Friday, September 3, 2010

I’ve Got You Trapped Now! >:D

One of the most frustrating things about my early days of C2, and even C3/DS, were the difficulties of keeping Norns contained to certain areas. 

While people have invented various agents, from force fields, to gadgets and door locks, and even “stopper” agents to deal with the Norn instinct to travel, I felt it would be a good idea to incorporate features directly into C2toDS wherever needed, to aid in wrangling and entrapping creatures.

One of the most important places such features are needed of course, are on the call buttons.  Not only do Norns, by their very nature, become obsessed with lift call buttons, they also use them frequently to run amuck in a world.

Not anymore!  The two main lift call buttons in Albia have been programmed with locking mechanisms that make them invisible and inoperable to Creatures!

And you can also see that they both have input and output ports for programming automated actions related to lifts.  Trigger the cheese machine to vend as soon as a Norn comes down, perhaps?  The limit is your creativity.

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I’ve also fixed another extremely irritating, saddening, and common problem from Creatures 2.  In fact, my first Norn, a green Emerald named “Matt” died from drowning…I cried…so Norn safety is important to me.

 

With newly installed dock moors with safety rope, creatures will never run off the edge again!

And finally, to surely halt all ye meandering nomads and to protect the wayward wanderer, I have recreated the electric gate from the Creatures 2 Object Pack #1.  As an added bonus and improvement upon the original, it has one output port, reflects agents as well as creatures, and the sound of the field can be disabled on each unit. :)  Observe the field here, reflecting (and also activating) a tomato launcher. :)

I Really Feel We Have a Connection…

One of the things most lacking in Creatures Docking Station were connectable agents, and to this day, few agents incorporate this fun and interesting feature of the C3/DS engine. It really gave users a hobby of sorts--to create useful and fun complex gadgets.

I recently discovered my love of connectable agents, have began to incorporate them into C2toDS. 

This was of course a controversial decision, because it requires editing sprites to incorporate ports, and breaking some of the immersion one might have between C2 and C2toDS.  However, after carefully weighing the decision, and by that I mean I thought it was cool so I kept going, I’ve been incorporating connectability into many of C2toDS’s agents.

From call buttons, to the cheese machine, to teleporters, to tomato launchers, all kinds of gadgets are hooking up!

Hate it or Love it, let me know. :)