Animal encounter tables

[tinker123]

Last week I was looking to detail the wildlife of a world, so hacked together some nasty C code to generate the animal encounter tables per CT book 3 (the CD version, not my UK LBB).
Thought I should offer to share, if anyone out there is interested. Don't really expect much interest.

What did strike me as a potentially useful feature for the next version would be to identify similar critters in different environments. So that 200kg hijacker with a thrasher that lives in forests (let's call it the "spotted headwhacker") would be related to the 100kg hijacker with a thrasher (the "lesser, or mountain headwhacker").

 

[cdward]

Animal Encounters

I'd be interested, although I think my first act would be to see if I could port the C to C# on the compact framework.

Chris D-W

 

[tinker123]

Sorry for the delay - the source and executable (DOS/windows) are both available at http://www.dslewis.plus.com/animal02.zip

I considered using the weapon_dups to make horns-&-hooves equivalent to just horns (or just hooves) etc, so that there are more related critters across the planet.

I also thought about including an ecological analysis of the food chain in each terrain. It would have described which smaller herbivores the large carnivores eat, and so on. But I eventually concluded that the food chain probably depends on smaller critters (<1 kg) which could be available in infinite quantities. So badgers (which are big enough for the chart) eat beetles & worms (which aren't), and the encounter table isn't a complete catalogue of the planet's wildlife.

btw - no need to flame me for lousy coding. I know of many bad practices in there (especially the global variables), but it does the job and that's what interested me this time.

for the avoidance of doubt: the rules are (c) Marc Miller as part of the Traveller game, and the code is all mine, which I hereby release into the public domain.

 

[deniable]

Looks good.

I dropped the source onto a Linux box and it compiled with no problems. Thanks, it beats rolling dice and checking tables.

I now need to build one that works for TNE.

 

[cdward]

Ported to c#

I have converted the code to c# with no issues and compiled it to work on the compact framework. As the compact framework has no console I have created a small GUI. I'm now going to knock up a small standard framework app that replicates the command line.

Chris

 

[tinker123]

todo list

I guess the other thing I should have done to the code would be to externalise a bunch of constants into an .ini file (or newer-tech equivalent). I'm thinking particluarly of the encounter table template that says you always get an event on a roll of 10. The rulebook suggests that these should be varied - does anyone actually use different templates?