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 Lurhstaap    |
I've been combing through the original Draconian genome for hours now and I can't figure out which parts are the important ones to longevity for sure. What exactly should I change and in what way(s) to make a longer-lived creature? I don't want immortality in any sense, just a create that will live longer. I don't even mind if it ages to Adult rather quickly so long as it stays there awhile and doesn't die within 45 minutes of becoming Old. A growth pattern similar to the original Draconians would work fine with me, but it doesn't have to be exactly like theirs. I'm just getting tired of the 3-4 hour lifespans I've been working with. On a semi-related note, also, how would I go about making a creature more resistant to disease and poison without making it actually straight up immune? I'd like to tinker with that stuff but I'm afraid to for fear of doing the opposite of what I intend and making some uber-fragile thing. When I was a kid I used to just delete the genes that made them susceptible to poisons and such, but that's too cheap for me as an adult. I want to just give them some toughness, not make them cheesy superNorns. Conclude with killer catchphrase. (Lurhstaap) "This is not knowledge - this is information!" New Model Army, "Courage" |
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 Malkin Manager |
Check out the hardman norns, they're tougher than your average norn. My TCR Norns |
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Lurhstaap |
That's the thing, looking at genomes isn't entirely helping because I'm not sure where I should be looking. It probably doesn't help that what I'm trying to edit is a CFF genome rather than vanilla. Conclude with killer catchphrase. (Lurhstaap) "This is not knowledge - this is information!" New Model Army, "Courage" |
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Malkin Manager |
In the receptors, where it says something like
You see how the gain of injury is less each time for the hardman than the civet norn? also, making the half-lives of the toxins faster will allow norns to metabolise them faster. My TCR Norns |
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 Peppery One Papriko |
Talking of half-lives, in- or decreasing the half-life of life force (chemical 125 if I recall right) will drastically alter the overall lifespan of your creatures. It is very easy to do, but can be hard to fine-tune due to half-lives not acting linearly. Ideally check the half-lives of existing breeds to get a general idea what half-life causes what lifetime. (e.g. grendels and ettins for short-lived creatures, average CL genomes for normal lifespan, bondis for slightly longer lives, draconians and tylinn.... tilynn? Those frosty ones for really long lives, etc...) Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |
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 Wrong Banshee Dragoler |
Papriko wrote: To add onto what Papriko said, after you increase the chemical half-life of "life", make sure to check the timeline organ and adjust the threshold slider on the "Become a X" genes to the right to make them grow at the same rate as before. (leave the slider for the "become old" gene) Don't set the half-life too high though. The time increase gained is exponential and a creature's organs will start to fail after about 12 hours anyway, regardless of what you do to them. Creator of the TWB/TCB genome base.  |
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Lurhstaap |
Ah! I was totally on the wrong track - no wonder what I did didn't work. I created some weird Norns just by making it take less glycogen to make glucose. o.O I'm still thinking in old C1-inspired habits at times, but mutated by learning C3DS stuff into a useless mess. Blah! This helps a whole lot, though. I don't mind when they reach Adult fairly fast, but it's annoying when they don't live more than two or three hours. Short lifespans are useful when I'm doing a high-rate-of-mutation experiment, but otherwise, they get boring - not enough time for behavior observation. Don't set the half-life too high though. The time increase gained is exponential and a creature's organs will start to fail after about 12 hours anyway, regardless of what you do to them. By which statement I assume it's not possible to make the organs live longer? Conclude with killer catchphrase. (Lurhstaap) "This is not knowledge - this is information!" New Model Army, "Courage" |
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Peppery One Papriko |
It probably is possible, but it would be more complicated than just pushing around a half-life slider. You'd need to find the organ damaging reactions and chemicals and tweak them to be less effective. Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |
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Wrong Banshee Dragoler |
Papriko wrote: Organ life ticks down as the organs are used. I tried to reduce the damage they take and increase their maximum health and graphed them out in the biochemistry kit but every test I tried made no difference to the rate of damage. If there is a way to reduce organ damage without stripping away every chemical reaction that organ is responsible for, I don't think the solution can be found in the genetics. The best you could do is slow down the clockrate. Creator of the TWB/TCB genome base. |
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Lurhstaap |
You know what, I noticed the same thing after tinkering with the supposed injury rates in the genes. Even though such things seem to be genetically specified if you're poking around in the Genetics Kit, the reality is they're apparently overridden by something hard coded in the engine. So the fix for that problem probably lies in CAOS somewhere, but alas, that's the aspect of Creatures where I'm by far the weakest. So I'll settle for the 12-hour limit for now. It WOULD be very interesting to explore Creatures with lifespans more similar to those of real animals, but if that's possible at all with this engine it'll take more skills than I've got right now to figure it out. Maybe I'll tackle that one in a few years, once I know CAOS and C3DS itself better. For the moment, I've settled for mostly copying and then slightly changing the settings used by the Amphibious Draconians. That produced a critter that stays a baby for quite a while, but then advances to adult in about the same amount of time it stayed a baby, more or less. Not what I meant to do, but it's an interesting growth pattern that appeals to me because it seems like a logical growth pattern for a highly intelligent animal - a long babyhood to give the brain time to grow and develop. (I know Creatures doesn't actually include a specific connection, at least not directly, but the corelate to biological life pleases me nonetheless.) Conclude with killer catchphrase. (Lurhstaap) "This is not knowledge - this is information!" New Model Army, "Courage" |
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Peppery One Papriko |
If you decide to dig into the code, try looking for the INJR command, e.g. with your text editor's search function. According to the CAOS documentation, INJR is a command specifically for the purpose of damaging organs. Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |
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Malkin Manager |
Is INJR actually used, though, or did they find that natural decay was enough? My TCR Norns |
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Peppery One Papriko |
No clue, but it is worth to investigate. Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... |
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Malkin Manager |
I've seen it commented out on the 'creature done to' scripts, so it was used there at one point, but it was taken out prior to release. My TCR Norns |
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Lurhstaap |
Well, they're definitely not relying entirely on natural decay in the sense of the result of genetic specification, or the gene alterations I and others have made would have some positive effect on the organs' lifespan. There has to be something in the engine itself that's putting a hard limit on the lifespan of creature organs. Conclude with killer catchphrase. (Lurhstaap) "This is not knowledge - this is information!" New Model Army, "Courage" |
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 Code Monkey evolnemesis |
From my research, without injury from other sources, the long term health of all organs decays naturally using an invisible reaction inside the organ which has a fixed reaction rate... it works just like any other reaction in the organ, except that you cannot change the half-life (reaction rate) of the reaction. The only way to slow this reaction and extend the natural lifespan of an organ is to slow the clock rate of the entire organ... you can actually get them to last a very very long time... BUT this will also slow all reactions in the organ, which can cause problems in their metabolism... if you change all the organs by the same proportion (like say, half the clock rate of all of them), then you MIGHT avoid a lot of problems, but still there is also the fact that half-lives of chemicals in the body are also tuned to the normal metabolic rates so you might need to adjust those too or you can get issues. The best bet might be to raise the rates of all reactions in the organs proportionally to offset the slower ticking of the organ... Then the organ should last longer but still work basically the same as far as their bodies are concerned. To double an organ's lifespan for example, you can try halving the value of the clock rate in the organ gene, then double the speed of all reaction genes in the organ... e.g. if the gene's reaction rate slider value shows a halflife of 10s, tweak the value and try and get it as close to 5s as you can... "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan |
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Lurhstaap |
Aha! Very interesting, thank you for the insights! Once I'm done with my current project I may have to experiment with extremely long-lived Creatures. (Now there'd be a real dragon Norn - ha!) Conclude with killer catchphrase. (Lurhstaap) "This is not knowledge - this is information!" New Model Army, "Courage" |
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Code Monkey evolnemesis |
Yeah, and as far a extending life, raising the half-life of the 125 chemical is nice and simple... Chichis I believe have the half-life around 15 minutes and live around 5 hours... Bondi have it around 20 minutes and live closer to 7... raising the slider a little so the half-life shows ~30 minutes (i think the real number is like 29.4m or something like that) will raise their overall lifespan to about 10 hours (comparable to c1 creatures)... Just changing this halflife on its own will extend all stages of their life proportionally... that is, if they live twice as long they will be babies twice as long, children twice as long, and so on.. Try the Alien Norns and have a look at the half-life of 125 in their genetics (after hatching one from the egg agent, the genetics file will be in your games genetics folder as 'norn.aliens.cff.gen') and play with them, they are a CFF breed I made with an extended lifespan like this, along with several odd behavioral features. Their organs are not modified, but the important ones are already tuned by default to be able to deal with fairly long lifespans like theirs, (probably since Creatures can mutate to live that long naturally on their own pretty easily) so they don't run into problems with them that I've noticed... The CFF hungerly drive overwhelmsion organ might die when they are at old age, meaning they won't have their special ability to forget about other drives when hungry any more, but that kind of makes sense considering they are also starting to get senile by that point. You can actually get the lifespan to be something crazy... With chemical 125 at max half-life a creature can live for about 300 YEARS of playtime before dying of old age... "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan |
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