Monday, November 7, 2011

For better Nornish Education!

Just when I thought I might actually get some writing done today, a thread on Creaturetopia inspired me to break open the CAOS tool yet again.



Really, I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it before. Hand-teaching norns their first words has a lot of charm to it in nurturing worlds, but after a while it becomes routine to lock a newly-hatched norn in the learning room for most of its babyhood, set the machine to automatic, and go about doing other things (or sit there, if you wish and watch the baby bumble about whilst having words drilled into its head). It's just not a very engaging process!

But using this Magic Words module, you can teach your norns words as you need them to learn them, so they can still run about enjoying their childhood, learning at a more natural pace. I find it a lot more personable and interactive than just having them watch a learning agent spit out words.

The syntax is pretty simple, just type "teach [word]". Provided the word is a valid DS vocabulary word, the hand will repeat it, and all creatures in earshot will attempt to learn it. It may take them a few tries, but they'll get it. One special exception is the hand-- if you type "teach hand" creatures will learn the name of the hand according to what you've defined it as, which I believe is by default your DS username, or just 'hand' if you have an offline world. You can change the name of the hand in the DS options panel.

Mostly, this is meant to be used to teach your creatures non-noun words, verbs such as push or hit, drives such as bored or hungry for starch, and other words like dislike, look, express, maybe, and so on. But if you really want to, you can use it to teach nouns too; it's probably easier to go about it the traditional way, but in certain cases you might want to teach a creature about certain objects beforehand (sometimes you don't want to wait until you encounter an angry grendel to teach a norn what it is so it will obey your commands to retreat from it).

Download Magic Words: Hand-Teaching (Updated 11-22-17). Requires the Magic Words Core to work. Please let me know if anything goes wrong so I can fix it.

Note: On 11/22/17, this module was updated with some new commands! Check out the update post here for more information. If you are having problems with the new version you can still grab the old version here

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for this! I really think this will be interesting to utilize. Love the ways in which C3/DS Norns are becoming a lot more enjoyable to raise and get attached to!

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  2. Very cool mods, and still useful. Great work here. o7

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