Agent Overview

There are really only 3 types of file you need to make an agent; an image, a sound and a script.

Images
The image files have the file extension .s16 or .c16 - .c16's are just compressed forms of a .s16 file (and so take up less disk space - highly recommended!).

You can view these sprite files using the CyberLife Sprite Builder, which is available free of charge from this site.

The Sprite Builder does not come with any image editing tools, but you can use cut and paste to create a sprite file from *any* image you may have ... whether it is something you've created yourself or have scanned in. Simply open your images in your favourite paint package and copy them across to the Sprite Builder.

The Sprite Builder comes with some more advanced tools that allow you to cut out individual image frames from a master image that has all the frames on it - refer to the Sprite Builder documentation for use on this feature.

Sounds
The Creatures 3 engine uses ordinary WAV files to produce the sound effects in the game - this means you can use many freeware or shareware tools to create samples.

The quality of the sample will affect how many sounds can be played at any one time. Because the game uses a buffer of a fixed size to store all samples that need to be played, if you produce a sample that is very high quality you may find that it doesn't play when there are a lot of other sounds playing at the same time. Finding the compromise between quality and size can be daunting but nearly all of the samples in Creatures 3 are recorded at 32,075Hz, 16bit Mono - with no noticeable degradation on the samples.

Scripts
Scripts are the life blood of all agents - you need scripts to create and destroy agents as well as making them do something while they are in-game! The format of these scripts is a COS file ... which is merely a plain text document with the text in a particular format. CyberLife have created a CAOS tool that is fully aware of the syntax of COS files and will allow you to create and save your own script files. The CAOS tool also allows you to inject these scripts into the game while it is running.

If you do not have the CAOS tool there is another way in which you can inject your own scripts into the game and that is by placing your completed COS file in the Bootstrap/world folder of your game. Next time you start a new world your script will be run. This has a few disadvantages over using a tool such as the CAOS Tool ... not least of which is that the CAOS Tool will not inject scripts that have syntax errors - the bootstrap method will inject any rubbish you give it! Another advantage is that if you create a lot of objects it can be time consuming to have to quit the game and start a new everytime you want to create a new object.