Monday, June 7, 2010

Half-released cosfiles

I call these "half released" because they've technically been available in other parts of the CC-- usually in a thread where someone requests a fix and I upload it directly to that thread. But I've pulled a few of them together into this post for everyone to enjoy.

Again, these are cosfiles, not agents, but most of them are the sort of thing you'd like to drop in your bootstrap folder so they'll affect all your worlds anyway. They also have not been fully tested, so please do report any problems you have. Additionally, you may have to right-click and "save as" in some browsers to download them.

No Seasonal Gender Bias -- Gender, as you may or may not know, is affected by the in-game "seasons." You can't generally tell, as very few agents depend on them, but the world does go through an invisible cycle of seasons. In the spring, creatures have a 75% chance of giving birth to females, and in the autumn, a 75% chance of males. Summer and winter grant an equal chance. This can sometimes be frustrating, especially for feral runs that rely on a good male/female balance, so this modified egg-laying script gets rid of that and makes the genders 50/50 regardless of the season. (Someone requested this in CC IRC, and I can't for the life of me remember who. But I hope you find it, whoever you are!)

Bypass Import Cloning -- You know that annoying box that pops up and makes you clone and rename most creatures when you try to import them? It's there to stop the warp server from getting confused, as it tracks creatures that go through the warp based on their moniker, So if you try to import a norn that was not directly exported from one of your worlds, the game clones it, gives it a new moniker, and all is well. But norn tracking has been broken on the DS server for ages anyway, and it really can be frustrating to rename every norn that you download, so this modified script will import creatures without cloning them. However, it will still clone a creature if another copy of it already exists in your world (or has existed in the past and died).

Wolf Control Fix -- This is something that may not be needed much yet, but I honestly think will become more and more necessary as time goes on and computers get faster. I first noticed when trying to run small wolfling runs in near-empty worlds, I would come back to find that wolf control had thrown a strange "divide by zero" error message when left in fast ticks. I dissected the cosfile to find that RACE, which returns the time in milliseconds which the last tick took, was being divided to find the frame rate. When DS is in fast ticks on a fast computer, it is possible that a tick can occasionally take less than a millisecond, causing the game to try to divide by zero and crash. This fix simply checks to make sure that RACE is not zero before it divides it!

CV Shortcuts -- This is not a DS cosfile; it is actually for Creatures Village. Some people have reported problems with it that I have not been able to reproduce, so use at your own risk. This just adds a few keyboard shortcuts to make CV a little easier to explore-- Ctrl+0 will "disconnect" your camera from your selected creature, allowing you to scroll around the room as you please. Ctrl 1-9 act sort of like favorite place shortcuts and take you to various places of the world (you can edit the cosfile to easily change these). Shift+Ctrl+1 will teleport the currently selected creature to your hand, and Ctrl+Q will export the current creature, though I haven't bothered finding a way to import them again, so it's fairly pointless.

Hope you all enjoy! :)

10 comments:

  1. Awesome downloads! I'm glad to see your last few posts: What you do is amazing, and far beyond anything I would ever think up. I love how some of the scripts or agents you have seem so simple, but serve such an important purpose. I haven't yet gotten into C3/DS, but I plan on using some of these cosfiles in the future. Thanks so much for sharing these with everyone!

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  2. Aww, your comments always make me feel so fuzzy inside ;_; Thank you! Maybe it's a bit silly, but hearing that people appreciate the stuff that I do really keeps me motivated to develop even more :)

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  3. Sweet! I have snagged the first two :)

    Thanks a lot for putting these up.

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  4. It just seems to link me to the Wolf Fix's code

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    1. You may have to right-click and "save as" in some browsers to download the cosfiles; these browsers sometimes try to view the files instead of saving them :>

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  5. Can anybody give me a quick lesson in how to alter the no-seasonal-gender-bias code to make it more likely for eggs to hatch as female then as male no matter the season? I've noticed that wolf runs tend to go better with just one or two males fertilizing a harem of females, indeed most, if not all of my wolf runs ultimately die out because there are more males being born then females, whereas if it were the other way around, it wouldn't be a problem as males never loose their fertility due to age, and if you were down to your last male, he could easily have a son or two just by impregnating the females around him.

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    1. Hah, that's a good point! More females probably would increase the success rate of wolfling runs.

      If you scroll down to just before the bit of code that says '*the following lines commented out to get rid of the seasonal gender bias' you can add the lines:

      doif rand 0 1 gt 0
      setv ov01 2
      endi

      (I haven't actually tested this but it should work; let me know if it doesn't)
      This should basically give each creature an extra flip of the gender-coin so to speak; it has a 50/50 chance of being either female or a random gender before it even gets to the built in male/female coin flip later on. So basically both coin flips have to land on heads for it to be a male, whereas if you get tails on either of the two flips, you'll get a female.

      If you wanted to increase the chance of females even more, you can increase the '1' in the first line to 2 or more for an even greater chance.

      Hope this helps!

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  6. The download link of Wolf Control Fix appears to be dead.

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    1. Funny, as of right now at least it's working for me on both my PCs. On further testing, it didn't seem to do anything when I clicked it in chrome, but it worked in firefox. Right clicking and copying the link and pasting the URL into a new tab also worked in chrome. Someone else mentioned a similar thing happening about a year ago with certain links and I think we traced it back to some browsers blocking uncommon direct download links. So if you run into that problem, maybe try opening the link in a new tab or using a different browser. If it still doesn't work (or if you get an actual page-not-found error), let me know!

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