Splice Quest

My DS splicer is so, so poorly coded. When I wrote it I was just fumbling through things, barely understanding how they worked and using cheap work-arounds to fix errors rather than find the source of them. Still, it was the first major thing I ever scripted, and the overwhelmingly positive response I got from it gave me the confidence to keep developing even more complex agents. Maybe that's why I enjoy using it, even if it is rather dated and buggy.

I recently learned that between my personal creatures folder and my LNA exports folder, I have nearly 5000 creatures lying around. For some reason, I've always felt ... odd about deleting export files; I would rather them have a death in a world than a simple deletion. So when I feel the need to pare down my massive collection, I enjoy splicing them.

It wouldn't be too difficult for me to just write a script now to just auto-import all my creatures and mass-splice them, but it's just more engaging to fire up the DS splicer, setting the auto-splice, and watch the whole process. Especially for the purpose of this project.

See, I'm trying to find some new genetics to introduce into the gene pool of Hera. So I'm planning on splicing a bunch of creatures, keeping an eye out for any interesting looking females, which will be set aside. Then I plan on letting the girls loose in an undocked DS world with the scenario script running, and letting them go completely feral for a few generations to weed out any bad genes. Hopefully the resulting creatures will do well in Hera, and in the meantime, I'll get to test how well the scenario script works in a feral/wolfling setting.

There's just something fascinating about watching the results of a mass splicing. Especially when I'm watching my own creatures getting spliced, and remembering all the various wolfling runs and other projects that generated the creatures to begin with.

I've put together a quick video here, just showing off the splicing process a little to tide you over until things get interesting in Hera again:

 

This is pretty terrible music for it though. It reminds me of those really depressing clips about factory-farmed animals that are created for the sole purpose of dying horrible deaths so we can eat them. Don't eat factory-spliced norns, kids. Free-range, carrot-fed norns are much tastier!

Okay, now I'm just being weird. Back to the splicing!