Thursday 28 May 2015

Beginner's Guide to Monk Abridged

How to use Monk, half of the Java-based Creatures development tool Jagent.

For the CCSF 2009, I wrote a tutorial on how to use Monk, half of the Java-based Creatures development tool Jagent.

Here is the tutorial, abridged and pictureless. I hope it helps.

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 or .agents file onto the white square, where it says 'drop files here'.

Shortly afterwards, a folder will appear in the same directory to which you have your source agent file in. It will contain the sprites (s16/c16), sounds (wav), code (cos), catalogue file, and a txt file. The txt file is your PRAY file, it is what you need to master in order to compile agents.

To compile, you must understand how to PRAY. 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. Set Monk's mode to "PRAY Chunk" and drag and drop the PRAY .txt file onto the drop pad. It will create a new agent in the same folder as the pray source.

As an addendum, for Windows, it's best to move your agent or files from your Program files directory to somewhere else, like My Documents or the desktop before attempting to use Monk on it, as Windows doesn't appreciate Monk trying to unpack the files.

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