Omnomnom Norns

It's getting hard to tag these posts when I'm covering like three different topics in a single post, haha.

I found a few people willing to test my DS splicer, so we'll see how buggy it is on other people's computers. I managed to work out the bugs I mentioned before. Here's a tip if you're ever going to make agents that move creatures using the mvsf command; it's helpful to preface the command with a "doif movs = 0". If a creature is currently in a vehicle (like say, a splice pod) and you try to move it using mvsf, you'll get an error saying mvsf only works on autonomous agents. If a creatures movs value equals 0, that confirms it is autonomous and it won't try moving it if it's not.

LNA is down, sadly, mostly due to the computer it was running on completely blowing up. I'm currently fixing up one of my older computers to try running it on. It might be a while, but I'll get it back up eventually.

In the meantime, when I'm not splicing creature in mass quantities, I've been working on other horrible things like a script that allows creatures to eat each other. It's easy enough to script something that simply allows creatures to be edible, but I've been trying to script something a little more realistic... so far, the script in its current state allows one creature to eat another, but "eating" won't instantly kill a creature, just wound it a lot and make it very prone to infection (it's more like biting than eating, really, but the creature will still die if bitten several times in succession). Though the biting creature receives nourishment, it still gets stim'd for disappointment-- sort of like a guilt trip for eating one of your own kind. However, the hungrier a creature is, the less disappointed they will feel, so hopefully creatures just won't eat each other unless they're really desperate.

I suppose I'll tweak it a little so say, grendels won't feel any guilt for eating norns, norns will only be able to eat a grendel if it's dead, among other things. Just to add some realism to the game, however gruesome it may be.

I still feel that C3/DS is far too easy if your goal is to raise a family of norns, and while it's not difficult to pick some more frail genomes to raise, that still really limits your variety. So I'm trying to come up with some ways to make the game as a whole a bit more difficult. Ideally these would be changes they would take effect regardless of the breeds of norns or metarooms that were used.

Perhaps a scripted "mating season," a script that essentially only allows creatures to become fertile during the in-game summer season, to make it a little more difficult to keep the population high. I wonder what other sorts of changes could be made to up the difficulty of raising creatures...