Starting Out in a Land of CAOS
One element of Creatures I still have yet to fully understand is the CAOS language, and how to use it for making agents and COBs. A quick glance at the Creatures CAOS Guide (PDF) could make anyone run away and hide! Although there are descriptions with the commands, sometimes it takes a little more to figure out exactly what the cryptic words mean. I started to take a look at some C1 CAOS, and it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought. My only problem was the fact that BoBCoB wasn’t very friendly with me. It crashed nearly as much as Creatures 2! Well, maybe not that bad… I quickly found out that my current favorite, CrEd32, was actually a decent solution for me.
At this point, I’m simply opening up existing COBs to try to find out what their scripts do. Even just one COB gave me a decent amount of insight, along with some help from Amaikokonut of Naturing :: Nurturing! Just like Creatures genetics can be extremely overwhelming to someone brand new to them, the trick is to take things slowly. CAOS isn’t as terrible as one might think: There are some complex topics, yet the majority of the language can be picked up over time. The one particularly annoying aspect, however, is figuring out the classifier number. Many programs can calculate this, but I couldn’t find any documentation about CrEd32 having this feature.
Then, there it was! A wonderful calculator that could figure out this number from the family, genus, and species. Wonderful! Right now I’m simply dabbling for the sake of learning, but perhaps there will be some upcoming COBs to keep an eye out for…
That class calculator… I am so happy that it exists.
You have no idea how happy I was when I found it, too! It will make things so much simpler than having to do the calculation myself. It could be programmed elsewhere, but of course I prefer things to be easy when they can be. Oh, CAOS!
I’m glad you’ve found yet another use for CrEd32 – it really is a fully-fledged Creatures 1 development program!
Don’t forget that there are some archived tutorials still available – the Gumby Doll and Snack Vendor at Spotling’s Norn and Grendel Paradise include tutorials for a shower object and a vendor object, and LummoxJR’s series of five tutorials is still available on archive.org. Slink’s COB Author’s Guide is another good resource, although I seem to recall it’s a touch more advanced!
Spotling’s Norn and Grendel Paradise
The Norn Underground
COB Author’s Guide
Thank you, Malkin! So far I figured out how to fix one COB so that it’s properly invisible. Advanced, right? Ha! I’m slowly getting the hang of things, and I’m sure those links will be very helpful. I hope you don’t mind that I reformatted them just a little bit! Maybe one day I’ll understand enough CAOS to write about some things myself. For now, I’m glad to know there are still excellent resources out there to help someone like me get started!
Even that is a good first step – items which are visible when they should be invisible can be very distracting to creatures. :) Thanks Jessica! I’m not sure how to format links properly for your blog, so I just tend to paste them in ‘as is’, so that they don’t get broken in transit.
I’m hoping to document this change in the near future! It’s a fairly minor update, but there always has to be a place to start! I might also highlight some of the C1 programs, as there are a couple of others I never heard of that can work really well. BoBCoB still refuses to work for me, so I’m glad there are other options! I have a feeling others may not know about some of them, though, like CrEd32 or COE.
Oh, and no worries about the links! I don’t mind in the least bit doing that: Feel free to continue doing just what you’re doing! And then if anything breaks, we’ll know to blame me for doing something silly!
Yay! Always good to have another budding developer out there. Here’s hoping you get in to it enough to start making some of your own stuff; I think I’d enjoy using your cobs/agents.
With BoBCob, have you tried something as simple as ‘run as administrator’, both when installing and when running? I don’t use BoBCob myself, but I found some of the other development tools work when you do this.
Thanks, Arch! I have some lofty ideas for COBs/agents, but I figure that gives me something to work towards. Likely there won’t be any releases from me until I know I won’t be crashing anyone’s games, yet I’m enjoying learning about all of this!
Hmm, that is a good idea for BoBCoB. Maybe I’ll try it! However, I’m getting used to CrEd32 and COE now. Worst case is that I’ll have a few options for good programs to use, which isn’t a bad thing!