Creatures Caves

This is a quick guide I originally wrote for malkin about how to make CA change with the seasons, but it's applicable to a bunch of other things as well, so I decided to flesh it out a bit more and post it.

The command we want to use is SEAN, which returns the season. From the CAOS documentation:

0 - spring
1 - summer
2 - autumn
3 - winter

Pretty straightforward. So how do we use this to make CA change levels according to the season?

The easiest way is to use GAME variables. GAME variables are wonderful things; they work just like any variable, except that they're global, which means any agent can check them. Pretty neat, huh?

To make use of this, we create our CA. For this example, I'm going to use light.

new: simp 1 1 xxxxx "blnk" 0 0 0
mvto xxxxx xxxx
*run every 5 minutes - 2 * 60 * 19.5 (there are approximately 19.5 ticks/second)
tick 2340

scrp 1 1 xxxxx 9
emit 1 game "mymeta_light"
endm

Basically, instead of making our agent output the light CA a set value, we're making it output light at a variable value that we can change easily. Do this with all of your CA, changing the variable name for each kind of CA (eg "mymeta_heat", "mymeta_moisture" etc). The tick script (which runs every 500 ticks) updates the emit value every 2 minutes.

Next we create a simple monitoring agent that changes our light value output depending on the season.

new: simp 1 1 xxxxx "blnk" 0 0 0
mvto xxxxx xxxx
*run every 5 minutes - 5 * 60 * 19.5
tick 5850

scrp 1 1 xxxxx 9
doif sean eq 0
setv game "mymeta_light" .8
elif sean eq 1
setv game "mymeta_light" 1
elif sean eq 2
setv game "mymeta_light" .7
elif sean eq 3
setv game "mymeta_light" .5
endi
endm

Pretty straightforward, right? That's all there is to it. Of course, there are many other ways to do do it, but this is probably one of the simplest.

Happy seasoning!