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Thursday, May 17, 2012

CAs and You!

So what is CA?

CA stands for Cellular Automata. More often, they are

called “smells”, although this is somewhat of a
misnomer, since light, nutrients, and water are not
exactly smells, but since the majority of CAs are
smells, the name sticks anyway.

CAs, sadly, are not easily perceived by the player, and

as a result, we often forget completely about them
while developing or even just setting up a creature
habitat. I’m writing this stuff up to help bring awareness
to how CAs are used in the game, how creatures
perceive them, and how important it is that we design
our agents and metarooms with the proper flow of CAs
in mind.

CAs are Room Values!

Look at the map of the room below:

Each of those little sections, those little boxes, is called

a room. The lines that divide them are known as doors.
Even though they don’t really look like rooms or doors
as we know them, that is how they are referred to, so
just keep that in mind as you read the rest of this
article.

CAs are not little invisible agents that waft around the
ship like bacteria. They are actually numerical values
calculated and stored in each room. One room might
have a CA 8 (fat) smell value of 0.65, and the room
next to it might have a CA 8 value of 0.55. CA values
range from 0 to 1.

If you want to know the value of a certain CA in a

certain room, first make sure you can see you room
map by entering “dmap 1” in the caos command line.
Center the hand in the room you want to check and
enter the following: “outv prop grap mopx mopy #”
replacing the “#” with a number from 0 to 19,
depending on the CA you are testing for. Hitting enter
should return a decimal value for the CA.

In the screens below, I’ve created labels to monitor the

CA value of protein in each room. I’ve removed all
other sources of protein smell in the world, so the only
agent producing the smell are the lemons in the top
left. As you can see, the CA concentration is the
strongest where the lemons are sitting, and gets to be
less and less as the rooms get further away. Even
down at the bottom of the workshop, the CA exists,
meaning a creature can sense it and follow it.

CAOS Note: Lemons don’t smell like lemons just

because they’re classified as fruit! To make an agent
“smelly” you have to use the EMIT command in the
creation script-- the same place in the script you set
your ATTR, BHVR, and other agent settings. The EMIT
command is structured as such: emit [CA number]
[amount]. The amount ranges from 0 to 1, so you might
use 0.05 to give your agent a mild scent, or 0.9 for a
very strong smell. You can actually set EMIT to a
number even higher than 1, but the increase is very
minimal.

How Creatures Use CAs

The classic Creatures IQ Test is the most common

example of how exactly creatures use CAs to find their
way around.

Creature brains already know from the start that

protein smell is linked to fruit-- this is defined when the
world is created using the CACL command, it’s not
something they need to learn. And most creatures are
born with an instinct to find fruit when they are hungry
for protein. Once a creature decides to go looking for
fruit, a combination of brain and action scripts take
over.

The brain starts

by checking the
room the
creature is in,
and the rooms
around it. It then
decides which
room has the
highest CA
value. If that
room is to the
left or right, a
creature will
simply walk that direction, but if that direction is up or
down, the creature will start to feel very “low down” or
“high up”, which will trigger its instincts to push or pull
lifts to get moving in the direction with the higher CA.
Similarly, if the CA is higher in a room that the creature
can’t access by walking, it will start feeling “trapped”
and feel inclined to push doors.

So in
short, for
a
creature
to pass a
classic
IQ test, it
needs to:

- Be
hungry.
-

Understand that food (or fruit or seeds) will satisfy its

hunger.
- Decide that finding food is more important than
pushing the training dummy, taking a nap, smashing
the lift button repeatedly, running into walls, etc.
- Be able to detect smells
- Understand that pushing lifts will satisfy its “need to
go up” drive
- Understand that pushing doors will satisfy its “need to
exit/trapped” drive.
- Not have any pose or gait mutations that might
prevent it from traveling properly.

Primarily, creatures use CAs to find food. Creatures will

also follow them to find their way home. This is most
commonly seen in pregnant norns, who will often feel
homesick and try to make their way back to the heating
pan or incubator, where the hidden “norn home” (CA
15) emitter is located. Ettins will also make use of this,
following the CA to “ettin home” (CA 17) when they are
carrying a gadget (which they might have sought out
by following the CA for “gadget” (18). CAs play a few
other roles here and there, for example “norn” (12) CA
generally makes grendels angry.

How other agents use CAs

While creatures use CAs for navigation, there are

some plants and animals that rely on CAs as well. CA
3 (moisture) and CA 4 (nutrients) are sometimes
required for certain plants to grow. The seed might
check the room that it lands in, and if the CA levels
aren’t high enough, it will just rot away instead of
sprouting. Moisture might be added by little raindrops
that, upon hitting the ground, add a little CA 3 into the
room they land in. CA 4 might be added by decaying
food; essentially compost. Similarly, some critters might
require certain light or heat levels to reproduce or for
eggs to hatch.

But this is all very agent-specific-- many third-party

plants and critters especially don’t rely on CAs in part
because many third-party metarooms don’t use
emitters. These days, having an agent that requires
certain CAs to function tends to really cripple where it
can be used.

Overall, CA requirements for agents can potentially

add a lot of complexity and interest to the game, but it
requires a lot of knowledge about exactly what the
agents require. In a room of CA-requiring agents, you
might want to be careful about planting too many
flowers that require lots of nutrients, lest they deplete
the soil and your fruit-bearing plants are unable to
grow. You might have to worry about watering the soil
regularly, or throwing apple cores over it. The more CA
requirements an agent has, the more restrictions there
are on where it can thrive.

Often, when it comes to customizing, it’s easier to just

ignore CA requirements and script in a form of
population control, limiting where your plants sprout by
room-type instead of CAs, so your species will thrive
whether or not a room has proper emitters. But if you
want to include this sort of interesting complexity into
your agents, it’s important to specify to players what
CAs they need, so the player knows to provide them in
one way or another, whether by placing them in a room
with emitters, creating their own emitters, or using
other CA-altering agents.

CAOS Notes: Creating emitters is very easy. The code

goes something like this:

new: simp 1 1 [species] "blank" 0 0 0

emit [CA number] [amount]
mvto [x] [y]

That’s it. Let’s say I want to be really mean and make a

protein smell emitter to confuse my creatures. I might
enter “new: simp 1 1 12345 "blank" 0 0 0 emit 6 0.5
mvto mopx mopy”.

This would create an invisible agent where the hand

was that constantly emitted protein/fruit smell.
Creatures would come from all over looking for fruit,
and find nothing, and get very confused. So I wouldn’t
recommend using it for fruit smell, but you might use it
to emit light or heat, whatever the agents in the room
might require.

But let’s say you don’t want to create an agent that

emits a CA forever-- let’s say you just want to give the
room a one-time boost of a certain CA, like how fruit
might give the soil a little bit of nutrients as it decays.
For this, you would use the ALTR command:

ALTR [Room ID] [CA number] [amount]

The room ID will probably be the room that the agent is

sitting, in which case you can use “room targ” or “room
ownr” in place of the room ID. If you’re running this
from the CAOS command line, you can just use “room
pntr” to use the room the hand is hovering over.

Amount in this case goes from -1 to 1, depending on if

you want to subtract or add some amount of CA from
the room.

Now, one thing to note is that ALTR doesn’t work on

“smell” CAs that creatures use for navigation; it only
works on CAs 0-5. If you need to alter the other CA of
a room, you can use PROP, a command with the same
function of ALTR, but instead of adding or subtracting
the number specified, it sets that CA level in that room
to exactly the number specified.

How CAs Travel

Now, we know what causes a CA value to exist at all,

but what affects how CAs travel from one room to
another?

Just a moment ago, we mentioned that ALTR works on

some CAs, but not others. It works on heat, water,
light, and other CAs that do not represent smells.
Actual smell-based CAs are called “navigable” CAs by
the game, presumably meaning that they are CAs
creatures can follow to find their way to food sources or
other objects of desire.

The interesting thing is that while non-navigable CAs

can travel freely in all directions, navigable CAs only
travel to the left and right.

For the purposes of demonstration, I have removed CA

links from this room. Note how the grendel smell will
only travel from left to right, and ignore rooms above
and below:

Why do navigable CAs work like this? Doesn't it make

more sense that smells would travel through all
rooms? Well, to us, yes, but you have to remember
that we're dealing with not-so-bright creatures.
Again, for
purposes of

demonstration, I have set the pink and white grazer to

emit a non-navigable CA that can travel anywhere. But
let's say that was a protein smell, and poor Disastrous
Plantation wanted to get to it? She would feel a pretty
painfully stabbing desire to go up once she reached
the open air, and have no way to get there. Maybe she
would travel a bit more to the left to take the lift there,
but she would just walk off the edge of the cliff trying to
get to the grazer, getting increasingly more confused.

So for the sake of the creatures, it is better that smells

only naturally travel in the directions that creatures can
walk, and the rest be controlled by CA links.

CA links are very critical part of navigation for

creatures, but not all third party metarooms include
them, meaning you need to set them up manually to
ensure your creatures can thrive.

As an
example,
here we see
that there is
a bounty of
food right
above Herria.
But since
smell CAs do
not pass
vertically
through
rooms,
without CA
links, she'll
never be
able to smell the food right above her.

CAOS Notes: Setting up a CA link is actually very

easy. The syntax is as follows:

LINK [room1] [room2] [perm]

Room1 and Room2 are the room numbers you want to

link. Getting these numbers is easy-- using
Shift+Ctrl+R will produce the number of the room the
hand is currently in right next to the hand:

As shown, the room numbers we want to link here are

839 and 855. The perm is easy-- for most CA links, it is
set to 1, to let all CAs flow freely between the link.
Setting it to 0.5 would only let about half the CA
amounts through the link, and so on.

So once we
enter our
command,
"LINK 839
855 1" ...
Herria can
suddenly
smell
something
delicious
above her,
and does not
hesitate even
a second to
take the lift
up to where
the fragrant food awaits! As you can see by the tags,
the CA smell has spread out into the rooms below.

CA links are also used to connect different metarooms

together by creating a link between the rooms that the
doors are located in; this way the creatures can smell
what's on the other side of the door.

CA links are not just useful for linking up metarooms

though-- creating links between rooms where elevines
reside will encourage creatures to use them as well.
Just remember that you are creating a link between
two rooms, not two agents, and if you move the
elevine, you'll need to break the old link (by running the
command again with the perm set to zero) and create
a new one, if you want to avoid some very confused
creatures wondering where that smell is coming from!

Room Types and CAs

There's one more important thing to know about CAs,

and that's how room types affect them. Room types are
not just to determine if plants should grow or if fish
should swim-- each type of room treats each CA
differently. Consider the chart below:

Gain determines how much of the CA is absorbed from

emitters in the room, Loss is how much of the CA
dissipates into nothingness, and Diffusion controls
how much of the CA flows over into other rooms.

Here you can see that soil-type rooms are really the
only ones that can hold onto nutrient CAs, and CA
smells travel much more easily through hard surface
areas than through soil.

The variations between room types are subtle, but one

special type of room to note is "Ettin Home," which is
very much like a standard walkway with one huge
exception-- it doesn't carry absorb gadget smell from
gadgets in the room. This strange mechanism basically
ensures that once ettins bring gadgets home to add to
their hoard, they don't smell them anymore, meaning
they can still pick up the subtle smells of other gadgets
further away on the ship and hunt them down.

These relationships between CAs and Room Types

can be altered with the RATE command, but you want
to be careful what you do, because changes in CA
rates will affect your whole world. Perhaps the most
common CA rate modification available is Moe's Heat
in Water transfer, which changes the rates to
allow...well, heat to travel through water.

Wow... well, that about wraps up what I've learned

about CAs over the past several weeks! I hope this
clears up a lot of questions and misunderstandings
about CAs, and hopefully makes the world an easier
place for norns to find their way around. If you have
any questions or comments or corrections, feel free to
leave them below! And stay tuned for the release of a
few Magic Words commands that will make managing
your world's CA links a lot easier, I hope!

Amaikokonut at 10:35 AM

5 comments:

Unknown May 17, 2012 at 11:00 AM

Awesome post, Amai! I'm one of those people who had
absolutely no idea what CAs were prior to this article...
I couldn't even tell you what CA stood for! Although
lengthy, you touched on pretty much everything
possible and made CAs seem much easier to
understand. The CAOS codes to control them don't
seem too crazy, but some Magic Words commands
would be amazing! I have a feeling I might have a
grand ol' time coding an entire world to make sure CAs
were emitted and linked properly. Thanks for putting
this together: I think it will be very handy to anyone
looking for a reference on CAs!
Reply

Risen Angel May 17, 2012 at 4:09 PM

About time someone wrote an article about this.
Hopefully, the amount of metarooms being made
without proper CA links should decrease now. Provided
this article gets enough attention, that is.
Reply

ArchDragon May 17, 2012 at 7:28 PM

Finally, a comprehensive guide to using CAs. Even
better, some CAOS to play with for those who can't
code entire rooms!

Grendelman is right, this stuff needs to be given heaps

of attention. The number of amazing rooms or agents
I've had to push to one side due to mixed up or non-
existant CAs...well it's probably most of them :(

I'll definitely be linking my blog to this post. The more

advertising it gets the better.
Reply

Malkin May 18, 2012 at 4:04 PM

Fantastic article! :D

This could also mention that you can't make an object

EMIT more than 1 CA at a time - for rotting detritus
such as the apple cores, which emit moisture and
nutrients, they use ALTR.

It could also mention the bootstrap files "z_agent

smells.cos" and "z_DS agent smells.cos" control which
CA are linked to which objects - so they can be edited if
you want to, for example, make flower scent associated
with plants and flowers (but in order to get flower smell
into your world, you'll need to edit your plant cos files to
make it so). They can also be used as a developer's
reference for 'what CA is linked to what object in
everyone's worlds?'

It's great to see all of the burgeoning interest and

knowledge about CA set out and explained (with
pictures! :D) like this. Thanks! :D
Reply

Unknown May 18, 2012 at 4:06 PM

One note about CA linking, you can't actually rely on
the room numbers themselves as they're variable. This
code is more effective:

// room 1
setv va00 grap xcoord ycoord
// room 2
setv va01 grap xcoord ycoord
link va00 va01 1

That will work regardless of what room numbers they

are. :)
Reply

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