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Classification system

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Revision as of 23:28, 4 February 2006 by Alexwatson (talk) (cleaner. maybe remove {{cleanup}} now?)
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Every agent in the Creatures series of games is contained within a hierarchy of classifications, which tells the engine what kind of object it is. The hierarchy descends from family, to genus, to species. For example, the spinning top is in the simple object family, the toy genus, and it is the first species in that genus.

Creatures only have broad categories of object, each made up of several genera, and within which they cannot distinguish between objects. This can be useful in terms of vocabulary and behaviour learning, as Creatures can learn one word and behaviour for a particular 'toy', and it will extend to all others (so that if it's nice to activate the ball, it's also nice to do it to the spinning top). Steve Grand initially saw this as 'cheating' when he made the first Creatures game, preferring a model in which Creatures learnt to generalise more naturally, but limitations of programming power and time have meant that this system has been used throughout the series.

The class number is the family, genus and species written together: for example 2 6 65, which is the class number for the Breaded Hatchling Norn. All agents with the same class number behave identically.

In all Creatures games, family and genus range from 1 to 255. In C1, species has a maximum of 255, and in C2 and CEE-based games, species has a maximum of 65535. Numbers over the maximum wrap around (so species 268 in C1 is equivalent to 12). 0 in any part of the classifier acts as a wildcard (see ENUM, for instance).

Lists of known C1 class numbers and C3/DS class numbers are maintained in addition to the overview below.

Creatures 1 genus numbers

Creatures 2 genus numbers

Creatures 3/Docking Station genus numbers

Other classes can be used, but by default they have no help name, and creatures cannot see them; you can change this, but it involves editing game files, and is therefore quite tricky to do multiple times without knowledge of how the game works - so is not good for players.

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