaceship backstory Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Bifrost |
Yeah, ages of evolution can account for absurd amounts of diversity. Some similarities between related families and genuses (what's plural of genus?) would still be nice. Like several fish-like types of bird. Oh. And a cow seahorse. I think the spacecraft is meant to have belonged to a now mia intelligent race (I still like the idea of the Daoine). Or some unknown mystery, yet to be explained or even explored properly. |
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Geat_Masta |
I like the idea that the player crash lands on this planet, as he becomes the caretaker of the creatures his spaceship begins to deteriorate, falling apart to reveal the strange internals, and becoming more unfamiliar and creepy, as you realize you don't belong in that world anymore. |
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Bifrost |
I'm not sure. It's a fun idea, but I don't know if it adds to or disturbs the feel and concept and purpose of the game. It depends on the back story, really. And the play style. I'd like to play as a hand/mouse pointer, not being given much of an identity beside my own. Not too much like an rpg, but more like a breeder/caretaker experience, with a bit of exploration. The same type of experience as in Creatures, Spore and similar games in this category. |
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 Brynn |
Can we give plants and animals functionality beyond giving nutrition when eaten? For example, can you harvest and transplant a [berry bush] and place it somewhere else? Or put it into a stove to generate heat for the kritters during the winter? Would be interesting to have this sort of ecosystem management element as well. |
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Bifrost |
I feel like explaining why I keep on talking about the Daoine as a creator race. There are several reasons for it. First of all, they resemble the Shee, as imagined by Steve Grand (though altered a lot by game developers), both in mythological origins and in their roles in the games. In my eyes, they're one way to honour him, though perhaps a very subtle way. More importantly, they serve the role of keepers of the lagoraptors and other kreatures. Because I imagine we will have a great variety of breeds, and not all of those breeds will have evolved naturally; especially not the ones found in a restricted area. To explain wide diversity within a locally restricted population, someone will have had to selectively breed them. The Daoine. Furthermore, the word Daoine, which comes from the same kind of folklore as the Aes Sidhe (Shee), (and I've said this earlier) sounds very similar to Darwin, aluding to darwinism and evolution, which is a great part of this kind of game. A race that's gone without a trace adds some mystery to the game. It adds a history. It adds flavour. It vaguely explains some of the features in the world that the kreatures can't have been responsible for. And it gives us a way to expand into new worlds. |
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Geat_Masta |
@brynn well if you had a furnace agent with a cabin that you could put burnables into, you can add a method that gets called whenever an object is dropped into it, and you would call classname() on the object to find out what it is and determine how much heat it emits. That's one option. The downside is it only works on objects that existed when you wrote the furnace agent. The other option is if I added message passing, then you could say: obj.pass("burn", this); and it would call the burn method if it exists, but otherwise do nothing. But then the method couldn't return anything (because the return value is being used to say whether the method existed and could be called). 3rd option would be to use interfaces. But I'll say yes it would be possible because the coupling wouldn't be too tight. Still a lot of work though, may not be worth it. |
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Bifrost |
Will we be able to build small fires? Like gathering twigs, branches etc. and light them on fire? |
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Geat_Masta |
@bifrost the scripting language allows for it. So I'm interpreting this question as "if I make twig agents, can someone else then make a fire agent that can use them", my answer to that is not very well. I can add a tryCast function to try to convert a game object to an arbitrary interface, but we'll see how that goes. If you want to do stuff like that you should decide on a series of interfaces that can should be used for different objects. An interface looks like this interface Food { method int calories(); method int gramsStarch(); method int gramsFat(); method int gramsProtien(); }; Then I'd have an object that implements the interface: class Cheese extends GameObject implements Food { //we need to define the functions the interface says we should have. method int calories() { return 4*(gramsStarch() + gramsProtien()) + 9*gramsFat(); method int gramsStarch() { return 0; } method int gramsFat() { return 8; } method int gramsProtien() { return 4; } }; And in a critter that can eat food: method onEat(GameObject obj) { Food * food =obj.tryCast("Food"  ;//tried to eat something that isn't food. if(food == null) { return; } //tried to eat something that is food, do something with it... } So for what you're asking you'd have a 'burnable' interface, that lists that functions that something that can be put into a fire has. Then you'd convert it to a burnable interface when someone tries to burn it. |
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Geat_Masta |
I'm very unhappy. I've been trying to get new meds all week, the doctor said he sent the prescription on monday, but I still haven't heard from the pharmacy, and they haven't seen it when I called them. And I'm just too sleepy and apathetic to do any coding without it. It makes me feel useless. |
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Fuzzy Dragonhat Pilla |
Is there anything I could do? I can't really draw, just make, uh, generic "scribbles". I was also fiddling around a bit with the agent code, currently I was trying to make an agent (but I'm making it way more complicated than I can handle for my first agent I think xD) And there's probably a lot of errors. I can't really figure out how to make a 'generic' plant on which other plant specimens are based. random agent code - link expires in 1 day It's far from complete, haven't tried testing out anything yet. xD I was also thinking about how the lighing would be done in the underwater cavern thing: should there be a light source? What kind of light source? Should there be small holes in the surface so light can go through? I was thinking about some kind of 'mars roamer', the kind of drone that gets used to explore another planet, originally from the spaceship, has fallen in the pond and just remained there as an artifact, but the headlight of the robot would still be working and provide light. .... Or a better suggestion? xD  I've been looking around for other random decoration... ideas for the underwater area. (But I repeat, I can't draw so these are just 'ideas' )I like shrimps and crayfish. I was thinking about the wuzzles idea, but I'm not too sure what to 'mix' these with. A pineapple maybe? Visit my Creatures blog/website - Pilla's DS Agents Join us on Discord - Caos Coding Cave Visit/contribute to the Creatures Wiki |
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Bifrost |
@Geat Masta: That sucks. I really hope it'll get sorted out real soon! @Pearldragoness: Water won't be added graphically. We'll just make a cave there at first. Water will get scripted in after. I like the idea of a light source. Perhaps we should have phosphorus or otherwise glowing crystals occur naturally. A drone works nicely too. I kind of think there's a lot of fun possibilities with drones and other kinds of technological gadgets. |
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 Wingheart |
Crayfish can stay unmixed, maybe, with flavour text saying that they're from splicing a shrimp and a crab? Crayfish look a lot like a splice between a shrimp and a crab anyway, so. |
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