new.cos

I have had an absolutely awful background with CAOS, even with 10+ years of scattered attempts to tame it. Its methods of doing things made no sense to me, and its silence on common errors was infuriating.

Then I learned Blender, which made me accustomed to silent errors.

Then I learned C, which made CAOS' grammar make perfect, if not superior, sense.

Not sure why that's what it took for me, since I'm of the impression most other people who write for Creatures never had the same problem or learned the same things. But it is what it is. Even if I'm late, I'm having fun.

The Blender expertise I picked up also amounts to some very useful node setups for Creatures rendering that I'll share as soon as I've confirmed the sprites they generate are peer-reviewed as tolerable. I do know the era of 'uh, go learn 3dsmax or maya, I guess. Have fun' as answer to 'how do I make my sprites look like CLabs'?' is over, for a fact. If it wasn't over already and I just missed it. I did not like those days.

Anyway, I've been experimenting. I've always wanted to make plants, so I'm doing that. Some useful things I've learned so far that might help out others on similar path:

• If using Jagent on OSX 10.9 (and possibly others), do *not* get the app version. Get the universal .jar version, hidden deeper in the download page.
• It helps to use the correct family/genus/species when writing a script. This has been the main reason my scripts were 'broken' so far. I am considering writing some text expansion to avoid this continuing to happen.
• Docking Station does not initialize CreatorX and CreatorY until the creator has already been used once. (It does this before creating the object, of course-- this information is mostly useful for COS injection on new worlds.)
• GOG's version of Exodus is sneaky and strange and I do not trust it.

Also, I ended up  having to roll back my partition changes due to ... silly mistakes on my own part involving Office 2003 and something like 8 hours of misplaced determination. ButI found another 500MB or so I could reclaim, so things are on track -- there's a few things from C3 I want to turn into agents, though, so once I figure out how to get the most vital files over living with DS (the breed sprites/sounds, mostly) I'll probably uninstall it/let its files live nonfunctionally on my Mac until I get to coding 'wrappers' for them. Docked worlds are very slow on my computer anyway.