welcome, guest

downloads   gallery   dev   community   creatchi   forum   mycaves

bookmarks | search | post new topic

Development Forum Flying Piranha    bobertneek      4/2/2015 How difficult would it be to make piranha behave as though a room's air were water, but have the norns not think that? so I could have flying piranha in the workshop dealing with the norns who are too slow to react. I think it might beef up my current IQ Test regimen since my using germs is causing too many immortals. Would something like the mod for aquanorns work for this?   Patient Pirate ylukyun Manager   4/2/2015  1 I think you'd just have to find the line(s) of code where the piranha recognizes the room type it's in and change that around. I'll have a look at the .cos file and see what I can do. Edit: Do these suit your purposes?   ArchDragon   4/2/2015 A neat idea. Out of interest though, how would the Norns know to run? They'd only get one chance to escape so they'd need to have a pretty strong motivator to get away.   Peppery One Papriko   4/2/2015 You must look for the lines where "rtyp" is checked. By default it is compared with 8 (fresh water) and 9 (salty water). You could probably just kick out that check and you have amphibious hover piranhas. I would not recommend using it in an IQ test, though. Even though piranhas are classified as.... I think "beast" if I recall right, they are too fast and vicious. The survival chances of creatures strongly tend towards 0, even if they know what to do. Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis...   bobertneek   4/4/2015 Thank you ylukyun . I'm going to try the Airanhas and see how they work. I'm getting to the point that I have hundreds of eggs so even if I lose half the ones who would pass it will still be worth it. at least until I get the pop under control. (I don't like having to use a forced pop limit).   Code Monkey evolnemesis   4/4/2015 If you want to focus the piranhas more, so norns that move are more likely to avoid them than the lazy ones that kind of hang out, I think you can just find the line near the beginning of their script that starts with 'tick' and raise the tick number by a good amount (maybe double or triple it). See, if they work like other living agents that eat, they have a timer script that runs periodically to check for food and has them move, eat, kill, etc... The number after 'tick' in the first few lines of their install script tells them how many ticks to wait between runs of this timer script, that is, how long to wait between 'moves'... Upping the number of ticks to make this script run much less often will make them more like little time bombs than just constant voracious eaters... Basically, they will be less active and wait a little while between moves and before attacking, which is probably better for what you seem to want to use them for. This number is easy to tweak, and it should turn out to be a good way to modify them depending on how deadly you want to make them and how much of a chance you want to give the more active or savvy norns to get away from them. "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   suzemaria   4/4/2015 This is an interesting idea, please post about how it works out ~* suzemaria *~   Peppery One Papriko   4/4/2015 Another problem is that you need just 1 piranha to start the eating orgy and the timers will run out of sync, e.g. one piranha might have started counting half a second later than the other. That means the swarm as whole still checks for prey to eat all the time, even if you increase the tick of individual fish. When just one piranha thinks it is a good idea to attack little norny, there is no escape. Even if they were eating something else in the meantime, they will leave behind their last victim and eat the new one. The old victim stays encased in bubbles anyways and dies eventually. Also, the piranhas probably only partially work like normal critters, they have a reproduction cycle afterall. But the eating system is a bit whacky. They always eat, regardless if they just ate something or not. Eating increases their their likelyhood to reproduce it seems, but even if they get nothing at all: the piranha pond never completely empties. One might argue that they have some kind of piranha spawner nearby, but don't think that's it. Even if you put somewhere else into water (e.g. the marine terrarium) they will take over the entire ecosystem and drive all other species to extinction. After that happened, the water is still full of piranhas and does not clear. Overall I still think they are just fancy creatures trash bins and that they need a lot of tweaking before you can use them as a good and balanced survival check. Just making them airborne is by far not enough. Quite the contrary, it makes them able to mess up the land and air parts of ecosystems too. Lets play plants! Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis... Photosynthesis...   Code Monkey evolnemesis   4/4/2015 Maybe disable their breeding too... (they probably don't die of natural causes, but if so, you can disable them dying too), but yeah, now you are really messing with a lot of their script. Still, if they can't breed, and you just put a couple of them around, it might work out... One thing I can say though... amphibious hover piranhas are definitely the stuff of nightmares... one more thing to keep me up at night, lol... Thanks for that "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   bobertneek   4/4/2015  1 Ok so I've been playing around with the airanhas that yluckyun made and to get exactly what I want I might need to fiddle with some of their code. But I can get it to work right now if I watch to make sure they don't go crazy. The piranhas spawn in the top of the workshop, so first I have to move them all to the bottom. (they lay lots of eggs so you have to be quick or do it again in 5 mins.) Then I TP all my norns there. (I have a limit of 100) Because of the way they only swarm 1 or 2 creatures at a time, about half actually make it out and to the meso. I just cant leave them unattended or the piranhas breed until there are 12 of them and kill everything as they hatch. Then I take the survivors and TP them into the Norn terrarium lake which is filled with normal piranhas and about half make it out of that too. the piranhas do die after a few minutes of seeming old age, but they lay so many eggs that they quickly get to an apparent limit. So to get a population control piranha I think I will need to make the following changes: Make piranha not die of old age. make them infertile make them inject only 1 at a time. Then I could attach my timer to an eggfinder and hatchers so that 4 or 5 eggs hatch at once; then the smart ones will have time to make it out while their peers get eaten.   Code Monkey evolnemesis   4/4/2015  1 Ah, the key to escaping flying piranhas is that you don't have to run faster than the piranhas... You just have to run faster than the person next to you... That makes me feel a bit better, definitely worth knowing, just in case there is an outbreak of mutant flying piranhas... "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   Patient Pirate ylukyun Manager   4/30/2015  1 It could be sooner than you expect. What do you think I spend all my time away from this forum doing?

downloads cobs adoptions creaturelink metarooms breeds   gallery art wallpaper screenshots graphics promos sprites dev hack shack script reservations dev resources active projects dev forum   community links advice chat polls resources creatchi   forum bookmarks general news help development strangeo survivor mycaves log in register lost pw 0 online creatures caves is your #1 resource for the creatures artificial life game series: creatures, creatures 2, creatures 3, docking station, and the upcoming creatures family. contact    help    privacy policy    terms & conditions    rules    donate    wiki