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[Toady One]

Most of the basic growth coding is done.  I now have structures that keep track of colors, patterns, and textures.  These things now permeate creatures (and items and everything else).  I've done the work with quite a bit of detail, so we can already for instance have Black Widow spiders (with red hourglass marks on their smooth shiny black undersides) and eyebrows (even eyelashes).

I still need to define some body building blocks in more details.  For instance, eyes will be anywhere from recessed to stalked, with anything from irises to no pupils at all.  The pupils will have varying shapes (round, slit, etc.).  The color and pattern structures I mentioned above can be used to make bizarre eyes (cheesy skull pupils, hourglasses a la Raistlin from Dragonlance, or whatever).  This won't take very long -- I just need to come up with some parameters.

The final thing before the next release is to make creature descriptions.  I'd like to have descriptive prose paragraphs, as well as links that you can click on to get more specific (even numeric) information.  The prose will be the most difficult part (since I have to translate from the raw data), but I've set up some of the variables to ease the transition a bit.

[Toady One]

Here are the building blocks I have:

BB_APPENDAGE
BB_SAC
BB_DISK
BB_COLUMN
BB_TUBE
BB_CSHAPED
BB_EYE
BB_NOSE
BB_EAR
BB_APERTURE
BB_SPIKE
BB_SUCKER
BB_LEAF
BB_FLOWER
BB_FRUIT
BB_ROOT
BB_BRANCH
BB_PINCER
BB_CLAW
BB_TOOTH
BB_TONGUE
BB_RIB
BB_FEATHER
BB_BEAK
BB_JOINT
BB_SKULL
BB_CASE
BB_SHEET
BB_HEART
BB_ANTENNA
BB_HOOF
BB_SHELL
BB_PLATE
BB_SCALE
BB_GLAND
BB_WING
BB_FIN
BB_HORN
BB_WEBBING

Am I missing anything?  BB_SAC and BB_APPENDAGE are pretty general, and can handle organs/abdomens/etc., and arms/tentacles/etc. respectively.  BB_CSHAPED handles complex shapes -- if a creature had a bunch of star-shaped growths hanging from its underbelly, BB_CSHAPED would handle them.  Hair and quills will be handled by BB_SPIKE.  Finger/toenails are under BB_CLAW.  Stingers are handled by making a BB_SPIKE and possibly a BB_GLAND and hooking them together with a tract.

I might especially be missing some things for plants...  BB_FRUIT might be too general for now (handling fruit, mushrooms, and cones).

Let me know if there are any strange creatures (real or fantastic) that you don't think will be covered by the above types, or if you want clarifications on a given building block.  Introducing as many types as possible now will allow me to avoid lengthy revisions in the future.

[ February 09, 2002: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Toady One]

I've finished the building block descriptions for the above blocks.

I now need to simply implement them in the mammal motif (e.g. add skulls) and add creature descriptions.  That's all I have to do before the next release.  I may do some smaller things, such as check the combat routines to make sure skulls work, and a few other odds and ends, but the only major task in front of me is the creature descriptions.

[Toady One]

The mammal motif is updated to the new format.  I haven't added some of the finer levels of detail (like whiskers on certain mammals), but there's a lot there now.

Now the only thing left is creature descriptions.  I'll add them in this weekend if I can finish them.  I'll at least get started.  It's hard to say if they'll be a lot of work or not -- creature descriptions are the kind of thing I could work on for a very long time, but I only want to get them up to a certain quality level right now.

There's also a strange bug.  Amazingly enough, after all of these revisions (it was quite an overhaul), the game still runs.  There is a problem with muscle strength calculations though.  Creatures are tending to fall over and drop their weapons more than usual, and when I was testing a Norway Rat it crashed (but fortunately I have a good idea why).

In short, the immediate plan is:
1) Do creature descriptions
2) Fix some bugs
3) Add a few more mammal details
4) Make sure skulls work in combat as they should
5) Release the next version

[Toady One]

I've done the general overview descriptions.  Now I just need to do the piece-by-piece descriptions.  I also added some random creature species and did a bug fix on my text display.

[ February 17, 2002: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Demon]

So, now we're going to have humans, ice dragons and fill-in-the-blank mammals?  Or is it going to be purely random with humans again?

How much longer until its ready for The Hair and Nails release?

[Toady One]

The mammal motif is the only one I've made -- you've seen how long it takes to make a motif, so we'll only have mammals for this release.  There's a fake motif called "reptile", but it's the same as the mammal one for now.

I've vaguely kept the old stock races, and I added titans, so you can play somebody roughly 40ish feet/12ish meters tall.  In the character generation screen (which is still the old ugly version), the column on the left is 11 stock races, and the column on the right is 11 random races (either mammal or "reptile", humanoid or quadraped, with varying sizes and so on).  Purely random creatures are feasible now, but it would again take a while to write up a generator for them, especially one that made workable forms (ie beyond the humanoids and quadrapeds we have now).

I should be able to finish the creature descriptions today.  It's hard to estimate how long it will take to do the bug fixes, but they don't look that difficult.  Making sure skulls work should only take a few hours at most, although there is one tricky point that is still bothering me.  That's it...  the next version should be out by next weekend.  I do have a differential geometry assignment to write up for Wednesday, which is why it probably won't be out before then.

[Zonk]

COOL!by the way Toadyone,could you remove JUST TO ALLOW ME the need for authorization on ICQ so we can talk in real-time?

[Toady One]

I've had the ICQ authorization turned off for a few days now.  It still isn't working?!?  Have you tried to add me recently?

[Toady One]

I *thought* I would finish creature descriptions today.  After 3000+ lines of code today over many many hours, I'm not quite done.  I still need a little bit of interface (just making some of the links work) and a few building block descriptions....  unh....  <shudder>

Long day...  At least I won't have to do that again.  Just a little bit more tomorrow...

[Toady One]

With the creature descriptions (almost done), I've solved the people-falling-over-all the time bug.  It was quite simple.  They all started without feet!

[Toady One]

I've solved the only other bugs I know about.  The Norway rats crashed the game because they had no feet and tried to attack.  Non-sentient creatures passed out all the time because the game made their willpowers negative instead of just low.  Creatures dropped their weapons because they were too heavy.  This is because I had to get rid of the one stock material "steel" and make random materials (I had to revamp material structures to do descriptions).  I used an old random material maker, and it was not to date for density calculations.  This meant that all materials were about 20 times as dense as lead...  the creatures could barely carry items made from them, and they were always jolted from grasps upon attack.

The current plan is now:

1.  Polish up a few paragraphs in the descriptions
2.  Skull stuff
3.  Release

[Toady One]

I've done the descriptions.  At least as far as I'm going to do them now -- I haven't done the paragraphs for certain building blocks like flowers, because they just don't come up yet.

Therefore, it now looks like this:

1.  Skull stuff
2.  Release

The mammal motif is not quite as interesting as it should be yet, but some of that will just have to wait for the motif editor (7 releases down the line, when I finally add vegetation).

For this release, I just have a little more code to write to get skulls working properly.  Hopefully this will cut down on the rate of instant death by a good factor, although the best option is still to avoid getting hit in the head.