Of Streaming and Splicing

The amusement never seems to cease when I'm reading the comments people leave in the LNA chatroom. Most people just ask "what game is this?" despite the show description blatantly stating it (I do wish that was a bit higher on the page..). Others will come in the chatroom to tell me to play warcraft/starcraft/other various games. And yet others who know and understand the concept will ask me to "kill off" some of my norns so theirs can warp in.

I wish there was a way to mark myself as away or something, because though I want to be around to answer questions and help people out, I don't appreciate it when people leave nasty messages because I'm not watching my chatroom every second. I also really wish the show description was somewhere other than the bottom of the page. That's kind of critical information, and I don't really appreciate how ustream pushes it underneath the comments box and other recommended shows.

Ah well.

In other news, my DS splicer control panel is coming along rather nicely! You'll have to click the thumbnail to see the full image though-- I didn't want to break the screen with it.

Right now it works decently-- the top button divides all creatures in the world into two groups and drops a group over each of the splice pods so they don't have to be dragged over to them, the second button automatically imports all creatures from the My Creatures folder, the third button will create a pair of random creatures from two randomly selected genomes in the Genetics folder and drop one over each of the splice pods so they're ready to mix. The fourth button is the sedative gas, which can be turned on or off; it lowers all drives of the creatures in the splicing area and lulls them into a deep sleep, which ensures the creatures are the happiest they have ever been and as a bonus stops them from moving around and getting out of the range of the splice pods. For the most part, these buttons work pretty flawlessly.

The AutoSplice button, which is pretty awesome when it works, is still giving me a few problems. Essentially it systematically splices all the creatures in the world until there are only a specified amount left (6 is the default, but that number can be changed by the user). It starts by splicing all the creatures near the splice pods, (realigning them with the pods if they wander off), and then teleports the second generation under the splicer up to the pods to resplice, and so on until the desired number is reached.

I'm having a few issues though-- one is with the teleport segment of the process; even though I'm using the exact code from the top button which works perfectly, it likes to give me "invalid position" errors. The second problem is an issue with the splicer itself: occasionally it will mistake an empty pod for being full, which throws the cycle into an endless loop of trying to splice something that isn't there. So I might have to actual modify the code ripped directly from the C3 splicer, which I was hoping to avoid.

Nonetheless, I'm pretty happy about how well this is going. I've never created anything this elaborate before, and even though much of it is just altered code from the C3 splicer, the control panel thing was pretty much done from scratch, with the exception of the import button which takes a lot from the DS import script. Now if I can just figure out how to fix these bugs... then I'll need to seek out people interested in testing. Developing is certainly a fun path :)