Creatures Caves | Development

Hey Malkin!

The CAOS command RAND var1 var2 can be used to pick a random number between var1 and var2.

There isn't a command to pick random letters though, so you would have to pick a random number and convert that number into a letter.
You could just pick a random number between 1 and 26 and then do something like:

doif va00 eq 1
sets va01 "a"
elif va00 eq 2
sets va01 "b"
elif va00 eq 3
sets va01 "c"
.
.
else
sets va00 "z"
endi

Surely there should be a cleaner/easier way!

Recently I learned more about the CHAR variable thanks to Amaikokonut’s blog post at Naturing :: Nurturing.
Char has two commands: one that returns an ASCII code of a character and one that sets a character in a string. The one setting a character is interesting because ASCII code is just a number, and numbers can be randomized with RAND, so...

To set a character, you have to use the ASCII code of that character. If you run the number that corresponds to the correct character through the CHAR command, you will get a string with that character.

Now all that’s left is to figure out the ASCII code of the characters you want to use. I quickly googled the ASCII table and I found that for the characters A to Z, the codes are 65 to 90. For the characters a to z, it's 97 to 122.

So if you want a character between a to z, the resulting code would be this:

char va00 1 rand 97 122

Neat huh?