Basic Knowledge

It is not that difficult to make simple objects for C1, C2 and C3. But before you begin, you should know a few basic things. As long as you use sounds or sprites that come with the games you are safe, but most of the time one wants to use his/her own creations. There are a few things to keep in mind when doing this:

• The names of all sprite and sound files must be exactly four characters long when used in C1 or C2 objects. Think carefully before choosing your names, because you don't want to overwrite already existing files or the work of someone else. Don't use "real" names, using words that consist of four letters are likely to cause trouble if someone else has already made a similar object. The best example are the frog cobs for C1 which both use a sprite file named "frog". The objects are different enough for a player to want to have them both in his world, but he can't because the second one he installs will overwrite the picture of the first one which leads to those unfamous lines that indicate a corrupted sprite file for an object. Better use a rather "cryptic" name (i.e. my sprite files all begin with my initials mh), but always look in your images directory first to check if someone else has already adopted your new naming scheme.

• If you want to use your sprites with C1, make sure that the size of the file in pixels can be divided by four. 

• The transparent color in all three games is black. This means that your images must have a black background to appear transparent in the game. But be careful here, because you cannot use black as a color for your object, these areas will also appear to be transparent. What you have to do is to avoid the rgb value #000000 for areas that aren't supposed to be transparent.

• Fortunately you can name your sprite files anything you want if you only want to use them in C3. This is a big advantage over C1 and C2.

• C1 uses a 256 color palette (8bit), C2 and C3 use a 16bit color palette. This means that often your picture will look much worse than intended once you have converted it to a C1 sprite file. :( You should avoid too many gradients when working with C1.

Concerning all three games another important thing to know is how to use object classifiers. It is fatal to use a classifier that is already in use, because injecting the cob will cause the game to crash immediately or will later cause script errors. Unfortunately there are only 255 classifiers for each object categorie available for C1, so you will most certainly be forced to use one that someone else may have already used. Never forget to include a text file with your cob that tells users which classifiers you  have used, it enables them to avoid clashes.

A complete CAOS documentation for C1 is included with COE which you can download at Alexander Laemmle's Creatures Archive.

Even if making new objects has nothing to do with magic, you will still have to learn the scripting language and you will perhaps realize that this takes time. CAOS has evolved from C1 to C2 to C3, so you cannot simply use the same code for the different games. But once you got started, it won't be that difficult. Just don't give up. ;-)

More coming soon.