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Flying/Swimming Agent   
Lurhstaap

Lurhstaap
United States  

 visit Lurhstaap's website: Addicted To CAOS
  5/29/2017

This wasn't always a problem for me, but since I had to reinstall DS, Grendel_Man's flying agent doesn't work right. (And yes, I tried reinstalling again... didn't help. Sigh.)

The flyers are no longer able to eat/get while in flight. This is a SERIOUS problem because they're not able to figure out why they're not able to catch the bugs/critters, so they just keep trying. They usually don't starve solely due to that, but only thanks to the new metabolism that causes them to stop flying when they're poorly nourished. So what happens is they fall to the ground eventually, with max hunger, but now they've learned that critters and bugs are nearly impossible to catch, so they start eating stuff like fruit and seeds, which are easy to get, but provide basically zero nourishment and do nothing for their hunger.

Every VERY VERY RARE now and then, one of them manages it, but 99% of the time, literally, they chase and chase but can never get ahold of the thing no matter how they try.

Now, this does NOT happen with the swimming agent. With that, they just swim up and grab, no problem.

So I PMed Grendel_Man about it for advice and he suggested the problem might be that they're hitting the sides of the vehicle cabin. (The agents both work by creating an invisible vehicle whose movement is controlled by the creature's decision lobe output, for those who don't know.) He says that this is usually an occasional problem only, but it might be what the problem is here.

So I tried changing the size/dimensions of the cabin, but that didn't make any difference one way or the other. (That is, it didn't fix the problem but nor did it create any new problems. Nothing apparent happened at all.)

So then I struggled with JAgent for ages to make it decompile the swimmer agent. Finally I got it to do that yesterday or the day before, and, feeling triumphant, I checked to see what the differences between the two agents' vehicles are.

Turns out they're identical except for a single attribute. The flyer agent uses accg 0.3. The swimmer agent uses accg 0.

I thought, aha! I'll just change that to be 0, like the swimmer agent.

And lo! It worked. They flew, they ate! I was happy. I thought I'd fixed it.

Thennn it turned out that they could no longer fall to the ground when they fell asleep. -.-; They just hover in midair until they wake up. Which is a problem because that means their whole system of egglaying (falling asleep, fall to the ground, lay egg, wake up) no longer works, and they get stuck in pregnancies while flying until they happen to land on their own long enough to lay. Which can take hours.

Now, I had fiddled with a couple of other things, so I thought that might be the problem. I went to my email, re-downloaded a fresh copy of the flying agent as Grendel_Man originally sent it to me, and pasted it into CaosTool. Then I changed that one and only thing, thinking surely that would fix the problem with eating, but couldn't be the issue with sleep.

NNNOPE. It's that one attribute. With that attribute present, they can sleep properly, but not eat properly. Setting it to zero reverses the situation.

Now, again, this IS NOT true of the swimmer agent. And I'm looking over these two agents and I can't figure out what the heck the issue is. ;.; Anyone able to give me some guidance? I don't want to bug Grendel_Man about it again as I know he's got other things to do and isn't terribly into development at the moment, so I was hoping someone else might be able to help me figure this out.


Conclude with killer catchphrase.
(Lurhstaap)
"This is not knowledge -
this is information!"
New Model Army, "Courage"

 
Malkin

Malkin

Manager


 visit Malkin's website: Malkin's page at CWiki
  5/29/2017

Have you thought of making a reverse swim bladder?

My TCR Norns
 
Lurhstaap

Lurhstaap


 visit Lurhstaap's website: Addicted To CAOS
  5/29/2017

What do you mean, reverse?

Conclude with killer catchphrase.
(Lurhstaap)
"This is not knowledge -
this is information!"
New Model Army, "Courage"

 
Malkin

Malkin

Manager


 visit Malkin's website: Malkin's page at CWiki
  5/29/2017

For flying, not swimming, but working exactly the same.

My TCR Norns
 
Lurhstaap

Lurhstaap


 visit Lurhstaap's website: Addicted To CAOS
  5/29/2017

That's already what they do. That's what's been broken. Because the agent no longer causes them to fall to the ground when they fall asleep, it doesn't work anymore. I can't think of anything I could do genetically to fix that, alas. ;.; I'm going to have to resolve it with the agent somehow.

Conclude with killer catchphrase.
(Lurhstaap)
"This is not knowledge -
this is information!"
New Model Army, "Courage"

 


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