before anything else, it has to not be shit

casual fluffies v0.3 is kind of garbage when you really stop and observe things, and i probably should have polished it more before releasing it. in typical casual dev fashion, i have released a broken piece of shit, and in the next update, i'm going to fix it, but it's probably still going to be a broken piece of shit because of the new features. while a bunch of alicorns live off the carcasses of their severely inbred friends and family in the official release, the development version is getting an upgrade.

contrary to the way it may seem externally, fluffies don't actually decide most of the things they do. basic wandering, drive satisfaction behavior, and screaming after being smashed into walls are handled by the fluffy ai itself, but other than that, fluffies' responses to things that happen to them are triggered by whatever is doing that thing to the fluffy. obviously, it's fucked up, or else i wouldn't be talking about it in a post dedicated to cleaning up v0.3's mess.

the thing about these events, as i've been calling them, is that there's no major system in place to handle them. everything a fluffy is directed to do is handled by the object that's making the fluffy do the thing, with no proper "event" function in the fluffy code. i get the feeling that all the sliding across the ground the fluffies are doing is a result of incomplete events, and either way, the whole thing is a shitshow to work with, so even if that's not why the fluffies keep doing these things, this event function will make event-related code a lot more pleasant to work with.

making the function wasn't too hard, and soon enough, i had a handy little thing i expected to help me a lot. then, i just had to replace all the weird, shitty forced actions with it. while i was at it, i made a function dedicated to fluffies beating the shit out of each other, because more than one path in the code can lead to that, and it just kinda had multiple copies of the same action floating around. i never counted how many lines were deleted, but i know the code became a hell of a lot more compact and tolerable to look at by the time i was done.

while i was rewriting code to use the new system, i added some stuff in. namely, i had fluffies pause and stare for a bit when a fluffy was hurt near them, and i also touched up an unused flinching animation and had it play when a fluffy fell.

while tweaking the seeking function, i ended up creating a short-lived bug that caused cannibals to have gay sex with their victims instead of smacking them. hot! regardless of any weird shit that happened along the way, working with fluffy code feels a lot smoother now, and i also managed to get cannibals to be more deliberate with their hunting, without as much of a tendency to slide across the floor or turn around and run away when chasing a victim. it's great to watch cannibals efficiently beating the shit out of other fluffies!

speaking of cannibals, i gave corpses a severe nerfing. in total, an entire corpse now contains 390 hunger points' worth of food, compared to the original amount, which was somewhere around 1310. for reference, a fluffy gains 1 hunger per second and starts seeking food when that number reaches 60. a fluffy pregnancy lasts 210 seconds, and foals take 600 seconds to become sexually mature, meaning that pens full of fluffies without food could more than sustain themselves through cannibalism. a single fully grown corpse could sustain ten fluffies for two minutes, and lord knows there's going to be more than one corpse lying around at any given time.

in summary, mother of fucking christ!