Miscellaneous Tidbits

Error Logging -
Any errors produced will automatically be logged to a file called "creatures_engine_logfile.txt" - which you will find in your Docking Station (or Creatures 3 if undocked) folder. The format of this shows the nature of the error detected and the action taken.

Windowed Mode -
By default the game will run in full-screen mode without a title bar. However, if you are developing add-ons (or just playing around with the engine!) then you will need to display the game in a window so that you can use other applications at the same time, the CAOS Tool for example. Pressing SHIFT-ALT and ENTER will toggle between full-screen and windowed mode.

AutoKill -
By default the engine puts itself into autokill mode - this means that any agents that produce an error will be killed silently without producing a dialogue box (the fact an error has happened will still be logged though). If you are in windowed mode you can tell whether autokill is enabled because it will state that fact in the title bar. There are two ways to disable autokill: You can alter the shortcut that launches Creatures 3 - if you look at it you will see the line finishes with '--autokill'. Simply remove this part from the shortcut and now whenever you launch Creatures 3 all errors will be displayed. The other method is by using the Wolf Control.

Wolf Control -
The game has an inbuilt agent that can help with wolfling runs, or allow easier long-term monitoring of any factor in the game. Simply press SHIFT-CTRL-W to display/hide the window. From here you can see some interesting facts on the game, and have access to some advanced features. One of the most useful controls allows you to toggle the game to run as fast as possible while disabling the display update. This means you can simulate many hours of play in a much shorter time.

XY Position -
Want to know the position of somewhere in the world? Simply press SHIFT-CTRL-X to display/hide the X and Y position of the top-left point on the hand. Moving the hand around will then allow you to get the coordinates from anywhere in the game.

Room ID -
If you need to find out the room ID of anywhere in the world you can simply press SHIFT-CTRL-R and a display will appear near the hand. This display will then show you the room ID for the room that the hand is currently over (a value of -1 means there is no room defined in that area)

CAOS Command line -
Now you don't need a CAOS tool to enter CAOS into the engine ... it has it's own command line interface! Simply press SHIFT-CTRL-C to enable/disable it. You can enter any CAOS into this but the commands will have to be on one line.

Quit the game without saving -
Press CTRL-BREAK to bring up a dialogue that allows you to quit the game without saving. Use care with this, because the game is not saved any births or new agents created in this session will not be saved.

Development Blues -
Ok, so you're trying to test your latest agent/egg file and there's something wrong with it and it kills the Creator machine or the Egg Layer ... very annoying but at least it didn't take the whole game down with it!

There are two remedies to this (1) Quit the world and restart or (2) Use a tool such as the CAOS Tool to load the COS file for the device in from the Bootstrap folder and re-instate it into the world.

The files you will need are creator3.cos or Norn Egg Layer.cos