Day Fourteen Release: Tutorial

on Saturday

Next up we have a tutorial from Malkin, who teaches us how to work with Jagent, an earlier release in this year’s CCSF from RProgrammer, so if you haven’t checked that out yet then now is a great chance to.

Beginner’s Guide to Monk

“Hi, welcome to the Beginner’s Guide to Monk, part of the Jagent development suite by RProgrammer. (available at SourceForge) The example agent we’ll be using today is the Liam SDR Dolls by Trix that were released for the CCSF 2006.

Please ensure that you’re using the most recent version of Java, as Jagent 2.0.x requires Java 6, and will work on any system that supports Java 6.

To Decompile:

In ye olden days of C1, cobs would come in their component parts, and you would have to move each sprite, each sound, and each cob script into its proper place within the Creatures folder, and you were grateful, too! For C3 and DS, agents can contain images, sounds, scripts, and information about where agents inject inside one file – the agent file. To extract the components of an agent, you must decompile it. Open Monk and set the type of file you’re working with to “PRAY Source”. Then drag and drop the .agent file onto the white square, where it says ‘drop files here’. (Figure 1) Shortly afterwards, a folder will appear in the same directory to which you have your source agent file in. (ringed in dark green in Figure 2) It will contain the sprites (s16/c16), sounds (wav), code (cos), catalogue file, and a txt file. (Figure 3) The txt file is your pray file, it is what you need to master in order to compile agents. (ringed in yellow, Figure 3) Please note that although we started out with one agent, we have three different scripts for the three different dolls. (ringed in light green, Figure 3)

To Compile:

First, you must understand how to PRAY. To do this, there are tutorials available on Sarako’s Home Sweet Albia, Hausmouse’s Creatures 3 Page and the Creatures Development Network. Your pray file can be saved as a .txt file. Have all the files you plan to compile together in the same folder as the pray file. Double-check that you’ve got all the files included in the pray file as “inline files”. This is, I believe, the most common mistake with pray files. Set Monk’s mode to “PRAY Chunk” and drag and drop the pray .txt file onto the drop pad. (Figure 4) It will create a new agent in the same folder as the pray source.

Congratulations, you have now begun your journey with Jagent!

Jagent was created by RProgrammer (root@rprogrammer.net)
This tutorial was written by Malkin for the CCSF 2009.”