Sunday, December 10, 2023

CCSF '23 Release: Natural Learning & Natural Curiosity


Grab the download here!

I don't think many people really check this blog anymore. There's not a usually any reason to, not when there's direct download links on the youtube videos and the CCSF pages. But if you do, know that I appreciate you, and that you are getting access to all these little backstory tidbits that no one else is! So thank you. I wish we could bring blogging and forums back but... that's a whole other discussion.

Anyway, fun fact about this script: it was originally designed as a way to break the "like loop" that creatures in a group tend to get into where they just ramble loudly about who they love/hate forever because they keep echoing each other. Since creatures couldn't get into those loops if they didn't know the words, the original concept for this script was to teach creatures every word except Like, Dislike, Love, and Hate. But then Verm came up with the Like Loop Fix, which is thankfully much simpler. So this script instead morphed into a much slower paced, more general-purpose vocabulary helper.

Which, honestly, has been so helpful for my playstyle. Hand-teaching my creatures is one of my favorite things in the beginning of a world, but the first thing to start feeling like a chore as the population grows. I love that this script doesn't necessarily take hand-teaching away from me or make it pointless, but it doesn't require it of me either, because creatures will eventually learn the words even if I don't get around to each baby. Left alone, they naturally learn some words, but not all of them, and still benefit from a little hand-teaching here and there without needing to drill the entire verb and noun list. I feel like I'm finally finding a balance with this. 

I don't know how many people actually play creatures attentively these days. It seems like most players just have the game open and occasionally glance at it like a fishtank. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I guess I'm just acknowledging the... narrow-ness of the audience for something like this. Still, I felt like it was at least cute enough to warrant a public release. And it's possibly the only release I have that's actually kind of sort of on-theme for CCSF, since the desire to reimplement "what dis?" and "why" stem directly from my C2 nostalgia.

Anyway, if you still enjoy playing creatures attentively, maybe leave a comment? There's more of us out there, right?

10 comments:

  1. I for one appreciate that someone else is still doing this blog thing (granted, I only started doing it again a couple weeks ago, but still).

    As for the agent...I grabbed it even though I'm a hands-off player, almost solely because anything that brings the good stuff from C2 over to C3/DS is a good thing in my book. That, and the idea of creatures who wind up getting auto-vocabed from things like the HLM or the Knowledge Stones teaching the rest sounds fun to watch.

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    1. Hah, I know what you mean, lately I only make blog posts for CCSF releases. I'd really like to get back into the habit of updating it more frequently. Be the change, and all that. At least there's a couple of us!

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  2. I adore blog posts! Like when I binge read through a blog's years of posts, it's super helpful to know what happened in the past. It's kinda like a journal or diary. I don't think I would have known CCSF was a thing if it weren't for your blog posts. Especially for newbies, a blog that dates back to 2009, is like super helpful, I don't have to hunt down posts via the Internet Archive.

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    1. aww thank you and I'm glad! It is kind of cool to see how things have changed over the years. I do cringe sometimes looking back at my older posts, lol, but don't we all? XD

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  3. I picked the game back up on a whim after a long, long hiatus (since 2004 at least) but before that I played constantly from C1 onwards. I still have a couple of beanie norns somewhere haha. I have tons of your agents and cobs in my world right now! Thanks for your unwavering dedication to the community!

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    1. Aaa thank YOU and I'm so glad to hear that! I feel like this is one of the more difficult games to grasp for new folks so it's especially nice to see people picking it up again. I hold out some hope that if we can keep the spark alive maybe one day it will start a fire :>

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  4. Hi, I love your blog and use the agents and scripts you made in my game often! Curiosity about the world and teaching themselves/each other words I've been wanting for SO long in Creatures 3, so I was so excited to see this announced. Currently I am more a lurker in the Creatures community than anything, but I have a blog I just started this past week documenting a Hera scenario run I started btw (flibdis.tumblr.com). It definitely is easy to feel like you're just posting into a void sometimes, but I'm so glad blogspots like yours are still alive :)

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    1. AHH yay another blog! I added you to my list (Giggling SO hard at the printed Creatures Adventures image oh my gosh I completely forgot about that feature dsjadgfjhfg). I know what you mean about posting into a void though. Maybe if we keep at it one day we can overcome the void!

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  5. Hey! Just wanted to throw my comment in with the rest and say that I also read and appreciate your blog entries. (Plus your dedication to doing cool things, of course!) But uh, I still connect to MOOs / MUDs daily, so I'm not exactly what you would call fashionable in this regard... Maybe I should join the cause and start a blog. I do already talk to myself in 'developer notes' as kind of rubber duck debugging and knowing where I last left off on millions of projects. Maybe somebody out there would be entertained by the ramblings of a mad man? Stranger things have surely happened.

    Sadly I haven't really attentively played Creatures since 2005ish. Back in the day I was very serious about getting just the right blend of those crazy neon Norns that used to get warped around. Now it's just a lot of letting them do their thing in a debugger to get C2 in a working state. That will change soon, hopefully, if (when) I can get my nieces into playing. We'll definitely be incorporating natural learning.

    I'll probably start them with C2, though. QA and all that...

    (Sorry, this got kind of rambley. :p)

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    1. THANK YOU I love these rambles!! And I personally would love to see a developer notes blog; it's fascinating to see others' thought process and logic behind things (and so often I end up learning something from it).

      Hope your nieces will enjoy it when the time comes! It's cool to see more and more "second generation" creatures fans popping up these days, even if it does make me feel old :P

      (P.S. I... probably would still be active in MUDs too if I had any friends that were still on them... they're so full of warm nostalgia...)

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