Mapping Out an Albian Carrot Garden
The updated Creatures 1 carrots are closer than ever to their initial completion! Perhaps I complicate these matters, but I wasn’t satisfied with just tackling the major fixes. I asked myself how the carrots could be improved upon. Do all of the minor additions matter? Not that much, yet I enjoy creating downloads that have tiny little surprises. A huge thanks to LoneShee for walking through a lot of CAOS with me. Carrots can now point left or right each time they’re dropped! The major fixes have been tested, such as making seedlings invisible and editing the amount of NFP decrease.
But I’m not quite finished yet! One idea I started playing around with was varying the vertical coordinate of a carrot. The variable horizontal coordinate means that carrots are spread out, and show up in different areas of the garden. They are always aligned in a straight line, though, which takes away a little realism. That is, unless you have one very perfect bunch of carrots! I discovered that Creatures 1 uses the top left of each sprite to determine where to place it. What I haven’t figured out is where a Norn picks the carrot from. Why? Because some of my test subjects can’t seem to pull some carrots out of the ground! I only varied the vertical coordinate by a few pixels, yet this made a big difference.
I found one image of the rooms in Creatures 1, although I couldn’t be sure if my carrots were falling beneath the “floor” of the garden area. If so, perhaps that was my problem. The garden also has a very uneven patch of soil, which makes some carrots look like they’re too far out of the ground. What to do…
I leave that ponderous thought to you, the readers! What do you think is the best solution? Do you even care about having a straight line of carrots, or would it be nice to have them at very slightly different heights? Another possibility is for me to play around with the bitmap files within the sprites, to see if I can rearrange the blank space to make the seedlings a little more realistic. More importantly, maybe no one cares about this and players would rather have the updated carrots now!
I think having them all in a line would make them a lot easier to access for you and your Norns, personally.
(In other news, I’m back from my hiatus in hospital…)
Welcome back, Chip! I hope everything is going well for you. You can actually see the slightly varied heights in the first image of this post. You’ll notice how some are just a little more underground than others, though not by much. I really like this look, but if it seems like it’s clashing with the room boundaries, I guess we’ll just go back to having everything at one height!
I always love returning to find new posts! Hmm…
I still need to reply to a few of your new posts! I have to login every time, though, which is usually what keeps me from commenting on everything. But judging by my constant chatter, maybe that’s saving you some time! Ha!
Still going back and forth on the carrot positioning. I’ll let that one mull over a little bit. Not like I don’t have a bunch of other Creatures-related stuff to do!
How do the original carrots, or MuppetBoy’s carrots handle this? As I recall, the first lot grew in an exact row and then later things got more staggered.
The original carrots don’t have a randomized y coordinate, while Muppetboy’s vary very slightly. I didn’t even know his had that feature! What I’m mainly trying to figure out is if there’s a set limit on the bottom of a room where Norns can’t actually get to an object. The trouble is that the standard y coordinate (902) seems to be right on the edge, so there might not be much room… Unless we’re OK with having some carrots pop out of the ground some more. I’d rather have them buried some more, though!
Well, ripe carrots do ‘pop’ just before they flower… :)
I think I may have found a compromise that involves changing the sprites a little bit and having a variable y coordinate. I’ll work on that, and should have some good news in the next few days!