Naturing :: Nurturing

Gnarlers are about to become my favorite critter

2012-01-23T14:33:00.000-08:00

I was trying to make a video showcasing the progress on the Garden Box, only to discover than my microphone has finally died, and I can't explain it as well with text-captions. So in the meantime, have something cute:

Counting the Images in a Sprite File

2012-01-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

This is it, my friends.
These are these obscene lengths we go to to completely screw with the engine in ways it was probably never meant to be used, to get some pointless little piece of information out of it.

Dear, dear C2E developers. Why did it not occur to you to include a command to list how many images are in a sprite file? Even a modification of SNAX to check if a particular pose existed would have been lovely. No, instead it comes to this, scripts in which ERRORS ARE VOLUNTARILY THROWN to find out something so, so simple.

Le sigh.

So I'm sure this breaks every Best Practice for coding... but the basic idea behind the code is this.

We create an agent, that, upon being mesg wrt+'d a sprite filename, creates a test agent with that sprite file.
It then turns autokill on to avoid the inevitable errors, and then prompts the text agent to increase its pose.
After each pose increase, it checks to see if it's still there (and hasn't autokilled itself).
It keeps count of the pose increases and, when the agent does error and autokill, it outputs the last post increase that worked, and thus the last image in the file.

I'm ...fairly certain autokill is not meant to be used this way. And I'm not sure what the consequences might be of running scripts like this constantly, ones that create and hide errors. I'm not a fan of using autokill to cover up mistakes or problems that could be solved by better coding. But I think this is the only choice in this case.

What would you guys call this? Clever error handling, or a dirty trick?

View the cosfile here, and make whatever use of it that you wish. Edit, copy, re-purpose, whatever.

Injecting the code itself will do nothing at first-- here is how you use it:

If you're just testing it from the command line:
rtar 1 1 22932 mesg wrt+ targ 1000 "[FILENAME]" "_hand" 0
Will make the hand-bubble output the number of images.

If an agent is prompting it, you can do it one of two ways:

rtar 1 1 22932 mesg wrt+ targ 1000 "[FILENAME]" "[STRING]" 0
This will have the agent set the [string] as a NAME variable in the FROM agent as an integer containing the count. So if your string is "spritecount" then the agent will setv NAME "spritecount" to equal the number of images so the agent can access the number later.

rtar 1 1 22932 mesg wrt+ targ 1000 "[FILENAME]" [INTEGER] 0
This will tell the agent to MSG WRT+ the script of the given [integer] of FROM agent, with _p1_ being the results of the image count.

Since the image-counting agent takes several ticks to count through, the output won't be available for use immediately, hence the second option.

A couple of thoughts on this whole thing:

The notion of creating a dummy/test agent is something I came across while writing the Garden Box. As I was pretty much re-writing the agent injector, I referenced it a lot and found that the injector has a similar mechanism-- it actually creates a "dummy" injector that injects the agent, and if it throws any errors, collects and displays them in the injector window. This way the agent injector doesn't autokill itself. Granted, the agent injector doesn't turn autokill on and try to create errors.

I'm sure this system, dirty as it is, could be applied to discover things other than counting images, I'm just not sure what.

And intentional error throwing aside, the actual way this agent works is something I've been wanting to try for a while-- you mesg wrt+ something to it and it returns a variable-- so the agents sort of talk to each other. I think maybe systems like this could be used to implement really primitive functions. Unfortunately it's not something that can be done instantly, but it might have some use down the line.

I sometimes think I'm completely losing my mind in this stuff. I question enough on a daily basis why exactly I continue to dig so deeply into a coding language that maybe a hundred or so people in the world, tops, will ever gain any benefit from. And now in cases like this, I'm not even coding for the sake of making the game better; I'm coding for the joy of solving problems that no one even needs solved.

I should get back to working on the garden box. Actually the garden box itself has been done for weeks, it's just that I was writing the patch plant scripts and got sick of coding dialogue boxes and went off to find a way to make that easier and started poking in PHP and I don't even know when I decided to try and find a way to count sprite files. But maybe I'll get back on track now. Kind of. I still need to develop a decent dialogue box system; that's going to take time.

I still can't believe there's no command for counting images. Knowing me though, there probably is, and I'm just blind to it, and went through all this agony to make myself look ridiculous.

It was fun agony, though.

CAOS Notes: WOLF

2012-01-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

From the CAOS documentation:

WOLF(integer) kanga_mask (integer) eeyore_mask (integer)
Provides various functions to distort space-time and otherwise help with wolfing runs. Set an AND and an EOR mask, to control the following bits:
1 - Display rendering. Turning it off speeds the game up.
2 - Fastest ticks. The game usually runs at a maximum of 20 frames per second. If this is set, it instead runs as fast as it can.
4 - Refresh display at end of tick. If set, then the display is updated at the end of the tick, and the flag is cleared.
8 - Autokill. If set, agents which generate run errors are automatically killed, as the command line option.

This can be a pretty confusing command to understand. It seems, just by glancing at the bits that this would work something like ATTR, wherein, say, if you wanted to have both autokill and fast ticks on, it would total to 10. But knowing that, where do these "kanga" and "eeyore" masks come in?

It's a little complex, but once you get the hang of how this works, it's really pretty neat. In fact, I kind of wish ATTR and BHVR worked this way-- you could accomplish more in fewer lines of code.

The thing about WOLF is that it's an integer, not a command. You can't set WOLF by just entering WOLF 8 or whatever, like you would with ATTR and BHVR. You have to actually set it as though it were a variable to alter it.

To find out what your game's WOLF currently is, open the command line and enter outv wolf 15 0. Why 15 and 0? We'll get to that.

Depending on your autokill status, your game probably returned 1 or 9. 1 being on for display rendering, and 8 being added to that if your autokill is on.

So here's a bit of mental review; WOLF only has four traits to worry about, so it's easy to take an output value and do the math in your head. So if your WOLF returned 15, what traits would be "on"? What if it returned 12? 7? 0? You'll have to have a decent grasp on this to understand how WOLF works.

15 would mean, yes, that all four traits, Display (1), Fast Ticks (+2), Refresh (+4), and Autokill (+8) are on. 12 would mean only Refresh (4) and Autokill (+8) are on, and 7 means Display (1), Fast Ticks (+2), and Refresh (+4) are on. 0 implies that no traits are on at all. This might be elementary to you by now from working with similar constructs in ATTR and BHVR.

Bear with me-- let's repeat the exercise looking for different answers. If WOLF returned 15, what traits would be "off"? What of 12, 7, or 0?

I'm sure you're clever enough to figure out the answers are the opposite of the above-- if a trait isn't on, it's obviously off. So 15 would have no "off" traits, 12 would have Display and Fast Ticks off, 7 means Autokill is off, and 0 means that all four traits are off.

I hope this exercises aren't totally fruitless-- the point that when you glance at a WOLF number, you need to think of it in terms of both what traits are off, as well on.

So now that your WOLF deciphering muscles are working, let's dive into the hard stuff: The masks.

These four "rules" here are all you need to know to decipher what your AND ("Kanga") and OR ("Eeyore") masks need to be:

1. If a trait is off in the AND mask and on in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be on.
2. If a trait is off in the AND mask and off in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be off.
3. If a trait is on in the AND mask and off in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be the same.
4. If a trait is on in the AND mask and on in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be the opposite.

Using these masks, then, you will essentially be able to, in one line, set your wolf controls any way you want them, even taking into account what they already are.

Let's go back to the line we used: outv wolf 15 0.
In this case, 15 is the AND mask, and 0 is the OR mask. That means that all the traits are on in the AND mask and off in the OR mask, which, according to rule 3, the traits will remain the same, unchanged, and the output will be the current WOLF value.

But let's say we wanted to turn all the traits on. To turn a train on, we have to follow rule 1, and make sure all the traits are off in the AND mask (making it 0) and on in the OR mask (making it 15). So we would outv wolf 0 15, which should return 15 and, depending on your computer, may make your world look like it's in super-speed mode (due to both fast ticks and rendering being on).

Before I go any further I need to address something odd before all sorts of questions come up. WOLF is a little bit odd in that 1 (Display) and 4 (Refresh) cannot be on at the same time. If the game is displaying rendering, there's obviously then no reason to refresh the display as it's already being refreshed. So if you set WOLF to 15, 5, 7, or any value that sets both Display and Refresh to on, the engine will automatically turn refresh back off after setting it. So even if you use outv wolf 0 15 to set the WOLF to 15, if you enter outv wolf 15 0 to check it, you'll get back 11, since refresh has been turned off. As far as I can tell, Display always overrides Refresh, not vice versa.

Anyway, now that that's out of the way.

Quiz time again: What would outv wolf 0 0 do?

Since all traits are off in both AND and OR masks, we would look to rule 2, which tells us all the traits will be off. Thus the above command would set your WOLF to 0. It will also sort of freeze up your game, since Display is off-- opening and closing Wolf Control will reset it to normal.

But let's get down to practical information now-- if you're coding something interesting, chances are you're not looking to turn everything on and off at once. Let's try a line that toggles fast ticks on and off. This will really only be apparent on machines that are fast enough to benefit from fast ticks with the display still running-- you might want to try it in a clean and undocked DS world if you're not seeing the difference.

outv wolf 15 2

Enter that once and watch your game spaz out. Enter it again and watch it return to normal.
Can you decipher why this works? This table might help explain exactly what's going on in this command:

	AND	OR	Rule	Result
Value	15	2	*	*
1 - Display	ON	OFF	3	Same
2 - Fast Ticks	ON	ON	4	Opposite
4 - Refresh	ON	OFF	3	Same
8 - Autokill	ON	OFF	3	Same

So setting up the masks this way allows for all the other traits to stay the way they are, while fast ticks is set to toggle (turn off if it was already on, turn on if it was off). In fact, you could use this table as a tool to work backwards from to find the masks for virtually anything you want to accomplish.

Say you want to make a switch that turns Display on, toggles Fast Ticks, turns Refresh off, and leaves Autokill the way it is. You would start with a table like this, putting in your own desired results.

	AND	OR	Rule	Result
Value	?	?	*	*
1 - Display	?	?	?	On
2 - Fast Ticks	?	?	?	Opposite
4 - Refresh	?	?	?	Off
8 - Autokill	?	?	?	Same

Next you look at the rules that would give you those desired results. I'm going to paste them again so you don't have to scroll all the way back up:

1. If a trait is off in the AND mask and on in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be on.
2. If a trait is off in the AND mask and off in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be off.
3. If a trait is on in the AND mask and off in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be the same.
4. If a trait is on in the AND mask and on in the OR mask, the resulting trait will be the opposite.

So if you want Display to be on, you'll have to find the rule that gives you the on result. Since that is rule one, you'll want to follow it, setting the trait off in the AND mask and on in the OR mask:

	AND	OR	Rule	Result
Value	?	?	*	*
1 - Display	OFF	ON	1	On
2 - Fast Ticks	?	?	?	Opposite
4 - Refresh	?	?	?	Off
8 - Autokill	?	?	?	Same

Now just fill in the rest of the chart, following the rules reversely.
To get opposite fast ticks, follow rule 4 and set both masks to on
To turn refresh off, follow rule 2 and set both masks to off.
Finally, to keep autokill the same, follow rule 3 to set AND to on and OR to off.
In the end, you should have something like this:

	AND	OR	Rule	Result
Value	?	?	*	*
1 - Display	OFF	ON	1	On
2 - Fast Ticks	ON	ON	4	Opposite
4 - Refresh	OFF	OFF	2	Off
8 - Autokill	ON	OFF	3	Same

What does that leave? Just adding up the values of your on traits. Fast ticks (2) and Autokill (8) are on in your AND mask, totally to 10, while Display (1) and Fast Ticks (2) are on in your OR mask, totaling 3.

	AND	OR	Rule	Result
Value	10	3	*	*
1 - Display	OFF	ON	1	On
2 - Fast Ticks	ON	ON	4	Opposite
4 - Refresh	OFF	OFF	2	Off
8 - Autokill	ON	OFF	3	Same

And that means, to set these values via the command line, outv wolf 10 3.

And that, my friends, is how you spend 14 hours using WOLF to set some settings you will probably never use.

You're probably going to pull your eyes out of your head and cry when I reveal the absolutely trivial purpose I have behind working all this out.

TL;DR:
I don't blame you. Screw it, I'll just write up a WOLF calculator someday.

CAOS Notes: ORRV

2012-01-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

Let's say you want to make everything in your world carryable by the hand.

This is actually a terrible idea and a great way to screw up your world, but let's throw all that to the wind and have ourselves some chaos.

enum 0 0 0
    setv va00 attr
    orrv va00 2
    attr va00
next

Yes, 0 0 0. If this kills your game you may want to filter it a bit.

ORRV is another weird little command. If you ORRV an ATTR or BHVR value, it will, similar to ANDV, spit out a number that will tell you if the value you're checking is set or not. Only if the value is set, instead of spitting out the value you're checking, it'll spit out your original attr/bhvr.

So in our last lesson:
     setv va00 bhvr
    andv va00 16
If va00 = 16, the eatable bhvr is set.

You can do the same thing with ORRV:
     setv va00 bhvr
    orrv va00 16
But va00 will equal bhvr, not 16, if that bhvr is set. (doif va00 = bhvr...)

There's always a thousand ways to code the same thing, so just do whatever you want.
ORRV, however, has this neat little side effect, you see. If the value you're checking for is not set, ORRV will return the ATTR or BHVR value that your agent would have if it was it set.

So if you want to set an agent as invisible, suffering physics, or whatever, ORRV it, and then just ATTR the value. If it's already set, it'll have no effect, and it if it's not, it will be.

Of course, you could accomplish the same with ANDV, it would just take more lines than necessary:

enum 0 0 0
    setv va00 attr
    andv va00 2
    doif va00 ne 2
        setv va00 attr
        addv va00 2
        attr va00
    endi
next

ORRV is just easier in this case.

Avoid using this to set BHVR values, since those, unlike ATTR values, actually need certain scripts to run and will throw errors if you don't have them. Also remember that if you set an agent to suffer physics, you'll actually have to give it some physics for it to mean anything (ACCG, ELAS, FRIC, etc).

So ORRV is nice for setting attributes an agent doesn't already have, but if you wanted to, say, make all your agents unmovable (to restrain yourself from interfering in a wolfling run, maybe), you'd still have to subtract the value manually:

enum 0 0 0
    setv va00 attr
    orrv va00 2
    doif va00 eq attr
        subv va00 2
        attr va00
    endi
next

Anyway, hopefully by now you have the hang of using ANDV and ORRV for your ATTR/BHVR checking and changing needs. I'm still grasping it myself, so if you're a wiser sort and see anything that I'm missing, do share the knowledge for the benefit of all!

CAOS Notes: Can I eat this?

2012-01-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

Ever want to use CAOS to check if an object is edible? Invisible? Pickup-able by the hand?

Deciphering ATTR and BHVR values at a glace isn't the easiest thing in the world, and it's not exactly glaringly obvious how one would do so with CAOS, either. This is just a really simple script that teleports everything in the world that is edible by creatures to the hand, to demo how you might go about identifying BHVR or ATTR values in an agent.

enum 2 0 0
    setv va00 bhvr
    andv va00 16
    doif va00 = 16 and movs = 0
        mvsf mopx mopy
        velo 0 0
    endi
next

(Yes, this enums through everything in family 2. In big worlds, on slower machines, you might not want to run this script as it may lag you to oblivion and back. Try a clean DS-standalone world if you're having problems.)

It's really difficult to explain exactly how ANDV works if you have no background knowledge of bitwise operators. Heck, I confuse myself with it. But what you really need to know is this:

If you ANDV an agent's ATTR/BHVR value with the ATTR/BHVR value you're checking for, it will return that same value if it is valid.

Say you want to find out if an agent is set to Suffer Physics (ATTR number 128), you would set the ATTR in a variable and ANDV it 128. If it returns 128, the agent does indeed suffer physics. If it returns anything else, it does not.

So in this above example you can see that we've taken the BHVR number that declares the creature can eat said agent, 16, and ANDV'd it to the BHVR. If it returns 16 (and movs = 0, to stop it from trying to move items in vehicles and throwing errors), it is indeed edible, and thus is moved.

If you run this script, assuming your pointer is in a valid spot, all the edible objects in the world should come spewing forth from your fingertip. You'll notice this includes edible critters, including fish from your ponds and pests. Go on and try it!

You did try it, right?

You've probably noticed then, depending on what you've got in your world, that some of the agents weren't the sort of thing the game intended on having moved. Apples and blossoms may hang in midair, as well as other fruits that had been growing on plants. As an exercise, you might try altering the script to check for physics and collisions as well,

Here's a hint-- you can add the values together that you want to check for. For example, if you wanted to check if a creature could push (BHVR 1) and hit (BHVR 8) an agent, you can add those two and simply ANDV the BHVR 9. If it returns 9, both conditions are true.

I know this is supposed to be a tutorial, but I am having way too much fun spewing food and critters all over the place, so I will have to come back to this later. I am sure you more mature developers out there can actually find something useful to do with these commands.

PHP, and other ways to enhance Creatures

2012-01-09T10:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve been cheating a bit on CAOS, you see. I’ve decided to branch out a bit and dabble in some other programming languages, starting with PHP. I started by writing up some simple ATTR/BHVR calculators; if you’re a developer, you might find these useful. But I’ve been thinking a lot about other ways programming languages besides CAOS can be used to enhance gameplay and benefit our tiny community as a whole.

Of course, other programming languages have been aiding the CC for a long time. Web-based programming is what brings us wonderful tools like LiveGMS and The Creature Repository, not to mention the Creatures Wiki and all our forums and blogs. And it's hard to even start when you get into non-web applications: all our 3rd party sprite viewers, gene editors, and direct game tools like DevThing... why, the community simply would not be the same without these tools.

I decided to start with PHP because web-based programming seems to be the way of the future. My first inclination, as told by my first calculators, is to use PHP as an aid in writing CAOS.

Now, it wouldn't be too impossible to write, say, a code generator in which you input a few variables like classifiers, image file names, and so on, and it spits out the cosfile for a basic food/toy agent. But I just really don't see that benefiting the community much, especially since, in my opinion, I believe we as developers ought to be focusing on additions to the game that mix things up and change the way we play; not just creating more of the same thing with different sprites.

But on the other hand, it might be a good starting point for new developers-- they might excitedly generate a Creatures version of their favorite toy and then seek to learn out to alter it to make it more complex, which could be a lot less intimidating than writing code from scratch. Something else to consider is the occasional newbie who is still enchanted by vanilla gameplay and would really enjoy a simple way to create their own food and toys on a whim.

But if I'm going to make code generators, I'm more inclined to generate Magic Words templates or code for dialogue boxes (I hate, hate coding dialogue boxes; finding an easier way is actually very high priority for me)

Something else that's been brought up is the notion of a web-based version of EasyPRAY. Personally, I think that utilizing something like CAOS2PRAY would remain easier, since the "blanks" you fill in would be about the same, only you'd have to go through the extra steps of opening your browser and downloading the generated prayfile. But it's still something to consider, particularly since agents for the Garden Box I've been working on actually use their own chunk type-- something neither EasyPRAY nor CAOS2PRAY supports. I also might be able to code a way to search the cosfile for potential dependencies, which could take some work off the developer's hands.

So the potential of using PHP to develop CAOS aids is certainly there, but what about other aspects of development? Something I was tossing in my head long before I picked up PHP was the idea of a site that focused on collaborative community projects, with a variety of features.

The first aspect would be a sort of developers' database, wherein developers (anyone registered on the site) would create a profile containing contact information, information about what they like to develop, their availability, and their skillsets, be that CAOS, spriting, 3D modeling, gene editing, concept sketching, as well as other programming languages and really, any skill that might be useful to the community. You could then basically search for a spriter or a coder or whatever you needed, and then contact them to see if they were interested in helping you out.

The second aspect would be a project ideas database, where people could post project proposals and ideas, and other users could vote in favor or against certain ideas. It would then be easy to gauge what ideas were popular and in demand just by glancing at the list. When an idea became popular enough, it would open up to development. A project manager (by default, the user who proposed the idea, but the role could be handed off to someone else if needed, or even shared among multiple people) would then make a task list.

Each task would include the skillset required and a detailed description of what needed to be done. Some tasks would obviously need do only be done once, something like "Spriting: A red and yellow-striped beach ball with animations for bouncing and popping." but it could also be a repeatable task, especially in the early/planning stages, something like "Sketching: Five concepts for undersea creatures, front and side views."

Interested contributors could then search for tasks that were needed by category and apply for them. Some tasks would require approval of the project manager first (to avoid say, someone signing up for something they may not have the skillset for.) Their contributions to various projects would be tracked in their profile.

Another, sort of offshoot feature would be a favor-trading board. This would be for tasks that aren't a part of a larger project; for example, if I was working on a personal project and need a sprite done, or if someone with no scripting experience just wanted an agent that turned norns to statues when they were touched (or something) and couldn't do it for themselves, they could post this on the favor-trading board, and offer something in exchange from their own skillset.

Something like this, while way out of my league at the moment, is still entirely possible for the future. The biggest problem with something this big and well-organized though, is that our community is simply just too small and inactive to fully utilize it. It would be an enormous amount of work for something maybe twenty or so people would really actively use. Still, it's nice to dream sometimes.

What of you guys? Can you think of any web-based programming possibilities that might benefit the community?

CAOS2PRAY: An Easier Way

2012-01-08T16:11:00.000-08:00

Sometime last fall, while I was preparing for CCSF, I discovered a little thing known as CAOS2PRAY. It would not be too much of a stretch to claim that, were it not for CAOS2PRAY, I may not have gotten around to releasing as many agents as I did, because I hate, hate hate hate writing prayfiles, and even easyPRAY was giving me problems.

CAOS2PRAY is basically a method of embedding your PRAY info in your .cos file so you don't have to deal with a separate file (or if you're using easyPRAY, a separate program as well). I really feel that it is a wonderfully simple way to compile agents, but is not very well known or understood; hence this little guide.

All I learned about CAOS2PRAY, I learned from the official documentation here. This tutorial attempts to simplify that manual, but you should refer to it for further information.

CAOS2PRAY was actually developed by RProgrammer as part of Jagent. As such, you need to use Monk to compile your agents for it to be effective. Malkin has already written a simple guide to Monk, so I'll skip those details and jump right into the unknown. Note that this tutorial also assumes you've written a PRAY file before and understand what information is generally required.

Again, CAOS2PRAY is not a program or anything of the sort. It's basically just a syntax you follow to, instead of writing the prayinfo in a separate file, write in the cosfile itself, in a much more simplified fashion.

If you were to decompile my Advanced Muco (or any of my more recent agents), you would notice the top of the cosfile contains text like this:

**CAOS2PRAY
*# Pray-File "advmuco.agents"
*# DS-Name "Advanced Muco"
*# Depend blnk.c16
*# attach advmucoo.c16 advmucohelp.catalogue
*# desc = "A display next to Muco the Egg Layer that allows you to choose breeds from a list."
*# Agent Animation File = "advmucoo.c16"
*# Agent Animation String = "0 1 255"
*# Agent Sprite First Image = 0
*# Agent Animation Gallery = "advmucoo"
*# Web URL = "naturingnurturing.blogspot.com"
*# Web Label = "Naturing :: Nurturing"

This is all I needed to write. Then I just made sure all the inline files were in the same folder, dragged and dropped the cosfile onto monk, and it spit out a complete and packaged agentfile, no prayfile required! It's incredibly easy to write up a "template" like the one above and just copy/paste it at the beginning of your cosfiles, changing the info as needed.

To make use of CAOS2PRAY, you need to understand a few things:
Since you're putting this text directly in the cosfile, you have to start each line with an asterisk [*] to comment it out so it doesn't throw errors when C3/DS tries to read it.
When compiling with CAOS2PRAY, Monk searches for the hash/pound sign [#]. Thus, you have to start each line that you want Monk to recognize with the asterisk followed by the hash sign [*#]. The only exception is the remove script, which Monk finds on its own.
It's best to put your CAOS2PRAY info at the top of your cosfile, or at the very least, not at the bottom. Once Monk hits your remove script, it will stop reading further commands, so if your info is at the bottom, under your remove script, Monk won't see it.

Now, if you're a careful observer, you may have noticed that some lines in the example contain equal signs [=] while others do not. That is because there are two different sorts of lines that Monk understands, commands and tags.
Tags are very simple, so we'll start with them. They're the ones with the equal signs, and they translate directly to the prayfile.

Let's say you write the following lines in CAOS2PRAY:

*# Agent Animation Gallery = "advmucoo"
*# Agent Sprite First Image = 0
*# Banana Cream Pie = "in your face"
*# Number of Pies = 42

This is the same thing as writing the following in a typical prayfile:

"Agent Animation Gallery" "advmucoo"
"Agent Sprite First Image" 0
"Banana Cream Pie" "in your face"
"Number of Pies" 42

Not that you would actually need to define the latter two unless you had a modified agent injector that read those values, but you get the point.

At first glance, it may appear that CAOS2PRAY is more writing than a typical prayfile. But there are shortcuts available, too. You may have noticed in the example, a tag simple labeled "desc"

*# desc = "A display next to Muco the Egg Layer that allows you to choose breeds from a list."

Monk translates this to the following in the prayfile:

"Agent Description" "A display next to Muco the Egg Layer that allows you to choose breeds from a list."

It doesn't matter if you use "desc" or "Agent Description" -- it will be read the same way. Here are the shortcuts that Monk supports:

"anim" -- "Agent Animation String"
"anim file" -- "Agent Animation File"
"desc" -- "Agent Description"
"anim start" OR "anim img" OR "anim image" OR "first image" -- "Agent Sprite First Image"
"bioenergy" "Agent Bioenergy Value"

As you can see, there are shortcuts for a lot of values in the example that I chose to write out instead of using the shortcut. I'm not really sure why I did that. Obviously if you're typing it all out by hand, it would be quicker to use the shortcuts, but in the end it doesn't matter which you use, especially if you're just copy-pasting a template.

Now, the commands. This is where CAOS2PRAY really shines.
Command lines do not contain equal signs, they are simply written as {command} {something}.
The commands are as follows:

Pray-File: This is what the output file will be named. Be sure to include the .agent extension. This is required!
DS-Name: The name of the agent as displayed in the DS agent injector.
C3-Name: The name of the agent as displayed in the C3 agent injector. Only required if your agent is C3-standalone compatible. Remember that your C3 agent name cannot be the same as your DS agent name!
Depend: This specifies dependencies (images, sounds, etc that the agent needs to function) but does not compile them into the agent. These must be separated by spaces and include the file extension. The nice thing about this is that you don't have to define a category like you would when writing a PRAYfile by hand; Monk does this for you. As you can see in my example, I got lazy and didn't include all the dependencies my agent needed. You should probably not follow my example, and instead try to list all the images, sounds, etc that the agent needs, even if they are included with C3/DS, because you never know when someone might accidentally delete half their sounds folder and then spam you with angry messages when they inject your agent and it gets autokilled instead of just throwing a dependency error.
Attach: This specifies dependencies and compiles them into the agent. Monk will throw an error if you don't have these files included in the folder with the cosfile while compiling the agent. Same rules apply as with Depend (must be separated by spaces and include the file extension). You use this for sprites, sounds, catalogue files, etc that are not native to C3/DS. If you list a file in Attach, you do not have to list it in Depend.
Inline: This compiles files into the agent, but will not specify them as a dependencies (unless you also list them in Depend). I'm not really sure why you would use this when you can just use Attach, but it's there, just in case.
Link: Supposedly this allows you to link to other cosfiles you want to include in the agent. I've never used it, though.

As I mentioned earlier, Monk finds your agent's remove script on its own-- you don't need to specify it manually like you would when writing up a prayfile by hand.

Hopefully this guide will help some of you get a grasp on CAOS2PRAY and have an easier time compiling C3/DS agents. If you have any trouble, get confused, or notice any errors in this guide, do let me know. I aim to keep this as understandable and accurate as possible.

"Garden Box" Mini-injector-- Another sort of opinion poll

2011-12-05T09:56:00.001-08:00

So while I was brainstorming the structure and logic of the aforementioned planting-stuff-into-walls agent, I stumbled on an idea that I'm not sure how I feel about.

The goal of this agent is to make world-customizing easier and more interesting, but the way I have the agent currently planned out, it might be a little laborious. If you wanted to plant a strawberry patch, you would have to go to the injector room, inject the strawberry planter agent (assuming you already had the plant-stuff-into-walls-core installed), scroll back to the room you wanted to plant the patch, find the spot to plant the patch (a bit of a pain in large worlds like C2inDS), and plant it. Now imagine you want to plant six, or twelve strawberry patches. You would have to go back and reject the module each time, re-find the place you wanted to plant it, and so on. This, to me, sounds like anything but what the joy of customizing a world should be.

There are a few different ways to make this a bit easier, like creating reusable seed packets that one can just carry around with them to create more patches. I don't know about you guys, but I don't really know what to do with seed vendors once I'm done with them; I don't like to have them imposing on the scenery and if I stick them somewhere I tend to lose them. Maybe that's just me.

My current brainstormed-solution is to, instead, create what I am terming a "Garden Box." This would essentially become and contain the plant-stuff-into-walls-core, and would sit as a little icon in the bottom corner of your screen, that when clicked, would expand into a floating box containing a list of all the garden box modules you have installed. From there all you would have to do is select the plant you wanted, confirm it, and plant your patch. When you were finished, the box could be minimized back to its icon form.

Something like this could be expanded far beyond an easy way to use wall-plantable agents; it could be expanded to contain other seed modules too, and possibly critters, scenery objects, etc., so you would basically have a centralized place for world-customizing stuff. Plants and critters already native to C3/DS would (I think) be fairly easy to add to the box, for easy re-creation in other areas of the world. Creators would have to rewrite any existing 3rd party agents if they wanted them to show up in the Garden Box (hopefully something that wouldn't be too difficult if I can implement it right), so it wouldn't be a universal solution by any means, but it still could simplify things.

What do you guys think? Is there a better solution to this? Does it bother you having to reinject an agent several times? Do you try to avoid having a bunch of seed vendors lying around? Does something like the Garden Box sound worth the wait, or should I just focus on the wall-plantable stuff on its own?

CCSF wrap-up, Advanced Muco Bugs, Looking Ahead

2011-12-03T14:18:00.001-08:00

CCSF really, really burned me out, guys. Wow. I've never done so many things at once in such a short period of time. I think I had a total of like fifteen downloads throughout the whole thing. Granted most of them were only a few lines of code, but that's still quite a bit to put out.

I never got a chance to write a proper wrap-up post. After it was over, I furiously scrambled to catch up on my NaNoWriMo story (which I did manage to finish, but wow I have never written a worse story in my life), and well, it's not too hard to tell how creatively exhausted I am right now. Kind of a shame too, considering I really wanted to contribute to the Creatures Community Advent Calendar but I simply had nothing left in me.

I really wanted to thank everyone who made blog posts during the CCSF; I don't know about everyone else, but for me it was really inspiring to see something new happening every day, and went a long way in motivating me to keep up as well. I originally planned on making some little award buttons/banners for the participants, but it was just something that kept getting pushed to the back burner. It's still something I'd like to do, though, belated as it may be.

Also, there have been a couple reports on Advanced Muco acting a little bit funny when used to select creature breeds that have never been injected before. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly investigate this, but in the meantime, if you're having a problem with a breed of creature that you haven't yet injected throwing errors/autokilling muco when selected via Advanced Muco, try using Advanced Muco to select the creature before the newly installed breed, then clicking on muco itself to select the next breed the old-fashioned way. Inject the egg, and hopefully you won't have any more problems selecting the breed normally via Advanced Muco. If you have any other issues with this, do let me know. It's something I'll look into eventually, and it will be be big help if I have some specific details from you guys.

In spite of all this creative exhaustion, my mind is already hatching new ideas for agents. The release of the Biodomes especially got me thinking about pulling away from my current obsessions with norn genetics/interaction/functionality and looking a little more at world customization.

One thing I'm tossing around in my head right now is an agent that essentially lets you plant a fruit or nut into the background/wall. You would select a region of the world (the idea being that you would do this with an area of the background that contains an image of a shrub or tree, but of course you could do whatever you wanted), possibly set some settings (like if you only want the fruit to grow in certain seasons, how often it should grow, etc), confirm it, and then the fruit would just start spawning in that selected area of the background, giving the illusion that the bush (or whatever) is bearing fruit. Kind of like the apples and seed pods grow in the C3 norn area-- they don't really grow on a plant agent, they're just set up to spawn in random areas of the treehouse.Would open up some nice world customization abilities anyway.

What do you guys think? I think I could set it up to be modular, so you could inject the "plant stuff into wall" core, and then individual agents for each type of food-- lemons, justanuts, apples, whatever, so it wouldn't be too hard for developers to make their own wall-plantable foods; it would just be a matter of writing a basic food agent and setting a few variables that sync up with the core. Could be fun? Maybe?

Just a few other things

2011-11-15T04:43:00.000-08:00

I have a few last things for you guys, if rough and untested:

The first thing is pretty much useless right now, at least til the warp goes back up, but it's a very simple magic words command, "random contact" that, assuming you are online, picks a random online user and adds them to your contacts list if they are not already on it. Basically a way to add people to your contacts without having to warp out random norns to them. Type it in, spam Ctrl + S a few times, and keep reloading your contacts list until the desired person appears. It's pretty boring and unrefined, and maybe I'll turn it into something better later, but it's not like it's that painful to hit Ctrl+S a few times, Anyway. Download it here. Requires Magic Words Core, as always.

The second thing has been requested a few times, so I've put together a release version of it-- that is the Creature Nametags you see on LNA and in a few of my posts/videos. Injecting this will make your creature's names appear under their feet, color-coded according to gender. If you are online and the creature has warped before, the name of the original breeder will appear as a secondary tag under their name.
If you have Magic Words installed, this agent comes with Magic Words commands to change the secondary tag of the selected creature: "set tag [text]" and "reset tag", so you can label your creatures however you want.
Again, this agent is a little rough around the edges and probably still needs further tweaking, but I'm trying to follow my impulses to just get stuff out there so people can start enjoying it, rather than having them sit unused by the masses because I don't find it perfect enough, hah.
Download Creature Nametags here.

Feedback and suggestions are always appreciated!

Interactive Egg Script

2011-11-14T09:14:00.000-08:00

Tying up most of my loose-end projects with this modified egg script. This script, similar to the critical hit script and crossbreeding script, is meant to just add an extra bit of flavor to the game. It makes eggs a little bit more interactive-- you and your creatures can both tickle and slap them. Tickling (clicking for the hand and pushing for creatures) warms them up a bit and speeds their development, while slapping (shift+clicking for the hand and hitting for creatures) damages the eggs and may injure or even kill the unborn creature. Eggs will also generally hatch a bit faster than normal.

Tip 1: If your creatures have gotten a little slap-happy with an egg, tickling it as much as you can may help the unborn creature heal.

Tip 2: A freshly-laid egg may need to be picked up and set down again before it responds to tickles and slaps.

I have been passively tweaking and using this script for some time now, but it hasn't really been rigorously tested (pretty much no testing at all with grendel/ettin eggs), so let me know if you run into any problems.

Download the Interactive Egg Script.

On Creaturely Inbreeding

2011-11-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

Most of us understand and accept that inbreeding is just part of nornish society. Creatures can't generally tell their parents from their children, their siblings from their cousins, and so on. A young, healthy breeding female is just as happy to have a romantic escapade with her grandfather as she is to push the cute little fallow you had lined up for her. It's strange, but biologically, there's no reason for creatures to act otherwise. There are no genetic pitfalls to inbreeding for norns like there are for us, and creatures do not live in structured family groups, nor do they have any sort of social stigma that comes with inbreeding. Overall, it's a little silly to expect such primitive alife to conform to our social code that we have developed over thousands of years when they really have no reason to.

But when it comes down to it, no matter how normal and understandable it is, as humans trying to raise a colony of creatures, it still comes off as just a little irksome when your first second generation norn chooses his mother as a mate. It sort of ruins the cute little ideals we have about raising creatures to be reminded that they really are nothing like the personalities we project onto them.

In nurturing worlds, it really would just be nice if creatures avoided inbreeding.

So forget everything I just said for a moment; now we're going to look at this gene:

This might be a little overwhelming; explaining genetics often is, but try to bear with me here.

This is a chemical emitter. Creatures have tons of them. Essentially their purpose is to emit, or inject, a certain chemical into a norn periodically if certain conditions are met. The Emitter Attachment box indicates the source of input, and the Chemical information box indicates the output.

This is an emitter that I'm pretty sure is common to most creatures capable of breeding, so it makes a good example.

Let's get the Chemical Information box out of the way first. This particular gene is set up to emit the chemical, "Opposite Sex Pheromone." The Smpl rate indicates how often the chemical will be emitted, from every tick to every 255 ticks. The Gain indicates just how much of the chemical is emitted, from 0 to 1. And the threshold indicates how high the input has to be before the emitter kicks in and starts emitting at all, also from 0 to 1.

The center box controls how the input is handled; Analogue means the higher the input is above the threshold, the more of the chemical is emitted. Digital means that it will emit the gain amount of chemical as long as the input is above the threshold, regardless of how high it is.

So what we have here is a an emitter that emits a small amount of Opposite Sex Pheromone as long as the input is above the threshold, which is currently set to 0.

But what the heck is the input? The brain, honestly, can be a scary thing to play in. It baffles even me, but this bit is actually pretty straightforward if you can follow me.

Most of what goes on in a creature's brain is controlled by the engine. This can be a little frustrating to developers trying to change something only to find it hard-coded, but that's another story. In this case though, we are dealing with a certain lobe of the creature's brain, specifically, "situ" or the Situation Lobe.

This lobe contains 16 neurons, most of which are unused. The value set in these neurons is controlled by the engine (though it can also be affected by caos). The neurons are labeled as follows:

0 "I am this old"
1 "I am inside a vehicle"
2 "I am carrying something"
3 "I am being carried"
4 "I am falling"
5 "I am near a creature of the opposite sex and my genus"
6 "I am musically at this mood"
7 "I am musically at this threat level"
8 "I am the selected norn"
9-15 -- undefined

If you're playing close attention, you'll notice that Neuron 5, the one used in the gene we're studying, is tied to "I am near a creature of the opposite sex and my genus". Makes sense now, right? When that neuron's value is greater than 0, the Opposite Sex Pheromone is emitted.

(As for the state, if you're fiddling in the genetics kit, you'll notice you can choose from 0 to 3. That's another discussion altogether, but most of the time, 0 is the state you want; we'll leave it at that for now.)

Now, you should have a basic understanding of how these sorts of emitter genes work. It's a bit funny if you graph this one in action via the Biochemistry Set-- all you have to do is hold a mature norn in the same room as a creature of the opposite sex, and watch the Opposite Sex Pheromone line go up. Move the creature out of view, and it goes down again.

You could, in theory, use this knowledge to create an emitter that triggers on neuron 4, emitting something like fear when falling, or something to increase comfort levels when neuron 8 is triggered.

Or, you could take a look at another lobe, the detl, or Detail Lobe.

This lobe also contains 16 neurons, and they apply to the object that the creature is currently looking at:

0 "It is being carried by me"
1 "It is being carried by someone else"
2 "It is this close to me"
3 "It is a creature"
4 "It is my sibling"
5 "It is my parent"
6 "It is my child"
7 "It is of opposite sex and my genus"
8 "It is of this size"
9 "It is smelling this much"
10 "It is stopped"
11-15 undefined

You might be able to see where I'm going with this.

Turns out, the engine is already coded to trigger certain neurons when a creature is looking at a family member, as detailed in neurons 4, 5, and 6. This makes the job of discouraging inbreeding just a matter of adding in a few receptors, like so:

A creature's fertility works something like this: Opposite Sex Pheromone is emitted by the emitter we were just studying when potential mates are around. Then, when the creature is fertile, Arousal Potential is emitted. When Opposite Sex Pheromone and Arousal Potential are both present in a creature, they convert into Sex Drive, thus making the creature want to mate.

Libido Lowerer effectively cancels out Arousal Potential. So with the addition of these three genes, a creature essentially will have no desire to mate when he or she is paying attention to a family member.

This graph a little further down illustrates the effect of these genes. Sadly the creature at the time was not especially fertile, so you can't see how the Libido Lowerer cancels arousal potential, but you can see that at point A, the creature is alone; at point B, he enters an area where potential mates are milling around, and at point C, he turns his attention to his sibling, spiking Libido Lowerer.

Now, these genes aren't by any means foolproof when it comes to preventing inbreeding. They will prevent creatures from naturally lusting after immediate family, but all bets are off if a creature is artificially made fertile with an agent or script that pumps their fertility so high they don't know what they're pushing!

The other pitfall to this is that it only checks immediate family members; Creatures may still end up attracted to their cousins, nieces, grandchildren, or what have you. But this is something that may be overcome in the future as well; more on that later.

An amusing side effect to these genes is that if a creature is snogging his beloved and happens to catch a glance of his mother walking by, he's likely to lose interest in the act altogether. So these creatures prefer privacy when it comes to romance!

These modifications certainly aren't anything new, Vampess' CFE Family Norns comes to mind as an example that's been around a while (as a disclaimer, I haven't gone poking around in the genomes myself to confirm this, but from the information given about them they seem to operate the same way).

It's exciting to consider what more can be done with these sorts of emitters, and possibly with unused neurons. I mentioned before that these neurons can be affected with caos, meaning a script could run to send a signal to a norn's brain when say, he was looking at a potential mate that was more than an hour older or younger than him. That could trigger similar emitter genes that would prevent creatures from breeding with grandparents or nephews. Another example: a signal could be sent to a creature's brain if he was looking at someone he had previously mated with, which could be linked to emitters to encourage monogamy or diversity.

Branching off from breeding behaviors, a world might be scripted to define certain creatures as being in certain tribes or clans, and creatures might become more angry when encountering creatures in enemy tribes.

Unfortunately I haven't actually tested these waters, and I am inclined to think that a bunch of scripts constantly firing neurons in creatures' heads might quickly slow down the game, but still, I think there's a lot to potentially explore here. I've been poking around a lot in the norn brain in some painfully grueling attempt to understand exactly how it works and open new doors in Creature development; I just hope I can make sense of it all and help it make sense to others, too.

Critical Hit Script

2011-11-13T04:25:00.000-08:00

It seems like using the CCSF as an excuse to get off my tail and finish up all the project that have been teetering on the edge of completion for months/years is working pretty well. One glance at my old projects list and it looks like quite a bit has been shaved off over the past several days.

So here we have another example-- a tweaked version of the Critical Hit Script.

Before I go any further, I want to emphasize that this is a script designed for general use-- It is not a "torture" agent or anything of the sort. Quite the contrary actually; this modification in many cases has helped creatures survive better when under attack.

Critical hits don't land very often in this version-- far less often than they do in my older video, anyway. They do hurt a lot, but the flinging back of the creature gives it a very good chance of escaping from his/her attacker.

Really, this script is just intended to make the game a little bit more interesting, and in my tests has not drastically affected the gameplay. I hope everyone can get some enjoyment from it, regardless of your playstyle.

Download the Critical Hit Script here. Extra thanks to Mea for the beta-testing!

Peaceful Death Script

2011-11-12T07:51:00.000-08:00

Today is my birthday. Hurrah! Yet, in some morbid twist of scheduling, I am blogging about creature death today. Lovely.

Has anyone else found it just a little odd/creepy when a creature continues to attempt to hit or push another creature after it is dead? Since creatures cannot tell the difference between a living and dead creature, it just sort of confuses them when suddenly their victim or object of affection isn't lowering their drives anymore when they.... well, this just gets creepier the more I think about it, so I think I'll just stop.

In my never-ending attempt to tweak scripts here and there to tailor the game more to my needs, I have made a few very minor edits to the death script. This simple modification does two things-- first, it makes dead creatures invisible to other creatures so they can have the peace and respect they deserve. Secondly, it makes dead creatures pickup-able by the hand (I was always annoyed that I couldn't do that), so you can carry the body to rest in a proper place if you so wish, or just move it out of the way of other creatures so you can actually target it with the hoverdoc to find out what happened. I'm not the only one who gets really annoyed with that, right?

If you're interested, download the Peaceful Death Script here.

The Mythical Elevine

2011-11-11T07:46:00.000-08:00

We're approaching the final few days of CCSF and as far as this blog goes, it's going to end rather anticlimactically. Maybe I should have planned and saved all the really shiny stuff for the last few days, but that's just not how my developing mind works. No, instead the last few days are likely going to consist of little odds and ends I'm tying up just to get them off my to-do list. But I guess that's okay, since I assume everyone else is releasing their greatest masterpieces themselves over the last few days, and there will be plenty else to play with.

This was pretty much the last thing on my list to pack up and ship out, agent-wise, and I'm honestly not a hundred percent sure I like them as they are, but since giving my instinctless norns the ability to use normal lifts again, these aren't as vital. Though they still are a lot of fun for customizing worlds to your liking, I probably won't be putting a lot more effort into tweaking them, so I figured I'll just call them done for now.

Download the Elevines. A thousand thanks to Mea, both for the beautiful sprites and for extensive bugtesting!

As a fair warning, I have had these throw errors a few times on me, but I've never been able to replicate the errors or generally figure out what has been going wrong, so do report any bugs you find in as much detail as possible.

Advanced Muco: yet another buggy release.

2011-11-10T05:45:00.000-08:00

You know what I hate releasing even more than untested agents? Agents with known bugs.

This is one of them.

The Advanced Muco is one of those things that I personally rarely use (since all my norns these days are "designer" creatures gengineered for a certain purpose), but the need for it was so great in the community and no one had done it yet, so I decided to take a shot at it.

My agony with this agent is that the left/right buttons as well as the center on/off button are supposed to light up when they are hovered over, and being the incompetent programmer that I am, I can't seem to make such a simple thing work despite managing to code the rest of the agent with much less effort than I originally anticipated.

Oh well. Light-up buttons or not, it does its job of making egg selection much, much less of a pain than it used to be. That's what matters, right?

Download the Advanced Muco. Thanks to both Mea and Ghosthande for beta-ing!
Remember, after injecting you need to click on the round button-thing on Muco to open the display!

Magic Words: Love and War module

2011-11-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

Back for CCSF '09 I got around to releasing some keyboard shortcuts that I had found useful over the years. But out of all of them, I think the ones that saw the most use were ctrl+9 and ctrl+shift+9 -- they were shortcuts that globally encouraged creatures to breed or fight respectively.

Since writing up the Magic Words system, I've found it much more useful for things like this, especially since unlike keys on a keyboard, there are a nearly infinite number of words and phrases to define. So I rewrote it, for my own convenience as well as yours.

So this rather simple Magic Words module puts two commands at your fingertips: "love time" and "war time". Fairly self-explanatory, entering one of these phrases will encourage all creatures in the world to act accordingly, giving you a quick way to either increase or decrease your population.

This can be an especially handy tool for those trying to crossbreed creatures, because unlike the old keyboard shortcut version and/or most aphrodisiac agents that only encourage creatures to push other creatures of their species, entering "love time" will encourage creatures to push any living creature nearby, regardless of species. As an added bonus, the command will also encourage any already pregnant females to lay their eggs.

Download it here! Remember, this requires the Magic Words core to work.

Crossbreeding Script. About time too!

2011-11-08T06:56:00.000-08:00

So a long, long time ago, just for the heck of it and to see it could be done, I wrote up a quick crossbreeding script for C3/DS. It wasn't really all that refined, and it was one of those things that sat around untested and unreleased because all I wanted to do was see if it was possible for creatures to crossbreed. Once that question was answered, I really had no desire to work on it further.

But it remained one of my most requested scripts for release, so I finally got around to refining it, and with some helpful testing by Mea, I'm finally getting around to releasing it today.

Now, you have to understand something when using this script-- it's not going to make all your creatures suddenly fall in love and have lots of hybrid babies. Even though this script will enable creatures of different species to breed if they are both very fertile and push each other enough, norns, ettins, and grendels are still not genetically attracted to each other, and it will take a lot of encouragement from the hand and various aphrodisiac agents to get them to push each other. Instinctless norns, I've found, are a bit more open to the idea than other creatures, but still not easy to sway. Where this script really has the potential to shine, however, is with hybrid creatures that may be of one species but have inherited the breeding instincts of another. Provided it finds a willing mate, a creature no longer has to be limited by its species.

One thing to note is that this script does not take into account for twin chances, or mutation rates due to heavy metals. Maybe in a later release (like three years later at this rate, hah.)

In the meantime, download the crossbreeding script here. This comes with both a cosfile and an agent--use whichever you see fit. Extra thanks to Mea for testing!

For better Nornish Education!

2011-11-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought I might actually get some writing done today, a thread on Creaturetopia inspired me to break open the CAOS tool yet again.

Really, I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it before. Hand-teaching norns their first words has a lot of charm to it in nurturing worlds, but after a while it becomes routine to lock a newly-hatched norn in the learning room for most of its babyhood, set the machine to automatic, and go about doing other things (or sit there, if you wish and watch the baby bumble about whilst having words drilled into its head). It's just not a very engaging process!

But using this Magic Words module, you can teach your norns words as you need them to learn them, so they can still run about enjoying their childhood, learning at a more natural pace. I find it a lot more personable and interactive than just having them watch a learning agent spit out words.

The syntax is pretty simple, just type "teach [word]". Provided the word is a valid DS vocabulary word, the hand will repeat it, and all creatures in earshot will attempt to learn it. It may take them a few tries, but they'll get it. One special exception is the hand-- if you type "teach hand" creatures will learn the name of the hand according to what you've defined it as, which I believe is by default your DS username, or just 'hand' if you have an offline world. You can change the name of the hand in the DS options panel.

Mostly, this is meant to be used to teach your creatures non-noun words, verbs such as push or hit, drives such as bored or hungry for starch, and other words like dislike, look, express, maybe, and so on. But if you really want to, you can use it to teach nouns too; it's probably easier to go about it the traditional way, but in certain cases you might want to teach a creature about certain objects beforehand (sometimes you don't want to wait until you encounter an angry grendel to teach a norn what it is so it will obey your commands to retreat from it).

Download Magic Words: Hand-Teaching. Requires the Magic Words Core to work.
Do keep in mind that this is something I literally threw together in a matter of hours and is likely to have some bugs here and there; please let me know if anything goes wrong so I can fix it.

The case for Navigation Instincts

2011-11-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

So after further testing, I have decided it is best to give my instinctless norns their navigation instincts back.

Even though the elevines make it easy for creatures that don't know how to use call buttons to get up and down, it seems without navigation instincts, the creatures don't really understand that they have to go up and down. Or in or out, and so on. Further research is required but it really doesn't look like creatures learn that going up satisfies their up drive the same way that eating satisfies hunger.

I do want my instinctless norns to be teachable, but not handicapped. And if they're genetically incapable of understanding a concept required for getting around their world, it really isn't fair. As put-off as I am by the idea of creatures popping out of the egg fully understanding how call buttons work, all things considered, up and down are just directions like left and right in their world, and I don't think that game mechanics in a flat world should prevent them from having full access to it.

If well-trained adult instinctless creatures can't make their way through a basic navigational IQ test, I feel that something is wrong there. So for now, I'm re-enabling them. Maybe a better solution will present itself later, but so far this change seems to give my instinctless darlings all their previous learning flexibility with the added bonus of knowing how to get around.

Magic Words Template

2011-11-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

First, I would like to say that today would mark the 23rd birthday of my favorite cat, were he still living. Even though he passed several years ago, I always remember him on his birthday. Happy birthday, Kitty-Witty; I hope you are having a lovely party in cat-heaven.

Anyway.

When I first brainstormed the notion of an agent that responded to speech-bubble commands, I remember one of my priorities was to make it easily expandable. I didn't want to have to recode my whole script every time I wanted to add a new command. So the system I came up with allowed the core agent to scan for "plugin" agents for matching words or phrases, and then execute the script within the plugin agent when a match is found.

I tried to set it up so it would be as easy as possible to write a plugin script so that any coder who wanted to could easily write their own speech-bubble activated commands without having to rewrite the core agent. I hope I succeeded, but you guys will be the judge of that.

You can download the working template here for detailed information and examples, but the process is really rather simple:

First create a simple agent with a blank sprite file and classifier 1 200 X. X being of course, a number of your choosing, one that doesn't overlap with someone elses, as with all classifiers. The important thing here is that the family is 1 and the genus is 200, since these are the classifiers that the core agent scans for.

Then, define name variables for the agent:
"magic_word_count" -- integer, the number of words/phrases you're going to address in this agent.
"magic_word_#" -- string, the word/phrase that must be entered to activate the script
"magic_word_help_#" -- string, the text that shows up listing the word/phrase and what it does in the help window (the one that pops up when you type "help" in the speech bubble).

You need to define as many magic_word and magic_word_help variables as defined in the magic_word_count variable. So for example, if "magic_word_count" is set to 2, you will need to define "magic_word_1" "magic_word_2" "magic_word_help_1" and "magic_word_help_2"

From there all you have to do is write your scripts. When the word or phrase defined in magic_word_1 is triggered, the agent will run script 1001, magic_word_2 will trigger 1002, and so on, so write scripts accordingly.

Here's a tip-- if you define magic_word_1 as "potato" the script will obviously trigger if you type "potato" in the speech bubble-- however, if you define magic_word_1 as "_potato" the script will trigger if you type any phrase containing the word "potato" such as "eat potato" or "potatoes are awesome." The contents of the speech bubble are then sent to the script within _p1_, allowing for more complex commands.

More details can be found in the aforementioned template cosfile, but that's the basics of it. I hope you caos-inclined creature-people can play around with it and put lots of interesting and useful commands at our fingertips!

Easy ways to break your world.

2011-11-06T01:21:00.000-07:00

This wasn't one of those things I planned to finish for CCSF; it was just one of those things that I made on a whim to solve a problem I had, and thought, "hey, someone might be able to use this!" Plus it can be quite a bit of fun:

The "clone" command will create a duplicate of the agent the hand is touching-- provided it is a movable agent. This is a sort of fail-safe to prevent you from cloning something you shouldn't. But if you want to clone something you shouldn't anyway, you can use the "movable" command to make an object...well, movable (and thus clonable). Of course, you want to be very careful with this-- some things, particularly doors, lifts and UI elements, just shouldn't be moved, and it can cause come serious errors if you do so anyway. To help you out a little, if you accidentally move something you didn't want to, or just want to put something back where it came from, the "reset position" command makes that easy for you, too.

Download the Magic Words: Cloning module. As with all Magic Words modules, this requires the Magic Words Core to work.

This hasn't been rigorously bugtested or anything; let me know any problems you run into!

I guess I should start releasing things...

2011-11-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

If you follow this blog, you're probably well aware that I tend to develop a more than I release. A lot more.

See, the thing is I just hate releasing imperfect things. Good testers are nearly impossible to find, and I often find myself sitting on a project out of paranoia that there is some bug in it that I haven't found yet because I am the only tester.

But I guess the best way of getting things tested is to just release it. I've found that people are much quicker to tell you if something they expect to work flawlessly does not.

So I'm going to fair-warn you that many agents I'm going to release have not been fully tested. Consider yourself a tester.

Anyway. Moving on to today's thingy.

Today I'm going to release the Magic Words Core, which is needed for all modules to work, as well as the SERU module, to give you something to play with.

Most of you have probably seen the Magic Words Demo if you follow this blog regularly. This is an agent that you inject in parts-- the core agent allows for speech-bubble activated scripts while various modules define the activation words and scripts themselves.

Once injected, typing "help" into the speech bubble (as though you were talking to a creature) will bring up a window listing all the commands available to you. If you haven't injected any modules, it won't show much of anything, but it will update itself as you inject more modules. This way you won't have to memorize every single command when you have fifty modules injected.

Download the Magic Words Core. This zip file contains both an agent and a cosfile. If you use it a lot, I would highly recommend just dropping the cosfile in your \Bootstrap\010 Docking Station folder so you don't have to inject it into every world, but if you want to pick and choose, just use the agent file per-world as you normally would.

Of course, the core alone doesn't really do much of anything, so here is a module, for your amusement.

If you're not familiar with SERU, I think it was by far my most popular agent, at least two years ago. It played through a sort of mini-storyline in which you were entrusted with stray eggs to care for. Several people liked the random eggs the agent produced, but weren't too keen on the storyline, so it made a perfect candidate for a magic words shortcut.

After injecting the Magic Words SERU module (and ensuring the core is injected as well), all you have to do is type "seru" in the speech bubble and a random egg will mysteriously appear. No storylines, beams, or cooldowns involved. Though I would still highly recommend using the original agent for the full experience, I realize it gets old after a while and sometimes you just want interesting creatures to mess with.

Download Magic Words SERU. Remember that this, like all Magic Words modules, requires the core to work. This file also comes with both a cos and an agent file, so you can decide which you want to use.

If you are a developer, it's very easy to write your own Magic Words modules! I'll try to get the template posted up by tomorrow.

Creatures Medicine 101: Antigens and Antibodies

2011-11-04T04:48:00.000-07:00

Antibodies fight antigens. Right? Every chemical list says so. Even the hoverdoc's cure glossary says so.

Well... as much sense as that makes, I'm having an impossible time proving that true. I can't find any chemical reaction genes that indicate as such, and if I inject a norn with an antibody and follow it up with an antigen injection, it doesn't seem to decay any faster than if no antibodies were present.

No.. the way the reaction equation works is something like this: Antigen X = Antibody X + side effect X
For example, the CFE bruin genome states that 2 antigen 0 = 12 Antibody 0 + 1 histamine B

Antibodies don't seem to actually fight antigens. Antibodies are what the immune system turns antibodies into; essentially, they are a by-product of the body's attempt to fight the infection. In this second graph, I manually lowered the concentration of antibody 0 several times (hence the jagged blue line) and the concentration had absolutely no effect on the rate of decay of the antigen; it follows the same steady curve.

So if antibodies don't fight antigens, what are you supposed to give an ill creature? It is a bit daunting to suddenly find that those antibody-filled lemons aren't doing a thing for a creature's immunity.

What a creature really needs to fight antigens is Vitamin C; this chemical speeds up the reaction rate of the antigen-to-antibody conversion. As a disclaimer though, you want to be very careful using vitamin C to cure antigen 5 (we'll get to exactly why in a minute). Sadly, the only source of Vitamin C I am aware of is found in the vitamin potion from the potion machine on the C3 bridge, meaning DS-standalone worlds will have to find a non-native way to get this vitamin.

But not only does Vitamin C speed up the antigen conversion, it also speeds up the clock rate of the bones organ, which is responsible for the creation of Prostaglandin, the chemical used to heal the organs injured by the antigens. Vitamin C really is quite the healer! Just be sure the creature is eating enough fat and protein, as those are broken down into the chemicals necessary for Prostaglandin synthesis.

But let's step back a bit to talk a little more about antigens themselves. As mentioned earlier, the immune system breaks antigens down into antibodies and a "side effect" chemical. The side effects are as follows:

- Antigen 0 -- Histamine B
- Antigen 1 -- Histamine A
- Antigen 2 -- Coldness
- Antigen 3 -- Coldness
- Antigen 4 -- Hotness
- Antigen 5 -- Wounded
- Antigen 6 -- Hotness
- Antigen 7 -- Pain

Most of these side effects are rather harmless, and act more as symptoms of the infection than anything. But antigen 5's side effect is quite the opposite, in fact; it is deadlier than the antigen itself. Woundedness is a chemical that will instantly kill the creature if it gets too high.

As mentioned before, Vitamin C accelerates the breakdown of antigens to antibodies. This also means it accelerates the creation of the side-effect chemical. This graph shows the reaction resulting from injecting a creature with antigen 5 less than a half dose of vitamin C. The antigen breaks down faster, and both the antibody and the wounded chemical (chemical 90 in this graph) spike, creating a very dangerous situation. For antigen 5, it may be best to have the creature rest and recover naturally.

There is more to know about antigens, particularly which organs they attack. In the next installment (which I haven't actually started writing yet, and still have some research to do, so it'll likely be a while) I plan to detail the functions of each organ so you can have some context as to what exactly is at stake when dealing with antigens.

Creatures Medicine 101: Toxins

2011-11-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

In my spare time I have been sort of going through the entire norn genome, making notes as I go along, just to understand exactly how these little things tick a little bit better. I figure I'll write a little series of posts based on these findings in hopes that the information will help people out a little.

Today I'm going to detail toxins and general nasty things for our norns, what exactly they do, what you can do about them, and maybe a few more interesting things along the way.

Note that all this information is taken from the CFE Bruin genome, and may differ from breed to breed!

Furthermore, although the chemical reaction information is sourced from the genome, some of the game-related information, such as where the poisons/antidotes can be found in the game, is sourced from my bad memory and may be incomplete, so if you find an inaccuracy, do let me know! Keep in mind, however, that I am only aiming to list the sources of chemicals present natively in C3/DS-- not every agent out there; that would be an impossible task.

Heavy Metals
As far as I know, the only way for a creature to get heavy metal poisoning in vanilla DS is by eating a stinger (and I don't know of any natural sources in C3). Nonetheless, it is a pretty mean little toxin! Heavy Metals damage both the male and female reproductive organs, and raise the mutation rate of poisoned creatures' offspring. They can also damage the immune system. What makes Heavy Metals really scary is that the norn's body has no way of fighting it naturally; it does not decay over time. meaning the poison just sits and does its nasty work until the creature either dies or finds the cure. A creature might live its entire life with heavy metal poisoning!

The cure for heavy metals is EDTA, which can be found in small amounts in tubas. Thankfully, these are rather plentiful in the DS meso. If you are docked with C3, the potion vendor on the bridge holds Heavy Metal Cure, an EDTA drink. The General Cure it dispenses contains small amounts of EDTA as well. You have to be quick though. The immune system is responsible for EDTA's breakdown of heavy metals; that means if the toxin has already shut down the immune system, even the cure won't work. If this happens, the only way to purge the body of Heavy Metals is by resorting to CAOS or using an agent that actually removes the chemical from the body rather than just injecting a cure.

Heavy metals will not outright kill a creature, but it will be quite frail without an immune system and may have difficulty producing viable offspring.

Cyanide
This is pretty severe stuff-- a full dose of it will kill a norn pretty much instantly. Luckily, there are no known natural sources in C3 or DS, meaning it's quite unlikely a creature will just stumble into it. Its quick-killing action is twofold-- first, it slows down the reaction in the Mitochondrial organ which converts oxygen to energy. Secondly, it destroys energy outright in a simple reaction (1 energy + 1 cyanide = 1 cyanide). Both of these are terribly dangerous-- if a creature's energy gets too low, it is instantly killed. Cyanide will decay very slowly over time, but usually nowhere near quickly enough.

The most straight-forward way to fight Cyanide is is with Sodium Thiosulphate, found in tiny (and I mean tiny) amounts in the carrots in the bottom of the DS meso. The C3 potion vendor also holds a Cyanide Cure (Sodium Thiosulphate is found in the General Cure as well).

If the creature's immune system has been destroyed by heavy metals or antigens 4/5, Sodium Thiosulphate won't have any effect. However, oddly enough, the immune system is also responsible for processing cyanide's direct breakdown of energy (the 1 energy + 1 cyanide = 1 cyanide reaction mentioned earlier). If the immune system is dead, cyanide will still slow the conversion of oxygen to energy, but it will not attack energy directly; this buys you a little more time to save your creature.

If you cannot directly counteract the cyanide, you will have to keep your creature's energy levels up while you wait for it to naturally decay. You'll want to make sure your creature is well-fed-- on starch and fat particularly as these break down into pyruvate, a chemical necessary for the oxygen to energy conversion. Stuffing the creature isn't going to heal it faster, but if pyruvate levels drop below normal, your creature will be in quite a bit of trouble, so make sure it isn't starving.

Adrenaline helps in keeping up energy levels as it speeds up the very same conversion cyanide slows down. You can find adrenaline in the C3 potion vendor's General Cure, or, believe it or not, by terrifying it with piranhas. If you place the creature near the piranha pond and drop in a bug or something else for them to eat, the swarming fish will cause any nearby creature to panic, sending its adrenaline through the roof and hopefully giving it enough energy to weather the poison.

Belladonna

This is another nasty one that, similar to cyanide, has no known natural source in the C3/DS world. It also, similar to cyanide, slows down the oxygen to energy conversion. Though it takes longer to take effect than cyanide, a full dose will still kill a creature in seconds. In addition to slowing energy production, Belladonna slows the clock rate of both the Regulation organ (which maintains that hotness and coldness cancel each other our among other things) and the Constitutive Drive Maintenance organ (which ensures that backup drives return to normal after a creature has a horrifying encounter). Generally, though, this secondary effect won't do much more than confuse the creature.

There is no known direct cure for Belladonna, but it will eventually decay. As long as the creature does not receive a high enough dosage to kill it within a few seconds, it should recover if kept safe and well-fed.

Geddonase

A creature can become poisoned with geddonase if it either eats or is stung by a stinger. While not the worst of toxins, it can have some lasting damage in large amounts. Its primary vice is that it destroys adipose tissue-- a creature's storage of fat that is broken down into triglycerides and subsequently fatty acids which are used in ATP production. However, it also damages the Liver Catabolic organ which is responsible for breaking down tissues into a usable form. If a creature is exposed to a lot of this toxin regularly, it could wind up being unable to properly break down stored energy or even nutrients from food, causing it to weaken and die for lack of a useable energy source.

There is no known direct cure for geddonase, but it decays as it breaks down adipose tissue. If the creature has a lack of adipose tissue, the toxin will remain in the creature and have more time to damage the Liver Catabolic organ. Suffering creatures should thus be fed foods containing fat, which are converted into triglycerides and subsequently more adipose tissue, which serves to both break down with any remaining geddonase and replenish the creature's reserves once the toxin is gone.

Glycotoxin

Glycotoxin is one of several toxins that that a creature can pick up from the invisible bacteria that floats around the ship; it can also be found in rotting food. It is somewhat similar to Geddonase, but instead of tearing though adipose tissue, it breaks down glycogen (a creature's storage of starch that is broken into glucose which is used in ATP production), and instead of damaging the Liver Catabolic organ, it injures the Liver Anabolic organ, which is responsible for converting useable energy sources into a stored tissue form. Keep an eye out for shivering creatures-- since Glycotoxin breaks glycogen down into a small amount of glucose and coldness, shivering can be a symptom of this poisoning.

The direct cure for Glycotoxin is Arncia, found in Peaking Pie, the purple triangle food that spews forth from the DS empathic vendor. Arnica is also found in the C3 potion vendor's Elixir of Arnica and in small amounts in General Cure. Glycotoxin, similar to geddonase, will break down faster as it goes to work on glycogen, so be sure the creature is well-fed with starchy foods (such as seeds) both to help finish off the toxin so it doesn't do lasting damage to the Liver Anabolic organ and to replenish the creature's store of glycogen when the toxin has passed.

If there is severe damage to the Liver Anabolic organ, don't despair too much! A creature can live a mostly normal life without it-- it just needs to eat much more often since it is unable to store food energy for later.

Sleep Toxin

As far as toxins go, this one is pretty benign on its own. A creature can pick it up from invisible bacteria, which usually carry antigens and other nasties, so be on the lookout for other infections as well. Sleep toxin, as one might expect, makes a creature sleepy-- it will likely be fine after a long nap; just be sure it doesn't sleep so much that it doesn't eat. Again, be sure to check it for other diseases it might have picked up from the bacteria.

Fever toxin

Fever toxin is similar to sleep toxin in that it is picked up from bacteria and is generally thought to be little more than an annoyance-- however, unlike sleep toxin, in large amounts it can actually be quite deadly. Fever toxin makes a creature hot, meaning it sweats a lot and is at risk for dehydration. If a creature's water levels are too low, it can't convert air into oxygen, can't convert oxygen into energy, and will quickly die.

In small amounts, a creature can usually get through the fever without any lasting effects, however, if the toxin is high, you might consider feeding the creature detritus, such as the apple cores in the C3 norn meso. Risky, yes, but the glycotoxin in the detritus has the side effect of making a creature cold, which may be able to bring down the fever if the creature is well-fed and has enough glycogen for the glycotoxin to feed off. Unfortunately this is only so effective, and if the fever is too high, no amount of glycotoxin can save it.

Histamine A and B

Really, these aren't toxins at all; in fact, by themselves they are practically good things as they trigger a creature to cough and sneeze, involuntary actions that can shake off bacteria that have attached to them. Histamines are usually a clue that another illness is affecting the creature, as they pick them up both from invisible bacteria or as a side-effect from antigens 0 or 1. Check the creature over carefully!

When you are sure no other illnesses are bothering the creature, you may give it antihistamine to stop the sneezing/coughing. Antihistamine is found in DS lemons and in C3 potion vendor's Cough Syrup as well as its general cure.

Alcohol

Alcohol doesn't seem to be an actual toxin. Found as a side-effect of bacteria as well as in the Shee Wine and Albian Ale in the C3 potion vendor, this stuff makes creatures walk funny, and not much else! The "cure" is Dehydrogenase, which has no known natural sources, and while it removes alcohol from the system, it also causes pain. Since alcohol doesn't seem to do any damage to start with, there seems to be little reason for a cure that causes pain. Further research may be in order, but until some negative effect is found, norns are free to party all they like!

ATP Decoupler

Sadly, this is very much an instant-death toxin. The toxin turns ATP into ADP without using itself up, meaning even a tiny bit of the stuff can eat through a creature's entire ATP supply in seconds, killing it instantly. It is silent, quick, and has no side effects or symptoms, and is thus practically impossible to detect. Creatures become poisoned by the toxin via bacteria.

If you somehow manage to notice the poison in time, the cure, Medicine One, is found in the Yarn fruit (the green and yellow fruit from the DS empathic vendor) as well as in an C3 ATP Decoupler Cure potion and of course, in General Cure.

Carbon Monoxide

Yet another bacteria-borne toxin, this one deprives your creature of oxygen by canceling it out. It can be very deadly in large amounts, but most of the time a creature, with bit of panting and wheezing, can survive until the gas decays.

Usually, if the toxin is in high enough levels to kill a creature, it will do so before you have time to get the creature to eat the cure, but Antioxidant will degrade the toxin quickly. It is found in the star seeds from the DS empathic vendor, in a C3 vendor potion of the same name, and in General Cure.

Fear Toxin

Bacteria sure are scary things, with all they can transmit to our creatures. However, this toxin actually does almost nothing-- it converts into fear at a strangely low rate: 14 Fear toxin to 1 fear, in the genome I'm browsing. You can practically ignore it.

Muscle Toxin

Not surprisingly, another bacteria transmitted toxin. This one, however, requires more research. What is does is pretty straight-forward; it attacks the muscles while slowly breaking down into lactate. The thing is, lactate also attacks the muscles, does seemingly nothing else, and doesn't seem to decay or break down at all. I'm still trying to comb through the genome for more information on this, but right now it looks like muscle toxin results in continuous muscle damage with no cure in sight. Scary stuff.

That's all for this part; next I'll tackle antigens and antibodies. If you have any further information or corrections, do mention it; I'm not by any means an authority on nornish biology!

When Lab Rats get loose

2011-11-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

I was doing a few experiments on my instinctless norns the other day, just a few things to test their learning patterns here and there, when I suddenly felt the urge to go read a book.

Usually I will pause or close DS when I leave the computer, but apparently my need was so great that I completely forgot about it, and I ended up not returning back to the computer that night.

When I woke up the next morning, I found when might be considered normal in most creatures worlds-- a complete population explosion. But the fact that it happened in a world that housed no more than one female and one male instinctless norn, I have to say I was surprised that the population was not only maxed out, but had gone ten generations without my interference.

When I first dabbled with instinctless norns, I noted how completely helpless they were, how they needed the hand to show them the way in the world or they would most certainly starve, or at the very least, never breed. Once educated, they generally can fend for themselves, but even if they do manage to discover the joys of pushing each other and producing offspring, their children would have to fend for themselves too and learn it all over again. Initially I ran a script for a while that generated instinctless norns by the dozen, figuring generating large amounts would increase the chances of a pair stumbling through the motions of breeding. In the eight hours or so I ran the script (in fast ticks, no less) there was still only one successful breeding.

So if dozens of creatures couldn't survive before, why the sudden population explosion from just two norns this time?

First off, the pair I started with was, to some extent, pre-trained. That certainly gave them an advantage-- they knew how to eat, at least. They seem to have gathered near the food-spitter-outer-- which caters quite well to instinctless norns since they don't know how to work normal vendors. Since they don't know how to work call buttons either, they tended to stay on that platform. Those that wandered off probably couldn't find their way back and died out quickly.

But I guess that the key to their excess proliferation was two things: one, I had modified their stimulus genes so that they got nearly as much boredom reduction pushing other norns (and critters, and machines, and most things in general in some attempt to give creatures a chance to develop their own sort of hobbies) as they did playing with toys. Secondly, there were no toys or really many interesting things at all on that platform. Only other norns.

I suspect these norns learned very quickly that playing with each other was the best way to amuse themselves, and when they were old enough to breed, found that this "playtime" had a side effect of reducing sex drive and producing lots of offspring as well. I'm really rather surprised-- I have seen a lot of "superbreeder" norns that push each other constantly because they have been engineered to have constantly high sex drive or strong breeding instincts or have had a brain-edit to force them to obsess over pushing norns, but it's kind of neat to see superbreeding as a learned behavior rather than a strictly genetic one.

Also kind of interesting to see how different circumstances that one might normally consider difficult can greatly assist a population's survival. If the world had been littered with toys or other stimuli, the norns may not have learned to push each other

I exported one of these creatures at random for your breeding pleasure-- download Extra-small Crime from the TCR if you so wish, and let me know what he gets up to in your world!

Why are catalogue files so awesome?

2011-11-02T05:44:00.000-07:00

So remember all that babbling I did about catalogue files and stuff the other day? I hope your DS-install is catalogue-friendly, because today you'll need it!

Protective Tub is a strange and amusing autonamer that you've certainly seen in action if you watch LNA. It works by picking a random adjective and a random noun from-- you guessed it, a catalogue file, and stringing them together to create strange names such as "Lame Flower," "Observant Cattle," "Deafening Magic," and of course, "Protective Tub."

This agent, when injected, will also slightly modify your UI so the longer names will show up properly in the profile window. The upper-left display will still display shortened versions of the name. If you remove the agent, the autonamer will stop naming creatures but you should still be able to view and edit the longer names.

As a fair warning, you will notice a few kinks in dealing with the longer names-- the text at the top of the creature profile may run into itself, names will show up cut off in the creature menu and containment chamber, and if a particularly long-named creature expresses a hunger for protein or addresses another long-named creature, the speech bubble will eventually reach a max length and cut off the rest of the sentence. So far I have yet to see it horribly crash anything, but if you run into any severe problems, do get in touch with me.

But back to the topic at hand. One of the great things about catalogue files is that you can easily edit them without having to recode anything! After injecting the agent once, look for a catalogue file in your Docking Station\Catalogue folder called "random_name_bits.catalogue". Open this in notepad or similar plain text editor, and you will notice it contains two lists under the headers: TAG "name_noun" and TAG "name_adj". Here you can add your own nouns and adjectives to the lists, delete ones you don't like, and so on. Just be sure to keep them in quotes and don't change the tag headers.

Download Protective Tub. Have fun, and if your creatures end up with any completely hilarious names, feel free to share them in the comments!

Is your version of DS installed properly?

2011-11-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

So.... here's the deal.
Whatever I end up releasing during CCSF isn't going to be released on the official CCSF site; it will only be here (Unless Laura feels like linking to everything on a whim as it's released). The main reason for this is that I am a lazy bum that can't make deadlines (or maybe have way more of a life than I realize), and instead of doing a bunch of stuff ahead of time, I am trying to use these weeks to sort of clean out my project closet and finish up the stuff that's been unfinished for years, or at least package up the stuff that I know I'll never work on again, and get it out there in one form or another.

So you may want to watch this space in case anything neat appears. I have actually pre-written several "release" blog posts for things I'm not even done with yet in some hopes that it will motivate me, so we'll see what happens. Between this, trying to fulfill my own blogathon challenge (it would be quite silly if I didn't, now wouldn't it?) and taking part in NaNoWriMo... well, let's say this will be an interesting few weeks.

Oddly, I have a "release" for you today. It is possibly the most boring release ever. Nonetheless, I believe it is at least somewhat important.

Many of you already understand the woes of trying to get Creatures games to work on newer versions of Windows. Getting DS or Exodus to install, luckily, is generally much less of a pain, but it still has its problems. Certain combinations of Exodus and newer versions of Windows produce a problem when unpacking agents; instead of unpacking certain files, most notably Catalogue files, into their proper places, the game sees these files as some sort of threat and instead sticks them somewhere in your documents folder. Then when you go to use the agent, it autokills or throws an error because it can't find the file.

This produces nightmares, both for the people trying to use the agent and the developers getting bombarded with emails about their agents being "broken". But it can quite easily be fixed by installing DS or Exodus to your My Documents folder instead of the default location in Program Files.

Is your installation of DS able to properly unpack files? Download this agent and give it a test. It will bring up a window that will tell you if it extracts catalogue files properly. If it doesn't, take measures to fix it by reinstalling. Some have even had success by just moving the DS folder from Program Files to My Documents or the root directory, though I can't vouch for this personally.

Your game will need to be able to properly unpack catalogue files in order to work with several (supposedly, hopefully) upcoming releases, so make sure you're ready!

On a final note, I'm going to try to keep LNA up and running throughout the CCSF, and will be populating the world with various CCSF releases, so keep an eye on it if you're into that sort of thing.

CCSF Blogathon

2011-10-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

Guys. We need more active Creatures blogs.

Every time I open my RSS reader, I hope anxiously that someone has posted in my Creatures category. And all too often I find my art/design category full of eye candy, my food category is full of delicious things I will try to cook later that day, my tea category has a handful of reviews of wonderful stuff I can’t afford, and my creatures category has nothing.

I realize I am as much to blame as anyone for this, as I’m not exactly the most prolific writer. So I have a proposal. The CCSF is coming, and there is no better time to up the activity of our little blogging community.

The concept is quite simple. To participate, simply commit to publishing one post a day during the fourteen days of CCSF. If you don’t already have a blog, there’s no better time to start!

Now, before you get scared, let me remind you that publishing one post a day does not necessarily mean you need to write one post every day! Most blogging platforms allow you to write posts in advance and schedule them to be automatically published on a certain day. If you wanted, you could write fourteen posts in advance, schedule one to be published each day, and be done with it. Meanwhile, the community will be getting a steady stream of posts to read throughout the festival!

Not sure what to blog about? If you are a developer of any sort, your blog is obviously a great place to post your releases, but usually not even the most prolific contributors have something for every day of the CCSF. If any contributors out there want to take that as a challenge, go for it, but for the rest of you, here are some suggestions:

Many creatures blogs serve as a sort of open diary detailing the events of what is going on in their creatures’ worlds. Tell us of the births, deaths, and other drama that raising creatures entails!

If you like to play creatures a bit more scientifically, blogs are a great way to document your experiments and the results that come of them. Similarly, if you are working on a selective breeding project or wolfling run with a specific goal in mind, it’s nice to be able to share your progress.

Perhaps you are a dreamer and prefer thinking of ways you might play creatures, or thinking of things you would like to develop or see developed. By publishing your ideas on your blog, you can explain them in all the detail you like, and possibly gather suggestions and general interest from readers.

You could get creative and take a fictionalized viewpoint. I think it would be neat to see a blog written from the perspective of a norn or other creature, detailing his or her daily life, like a sort of ongoing story.

Speaking of stories, if you’re a creatures fiction writer, publishing a small part or chapter of a story every day is a great way to keep readers interested. Sitting down and reading a long story can be quite daunting sometimes, but releasing small bits at a time makes it easier for casual readers to digest.

You may choose to, instead of focusing on Creatures itself, focus on the community and its creations. Reviews of agents, metarooms, breeds, and even stories, are few and far between, and are a good way to spread the word about some of the hidden gems in the community.

If you are a developer, artistically, genetically, or otherwise, other aspiring developers can get a lot of information out of “the making of”-style posts. Sharing of tips and techniques inspires more creation, and more content for the community!

If you’re really stumped, look to other blogs for ideas. Perhaps a blog you follow has written a post about why C2 is better than C1. Have a different opinion? Feel the same way but for different reasons? Write a post on your own blog in response, linking back to the post that inspired you. Multiple bloggers discussing the same ideas helps to pull the community together, and inspires quite a bit of discussion!

Honestly, you can write just about anything. During the CCSF, there will will certainly be a lot going on and a lot to to think about-- I think you’ll find that it isn’t as difficult as you think!

To kick off this blogging initiative, there is a new tab at the top linking to a list of Creatures blogs. I will attempt to keep this list as complete as possible, so if you start a new blog or know of one that isn’t listed, let me know so I can add it!

(As a sidenote, I've been fiddling with the layout of this blog, so excuse any mess in the meantime!)

Stop sleeping!

2011-10-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it frustrating when norns sleep a lot?

Especially when you're trying to train them to do something very specific, and they just decide to just plop down and take a nap, right there. Argh.

Well, even though I haven't bothered documenting the updates to my dabbles with my instinctless creatures, I have still learned much from that experience and have been slowly working to improve the genome as a whole.

While investigating the aformentioned lonely grendel problem, I discovered that grendels lacked the "found company" gene that reduces loneliness when approaching a member of the same species. Adding the gene in fixed the problem quite simply.

Another problem I manged to fix was one with the sleep cycle. If you don't know, the creature sleep cycle works as such: A creature rests; as it rests it becomes less tired, but gets sleepy, and when it gets sleepy enough, it falls asleep. While sleeping, the creature's tiredness and sleepiness both decrease until it is well-rested and wakes up.

As most of you are aware, there is no "sleep" verb. A creature can decide to rest until it falls asleep, but it cannot just decide to sleep. (Nor can we!) The problem with this is that while creatures with instincts are pre-programmed to rest when sleepy, creatures without instincts cannot make the connection between resting and sleepiness reduction, because it isn't resting that directly reduces sleepiness, it's the sleeping that eventually results from the resting.

So to remedy this, I simply made resting appear to reduce sleepiness by tweaking the stimulus gene to first reduce sleepiness and then silently increase it, enough to both compensate for the reduction and bring it to a normal increase. And it worked! I was so proud to see my instinctless creatures suggesting that other sleepy creatures rest. I just love seeing evidence of creatures learning!

But, I still feel like the creatures sleep too much as a whole. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to do away with sleeping entirely, but it just feels like the frequency is a little high. So I've been tweaking the genetics a little here and there, too.

Meanwhile, I am really enjoying raising these little creatures and discovering how much impact a creature's upbringing can have on its behavior when it isn't being controlled by pre-programmed instincts. For example, I brought up a pair of norns together in an area with nearly no toys around. The norns took to pushing each other instead of toys to reduce boredom, and not only grew up to be great breeders, but very social. It was quite cute when a grendel wandered along complaining of boredom and one of them suggested he push norn!

I plan on tweaking the stimulus genes further to make traveling, pushing lifts, etc to have more of a boredom-reducing effect and see if creatures can be taught to wander around when bored.

Really, the more I play with these altered genomes, the more I wonder what the developers were thinking, putting in these instincts! Some of them I can understand being necessary, half-strength instinct trick for elevators and vendors and all, but as a whole it seems to strip the creatures of so much personality. I can't imagine going back to normal creatures now.

On a side note, I have been testing the elevines (improved "lift ring things" with beautiful sprites many thanks to mea!) in this world, I am finding them so wonderfully handy! Not only do they work great as lift-replacements, but they can also work as replacements for the boats/submarines as well. I'm still tweaking them here and there but hopefully they'll be ready for release soon.

Meanwhile, the DS server has been toying with my emotions, going up and getting my hopes up and then going down again. Oh well. I certainly have enough projects to keep me busy in the meantime.

Updates, call for testers, C4, etc.

2011-08-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

These posts are getting rather unexciting, hah.

I sort of dropped off the face of the earth for a while, random upsets that real-life throws at you can do that. Some of you may have noticed that LNA is down-- most likely it's going to stay that way until the DS server goes back up. I can't really do a whole lot of development for it until that happens anyway.

If you've been keeping an eye on my projects page though, you've probably noticed that I have been finishing up a lot of my smaller projects and they mostly just need to be tested and compiled. So if you are a bored DS player interested in helping that process along by bugtesting and giving feedback, send a PM to Amaikokonut on Creaturetopia. You can technically send me a PM on CreaturesCaves too, but I'll get them faster on Ctopia.

I also feel the need to briefly throw my two cents out there about C4, since news about it is making its way around, sparking mixed opinions from everyone, some a bit disturbingly hostile. Let me just drop in a sixteen-second reminder on how to handle other people's opinions before going on:

Anyway, my view on things may be a bit different than some-- for one, when I first heard the news about C4, I didn't leap for joy or anything of that sort. I didn't have high expectations. Heck, I stated years ago that I wouldn't have high expectations for any future creatures game because the things I personally love creatures for (science, genetics, brain-simulation, etc) are just not marketable traits of a game in this era. No one is going to put tons of time and money into advancing artificial-life science unless they are passionate about it and not looking to turn a profit. That's a project for people like Steve Grand, not a team of game developers. It's just not financially reasonable to expect otherwise, in my view.

So I'm really not expecting C4 to be anything but superficial. In my mind, Creatures has split off into two paths: Grandroids, which takes all the science and realism and improves them without any of the actual surface elements, and Creatures 4, which takes the surface/game elements (norns themselves, graphics, etc) and improves them without the science/realism.

That said, I think C4 looks cute. I will probably buy the boxed version, if nothing else but for the little figurine (I'm just a sucker for stuff like that). I will play it, and possibly find some inspiration with it. Then, in all likeliness, I will go back to playing/developing for DS.

In my mind I'm seeing C4 as almost more like a spin-off or a side-game than an actual successor. And from that standpoint it really doesn't look that bad.

Honestly, I don't think this community needs a C4. It needs lifeblood, it needs more people, development, art, stories, and other interactions-- that is what has kept it alive thus far. But C4 is likely to bring us that in the form of publicity, if nothing else. In that sense, it is most certainly a good thing, no matter how the game turns out. That is, providing the CC doesn't get so up in arms fighting over it that it drives old and potential new players away.

And who knows? Maybe C4 will surprise us a little, too.

Magic Words Demo

2011-08-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

Wow, sorry for the lack of updates. There simply just hasn’t been a lot to write about-- I’ve mostly been spending a lot of time revamping the framework for LNA. There’s not a whole lot of visible changes, but things overall should be running a bit more fluidly and I’ve made it a lot easier on my end to make updates and changes, tailor scripts to certain worlds, and so on.

A lot of this is in preparation after Don’s announcement that hopefully the DS server’s registrations will go back up this month. In anticipation that this will result in a bit more traffic for LNA as well, I certainly want to be prepared.

Oh, and just a little preview of something else that’s been occupying my time:

Just a quick demo of the "magic words" core module I'm working on, as well as the auras module.
The core module basically allows the use of speech-bubble activated scripts while additional modules define what words/phrases to react to and how to react to them. It's basically a foundation for writing interesting agents without having to deal with spriting/coding a GUI. There's a dynamic in-game help menu (not shown) that lists all the commands and what they do, (provided the authors of the modules were not too lazy to define descriptions for their scripts) so you don't need to memorize all the commands.

Anyway, the auras module is just a means of attaching a certain "aura" to a creature. Here I have large stars, small stars, butterflies, and bones (which needs work, it's a little hard to see right now). Useful if you just want to mark a favorite creature or separate creatures into various groups and be able to tell at a glace which group a certain creature belongs to. Still has a bit of work to go, but I figured I'd demonstrate the concept.

I really, really should probably avoid starting new projects when I have so much else to do, but I can't help myself sometimes!

Narrowing Focus

2011-07-07T23:45:00.000-07:00

First of all, I want to thank all of you that gave feedback on my last entry. I have taken everything you guys have said into consideration and used it to formulate this tentative plan for future creature creations. That said, I am still open to feedback, and this not by any means set in stone, but more an update on where my line of thinking is.

The first thing I want to address and get out of the way is Project Underground. After going through my notes on it and giving it a lot of though, I have regretfully come to the decision to put it, for the most part, on the very back burner. It really is just too big. My ultimate goal with that project was essentially to make creatures as attachable as the engine might allow. Throw them into conflict, a dangerous world where they need your help and eachother's help to survive. Add as many random elements as possible to make each play session a different experience. But the more I thought about it, interacted with my Mixed Berries creatures, and leafed through pages and pages of notes and plans, the more I realized that getting attached to creatures just isn't something you can formulate, no matter how many dangers you have to save creatures from or how much the world may change, suspending your disbelief enough to get attached to your creatures is something you have to choose to do-- it's not something a bunch of mods can do for you. Yeah, they can help, and I don't doubt finishing the project would help, but there's a lot of other things I can do to help without rewriting the entire game. In the end, I just don't feel it's worth it. I have more faith that when Grandroids gets into a playable state, it will blow anything I could do within the limits of the DS engine out of the water, as far as realistic and emotionally attachable A-life is concerned.

Now that said, this doesn't mean I'm scratching every idea related to the project. Some of the ideas I had for the project are still viable under the regular DS world-- namely the notion of a randomized metaroom system. That still sounds like quite a bit of fun, and I'm fairly certain I'd like to try and implement some version of that if I can amass a large enough collection of plants, critters, background imagery, etc to make it viable. Ideally, I'll be able to code it in such a way (probably relying a lot on catalogue files) that it will be possible to construct a very basic version with just a few options that will be easily expanded with new possibilities over time. But I'll find time to ramble on that more in later posts.

As far as LNA goes, I'm leaning towards fixing up the status window and coding very basic client/server agents (the things that let you adopt/retrieve norns) somewhere in the near future and see if it sparks any more interest. If so, I'll look into developing it further, but if not, I'll probably have to retire the project as just another one of those ideas that was way better in theory than practice rather than putting more energy into it (that's not to mean I'll take down the stream by any means, just that I probably won't develop a lot more for it)

I probably will make an effort to use the LNA computer for development too, though. A few people seem interested in watching the game crash and bug out, haha.

As far as my old agents, Mind arrows, SERU, Population Control Options-- I think it's best to just leave those as they are for now (though I probably should at least update SERU's readme since a lot of people running Exodus still aren't aware of its issue handling catalogue files). In the future I may develop better agents that serve similar purposes, but for now I think they stand quite well on their own for what they are.

My unfinished agents... I think I'm going to try to finish them. The critical hit script isn't that far from completion and the crossbreeding script probably only needs an hour or so of work to at least get into a testable state. The lift-ring things will take a little more, as I'm hoping to get them better sprites (from Caos of the Creatures Realm, a rather promising blog for us not-so-artistically-inclined coders) and idiot-proof them a little more as right now they throw errors if say, you stick one in outer-space and then try to port a creature to it. And as much as I dread it, I will prod selective muco a bit more and see if I can make anything of it. I've learned quite a lot since I last touched it-- maybe this time around it'll be a bit less daunting.

I was a bit surprised to hear how many of you were interested in seeing Project BattleStance finished (considering the grand total of zero comments achieved by previous posts about it, hah!). Personally, it's a project that's always been a little dear to me and if people are interested in it, I would be more than happy to oblige-- plus, this could be quite a fun thing to develop live on LNA.

Meanwhile, stuff like revamping the blog, caos tutorials, and documenting nurturing worlds will probably just be done on an "as I feel like it" basis. Though I have a new method I'm trying out for nurturing-world documentation that hopefully I'll get around to finishing/posting in the next few days.

The fanfiction podcast, sorry to say, probably just isn't going to happen, both due to lack of interest and the fact that it's been a really, really long time since a creatures story has really caught my attention. However, if anyone else wants to pick up the idea and run with it, you are more than welcome!

With all this in mind, I have been working on a project/progress page that I will try to post in the near future, so keep an eye out for that, and if you have any comments, questions, complaints, or concerns, as always, do feel free to leave a note!

Focus, or lackthereof.

2011-07-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

I think I might need some help, guys.

I'm getting to the point again where I have so many creaturely ideas that I'm in danger of getting overwhelmed and burned out and vanishing for months like I have so many times in the past. I really don't want that to happen, especially since (it seems like, anyway, maybe I'm just conceited) I'm getting a lot more community support for my projects this time around, and I really don't want to let you guys down.

At the same time though, I need to stick to working on things that I'm interested in-- I find that forcing myself into working on projects that bore or frustrate me, even if they're my most popular ideas, tends to make me burn out very quickly as well.

So I'm going to try to make a list here of all projects currently on my plate, and I would really appreciate it if you guys would comment and let me know both what sorts of things here interest you the most, as well as what interests you the least. Don't be shy-- I really would like to know before I waste a lot of time if no one is interested in something! So without further ado:

Revamping this blog -- It's something I've been wanting to do for ages-- mostly in terms of layout; I'd like refresh the look as well as add links to other pages, a way to easily subscribe to feeds, and so on. It's not something that would take more than a day's work or two, but I keep putting it off because it's just not the highest priority I guess.

Writing more CAOS tutorials -- My tutorials are of a different sort than most; while general tutorials show you how to make basic objects, I like to write about individual commands and how they work, or how to make certain scripts function. Most of these are more or less notes of things as I'm discovering them myself and cater to people that already have a decent grasp of CAOS, but I do enjoy writing them and wouldn't mind doing more articles on how more basic commands work too. Of course, the tutorials would only be as useful as readers made them, so I really want to be sure there's demand for that sort of thing before sinking time into it.

Documenting nurturing worlds -- I've been having a lot of fun with Mixed Berries and I will probably continue playing with it, but documenting it, screenshots and all, takes quite a bit of time. I certainly enjoy doing it, but I'm not sure how many people actually enjoy reading that stuff.

Work on Live Nornish Action stuff -- LNA is a bit of a favorite project of mine, but one that relies heavily on viewer interest, which there honestly doesn't seem to be a whole lot of. So one side of developing this is that further improvements could spark more interest; the other side is that I could put many days and nights of work into something that two or three people in the world really enjoy watching/participating in. There's also the risk of the warp server going down indefinitely, which makes the stream mostly pointless and the hours wasted. There are several things I can work on here:

Redoing the status window so it actually wraps properly and is a little more flexible, as well as exploring the possibility of creating a larger font for it.
Writing the client-server agents, which should allow people to interact with LNA remotely, with functions to retrieve your creatures or adopt native-born creatures from the world, drop food or toys in front of creatures, move creatures that are stuck or have wandered into unfortunate places, and so on.
Planning and running some script-assisted competitions-- such as a fighting tournament with modified hit scripts so immortals don't have an unfair advantage, obstacle courses (sort of like an advanced IQ test) that rank creatures according to how fast they can get through them, or breeding competitions that keeps score of how many eggs a creature has laid, and so on.
Another option is to use LNA for showing live development of other projects-- I'm not sure if that would interest or bore people, but it's open to opinions.

Finishing unfinished projects -- Most notably the Crossbreeding script and Critical Hit script falls under this catagory, as well as the Selective Muco, as much as I dread picking that back up again. But Project BattleStance is also very much on the table, which sort of has my interest now that I believe I actually have the skills to finish it if I wanted to. While not an agent, the Creatures Fanfiction Podcast is still a possibility too. And would anyone actually be interested in the lift ring-things if I were to polish them up and turn them into an actual agent?

Polishing old agents -- I always wanted to give the Mind Arrows a bit of a makeover; get rid of the sezz lines, allow them to be turned on/off as needed or adjust the range, possibly even allow filtering according to age/genus. SERU, hands down my most successful agent, might also benefit from a few tweaks and additions, and though I'm willing to bet most people would rather me release a version that scrapped all the cute storyline stuff in favor of making more weird creatures as fast as possible, I could have a lot of fun developing the interactive stuff further too. Population Control Options is another agent that could use a revamp to include support and filtering for ettins and grendels, and a few more options as well.

Following new sparks -- There are too many of these to count...I'll write the ones at the top of my head right now:

Project Underground is probably the most prominent of these, but I really can't help but feel that the time I put into this is just going to go to waste-- it's such a massive undertaking and I'm still not sure I can pull off everything I want to that I'm almost certain sooner or later I'll hit a wall or get bored, it'll never get finished, and all the work I put into it will become nothing, I don't want to sound pessimistic, but well... I really am. Still, I love the idea and I have a lot of fun working on it-- if nothing else I feel like working on a near-rewrite of the game will help me improve my skills and gain a better understanding of how the inner-workings of the game work. I wouldn't count on anything else coming from it.
I've been making extensive use of speech-bubble activated scripts to test agents and personal scripts and things, and I've been thinking of putting together a core module that allows speech-bubble activation to function, while making it extremely easy for other developers to incorporate the feature into their own agents-- it would be as simple as including a variable containing the activation word/phrase and the script to run when the word is said, allowing the agent to respond to speech-bubble commands (as long as the core module was installed) without having to rewrite the speech-bubble-searching bit themselves.
An in-game photo album/journal. Just a weird idea I had recently and after fiddling with a few scripts realized was actually possible. The agent would consist of a little camera agent you could use to take pictures in your world (like those that you take of your creature, but anywhere, and with more size options) and then add them to a sort of scrapbook where you could write a description of the photo or whatever happened that day and so on. Kind of a big project and a pain in the rear to code, but a cute enough idea that I'd be willing to try it if there was interest.

... As you can see, I have quite a pile of projects to work on and some days I am just so overwhelmed by them all that I would much rather go read a book or play another game than decide what to do, and consequently no progress is made. So, maybe you guys can help me prioritize a little? Any and all feedback is appreciated; let me know what projects you think the community would benefit most from, as well as the ones you think are better left on the back burner!

Downloads Page

2011-07-02T12:15:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update-- I finally get around to adding a static downloads page so you don't have to go rooting around through all the pages to find a specific file. You'll find the link right below the banner on the main page. Hope this makes life easier for you guys!

The Case of the Lonely Grendels

2011-07-02T07:31:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me while interacting with my little berries today that it's been so long since I've played with regular creatures, or even CFE creatures, that I really can't tell if the seemingly odd behaviors of these creatures are due to their being instinctless, or due to being CFE, or if they are just regular creatures traits. So I may just have to leave that up to you more experience nurturers to determine.

I didn't think starting off right away with all six helpless, instinctless creatures right off the bat was the best idea, so I just started out by importing the norn pair

I decided to auto-vocab everyone in this world because while I do love the charm of spending time to hand-educate your first handful of creatures, I've discovered in the past that after the first or second generation, it becomes this generally mundane and repetitive chore that results in temptations to just lock the little guys up in the learning room for all their babyhood instead of doing any actual nurturing during those important formative years. Well, minutes anyway.

So I was a bit surprised when I first imported the pair and it was apparently love at first sight. I know CFEs are more expressive of their emotions, but it seems a little weird for even them to pop out of the egg and begin declaring their undying adoration for the creature beside them.

They sat cuddling in the corner for the first few minutes of their little lives before getting bored, when I suggested they play with the ball. They...took that idea and ran with it, chasing the ball all the way to the end of the hall, sticking with each other every step, before stopping to express their joy.

Ahh, the innocence of youth.

I looked away for just a moment to respond to a message, and came back not a moment later to see that Icepaw had developed a sudden streak of wanderlust that landed him in the jungle, and was starting to regret it. His little playmate didn't seem too happy with the arrangement either.

But they seemed to be getting on alright-- they weren't starving or throwing themselves into bodies of water, so I thought I would progress to importing our scalier pair.

They didn't have the cute cuddle time that the nornlings had right out of the shell, but they did express their likings for each other a few times before Gnaw decided to go prove her bravery by dancing on the piranha pool bridge. Wish I had a picture of that one.

Was it really safe to let Icepaw wander so close by? I'll admit, I was curious if instinctless grendels would have a better chance of getting along with other creatures. Norns still genetically make them angry to be around and hitting creatures does release that anger, but they aren't born knowing that, so they would have to learn that hitting creatures makes them feel good before it became a habit, and maybe I could teach them to take their aggression out elsewhere before they realize that small helpless creatures are the most effective punching bag.

But it seemed all they wanted to do was play with toys anyway.

So the really weird stuff started when Leo became separated from his bonier counterpart and began expressing his sadness.

Icepaw responded with "maybe get norn Leo," which I have to mention because it actually has some significance with instinctless creatures. As they are born without knowing what to do, it's easy to tell what they have learned when they respond to other creatures' complaints-- they will express what they think should be done in that situation. Without instincts to pre-program those reactions, they will usually respond with "maybe left/right something" unless they have learned a better way of dealing with it. So it is a little exciting to see that little Icepaw has learned how to deal with loneliness.

So I attempted to tell Leo to approach grendel in hopes of teaching him the same thing. But....it didn't help?

Come on Leo, she's right ther-

Sigh. Gnaw, poke him or something so he knows you'r-

....oookay. So you guys are invisible to each other or something.

This continues on for quite some time-- Leo seems to be the more emotional one, complaining of loneliness regardless of whether or not Gnaw is right there. Gnaw occasionally complains of loneliness but is more likely to complain of boredom. She also seems to be directionally challenged as I caught her banging her head frantically into the wall in some attempt to approach me.

Alright, well at this point I decided to import the ettins, so I guided Icepaw back to the norn area so I could focus on the new pair without worrying that one of the grendels would suddenly learn how punchable norns were.

Cookie has an adorable little sprite defect in the form of a tail. I'm certainly not complaining; it's a bit charming! Unfortunately though, I am not very good at caring for ettins. They, quite unlike the norns and grendels, showed no affection at all for each other upon importing, and instead complained endlessly about boredom. And I tried everything. I gave them toys, I gave them gadgets, I gave them food! But it doesn't help that the stubborn things refuse to listen to what I have to say.

Within only seven minutes they had advanced to adolescence; I forget how fast these things grow! But after more attempts to cure their boredom to no avail, I went to check on the others again.

They're growing up so fast and getting along so well! And look! They even appreciate me. ;_;

Next time I'll redouble my efforts to make the ettins happy. Hopefully I can get them to pay attention! And the lonely grendels....I don't even know what I'm going to do with them. They're technically of breeding age now-- maybe I could convince them to produce a child?

At least the norns are happy and learning well!

Return to Nurturing. Sort of.

2011-07-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

I was on a coding roll this week. This kind of stuff tends to happen after I get a new order of tea.

Okay, and I wanted an excuse to post this extremely pointless video. Anyway.

So I was coding along when out of the blue I get this weird urge to like...um... actually play the game I'm coding for. What a weird idea.

I'm pretty sure I haven't run a serious nurturing world since Mixed Nuts back in September '09, and lately I'm wondering if I need to rediscover the experiences that made me fall in love with this game so long ago.

With this idea in mind, I promptly went back to coding. How effective.

No, really, my ambitions had a purpose-- I wanted to start a nurturing world with instinctless creatures, and in order to do that, I had to make some lifts that didn't require call buttons, since without instincts, creatures don't have the call button/lift system programmed into their brains. So grabbing some random sprites from the hoverdoc, I hastily and sloppily coded these goofy little lift rings.

They're not much to look at and don't really make much sense in design, but they're practical and easy to work with. Shift-clicking one makes another ring appear with the same ID as the original, ctrl-clicking creates a ring with a new ID, shift-ctrl-clicking deletes the ring.

When a creature pushes/pulls the rings, which are classified as elevators, the rings look for the next highest/lowest ring with the same ID and teleport the creature there. It stims the creature in the same way lifts do, so for all intents and purposes, the rings are identical to lifts, just without all the call button complications.

At least, so I hope. Hopefully this nurturing world I'm planning will give them a thorough testing.

I set up the world (which I named Mixed Berries) for my instinctless creatures first by killing all the lifts and replacing them with the rings. I then killed all the vendors, since those too rely on the half-strength instinct trick, and replaced them with various plants instead.

Then I created my starter creatures. In the spirit of my old Mixed Nuts world, I decided to start with two norns, two ettins, and two grendels.

I opened the CFE breedfile for each species, disabled all instincts, and then chose the sprites for the creatures. It's important to mention the sprites do not reflect on the creatures' genome in this case-- all I did was change the appearance genes in the CFE genome to the sprite slots I wanted; they are more a skin than anything. Thus aquatic breeds are not actually aquatic, and so on.

So, meet the creatures of Mixed Berries:

I will try to document the time I spend with them in some attempt to learn more about instinctless creatures, and maybe just for a while set aside the logic and rationality required for coding and suspend my disbelief long enough to get in touch with my nurturing side.

That, or I'll get bored and forget the whole thing, as I am so prone to do. We'll see how it goes.

Older Highgen Generator

2011-06-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

As per request, I'm posting an older version of my Highgen Generator script up here.

This one is much slower and sloppier, but as I mentioned before, the purpose of the script was to create highgens as fast as possible, and that meant sacrificing any interest in the actual creatures. Older versions of the script actually spliced creatures with themselves or parents/siblings instead of a random first-gen genome, which allowed for mutations to carry down the line. However, it came with a whole lot of problems, the most prominent of which being that since creatures didn't have to be alive to be spliced (and culling stillborns slowed down the process of getting highgens), I ended up with thousands of creatures that were not only dead, but mutated to ridiculous extremes.

I basically had a few choices-- I could be content with dead norns, I could set the mutation rate to zero and have the creatures never change through the generations, or I could splice them with first-gens instead of themselves. I found the latter to be the most interesting option I could choose without sacrificing speed, so that is what the current script does.

However, for those of you that care less about highgens and more about interesting creatures, I will provide this older version. It includes a check that culls stillborns, creates three creatures at a time instead of one (to provide as backups in case of stillborns), and exports about every hundreth creature instead of every thousandth (but instead of only exporting creatures that end in "00" it basically gives every creature a 1% chance to be exported, so the actual generations that are exported are random).

Keep in mind that creatures resulting from this script are still very likely to suffer a lot of handicaps, since they still don't need to be able to move, eat, sleep, breed, etc in order to be spliced. So you are still pretty likely to end up with sliders, creatures stuck in certain ages, creatures unable to perform basic functions, and so on. But hey, at least they'll be alive.

You can download the old script here. As always, use at your own risk. This version hasn't been tested very well at all.

Be sure to post some of your highgens and other interesting creatures to TCR and show them off! I'd be interested in seeing what creatures you guys are producing.

Project Underground UI

2011-06-27T15:26:00.000-07:00

I'm still really bored.

Even though I don't see myself ever getting anywhere even slightly close to ever making any real progress on Albia's Underground, and it's more or less just another one of those insane dreams, I have sort of been entertaining delusions of progress by working on the UI for it, at least-- you'll have to click the thumbnail to see:

So I started with an LNA-esque status window, only coded about a thousand times better.
There are buttons to scroll up and down, shift-clicking takes you to the bottom or top of the log, ctrl+clicking makes the window bigger/smaller so you can adjust it how you like it, and shift+ctrl clicking lets you adjust the transparency of the window however you like it. The X lets you clear the window(more specifically, it prompts you to shift+click it after clicking it once normally to prevent accidental clearing) if it gets too long for your liking or starts to slow down the world, but old logfiles are saved in the journal folder.

It logs whenever the world is opened, saved, and closed, and makes a note when a world is opened after a crash. If I ever get far enough to write the scripts to support actual creatures, it will log the same stuff LNA does, when creatures are born, breed, die, and other world-specific events like tunnels collapsing.

I find myself a little stuck on developing the rest of the UI because I'm still not sure how I want to handle how and which creatures get tracked. If you read my long ramble about this world, you'll know that in this world there will be your own, tame, trackable creatures and then "wild" creatures that can't be selected, but I have yet to work out who is and isn't selectable and why, and how a creature becomes selectable, but I haven't quite found a solution that quite fits what I am wanting out of this world.

I want wild creatures to inspire feelings of curiosity, mystery, and caution. I don't want you to be able to select them once you discover them-- that would defeat the point. I would like to have some system that allows you to eventually select them, but I don't want to have to implement some sort of mundane activity that you repeat in order to try to win their trust or something. I may just end up finding some way to track how much a wild creature interacts with your tame creatures and then allow wild creatures to become selectable after some period of time.

At the same time, I want to avoid a "collector" mentality. I want to get attached to the creatures I do have, ideally enough that I don't feel the need to tame every strange creature I come across. I have thought of implementing a hard limit of creatures you can track at one time, but some part of me just doesn't like setting hard boundaries like that. Another idea would be to just have some sort of penalty, something that makes the game more difficult the more creatures you are tracking. Perhaps if you don't spend enough time with a tame creature, it has the chance to turn wild and become unselectable.

I like that idea in theory, but I don't want to feel like, "oh I better tab over and tickle this creature so it doesn't run away." I want the play experience to be an immersive one, where I can go about caring for my creatures without having to be conscious of the scripts in the background.

But maybe if I can script it reasonably enough, the flow of selectable creatures will be fairly natural-- the creatures I grow attached to and enjoy watching will become trackable, and the creatures that I really don't find that interesting will become wild, and it won't really feel like a huge loss anyway.

I don't know why, but I take a lot an awful lot of joy in working out concepts for things, even if I know they are unlikely to ever actually be put into action.

Highgen Generator

2011-06-19T15:35:00.001-07:00

The DS server is down, and I am bored to death.

So I've gone and written another script. Many of my scripts exist to accomplish a certain purpose as fast as possible, and this one is no different! This one just exists to generate high-generation creatures.

When you inject it, it starts by emptying your world of most objects so that it can spend most of its resources generating creatures instead of worrying about other scripts-- this includes removing elevators and doors, so you'll want to start a new world specifically for this purpose before injecting it.

The script will then check your world for the youngest creature. If there are no creatures in your world, it will attempt to import the last creature that was exported. If there are no creatures to import, it will pick a random genome from your genetics folder and make one.

The script will then either kill or export all other creatures in the world. It's set to only export creatures of generations in multiples of 1000, and kill the rest. Otherwise, the script would be generating thousands of export files, which can really take of space, not to mention just clutter things. Exporting every 1000th creature provides a bit of a save point in case the world crashes or your creatures get autokilled, and allows you, if you wish, to track the changes over time.

Once only one creature is in the world, the script splices the creature's genetics with a random genome in your genetics folder at an average mutation rate to create a creature of the next generation. That new creature is now targeted, and the script repeats itself indefinitely, creating higher and higher generations of creatures.

On my computer, in fast ticks, it generates a thousand generations about every 6-7 minutes. Of course, this will vary according to your computer's speed.

Keep in mind that worlds running this script tend to take up a bit of space since hundreds of genetic files are being generated every minute. If you run the script for say, days at a time, you may find your world's folder bloated to a gigabyte and beyond, so if hard drive space is an issue for you, keep that in mind and delete/recreate the world every so often. The script will pick right up from the last exported creature.

What did I do this? I don't really know. Part of me wondered if the generation counter would break at a certain number, I guess. Part of me just likes to see numbers go up. But mostly, I was just really, really bored.

Anyway, if you want to join me in this relatively pointless boredom-induced number generating, get your copy of the cosfile here (right click, save as). As always, use at your own risk!

In which I ramble forever about more things I will never do.

2011-06-04T02:08:00.000-07:00

When I look through all my notes and ideas and wishes for changes to DS, sometimes I seriously want to just rewrite DS from near-scratch, using only the engine, the graphics, and perhaps the CFE genome (though it would have to be heavily edited still. I have learned a lot about the inner workings of Creatures, but the creatures' brain is the one thing that remains such a mystery to me that I know I'm best off leaving to the experts) and making DS just the way I would like it.

I know I don't have the time or skill to do such a thing, but I like to dream about it anyway, and sometimes, write up an ideal scenario of what the game would be like if I did. I just... really want creatures to be an adventure again. I want to recapture those feelings I got when I first started playing, the feelings of adventuring into the new and unknown, of closely nurturing creatures to both protect them from the dangers of the world and teach them to avoid them for themselves.

So just for fun, here is a backstory and yet more weird ideas that I will never be able to fulfill:

***

Albia is not what it used to be, and the Shee are to blame.

Thousands of years after the Shee had well-established themselves on their spherical planet, a few reckless Shee decided to break laws and ordinances that forbade them from going back, and did just that. With absolutely no respect or care for the planet's balance or the well-being of the creatures that inhabited it, the rebellious Shee treated the fragile world as a mere playground, making repairs to the old splicer, rounding up the norns, ettins, and grendels to splice, clone, genetically modify, and splice again, creating hideous creatures of absolutely no distinguishable species purely for their own amusement. The Shee also brought in genetic samples from their home and let loose new life on Albia; terrible beasts and toxic plants that had adapted to a much harsher (and larger) world than than this one, and had no problems thriving, completely infesting the world, ripping apart the native plants and animals to claim the tiny planet as their own, devouring both the careless Shee and the majority of their experiments.

Luckily, a hundred or so of the spliced creatures managed to flee underground-- the only place safe from the monsters that had complete dominance of the surface. There they banded together, for there was no difference between them anymore; they were all mixed freaks now, and neither had more norn, ettin, or grendel blood in them than the others. But there were so very few of them, and they quickly realized that as the only survivors, they had to repopulate in order to keep as least some semblance of their kind alive. But their genetics worked against them, and it appeared that only three of the females in the entire group were fertile. So it was that every creature descended from one of three mothers: Glias, Lyth, or Kir.

Though the creatures began their new lives as one united species, it sadly did not continue that way. Perhaps a drive to claim one's own kind as genetically superior just runs far too deeply in the hearts of all the Shee's creations, for it wasn't long until the once allied creatures divided themselves according to their heritage. Though the bloodlines were still visually completely indistinguishable from each other, they nonetheless grouped into their own clans and fought amongst themselves to claim territories and food sources in the large networks of underground tunnels they had once created together.

As the horrifying beasts above continued to rampage, the creatures learned to avoid Albia's surface at all costs. The earthquakes created by the monsters quite often damaged and caved in many of their underground hollows, and the creatures struggled to both defend their territories and keep them intact.

You, the all-seeing hand wandering these tunnels, discover an abandoned nest that has been cut off from the rest of the tunnels by one of these quakes. The two orphan eggs remaining could hold creatures of any descent. Perhaps if you care for them, watch them carefully, and follow them, you will learn more about the strange tribal culture that has evolved in Albia's Underground.

***

The first thing I would do is get rid of the breed/species distinctions. There would be no norns/ettins/grendels, instead those genus slots would be used to distinguish between the three tribes, which would be genetically identical other than being outwardly hostile towards creatures not of their tribe. Technically, they would still be able to befriend each other and interbreed, but would certainly not do so naturally.

Your initial two creatures would have their tribe picked at random, and be generated semi-SERU-style, basically picking from 16 genomes of that tribe, all of which would be genetically identical except for their sprite assignments, and mashing them together with at zero (or rather small) mutation chance. So basically, the creatures would be born genetically stable, but completely random appearance-wise.

You would start out in a tiny cave, a single metaroom with the basic supplies to teach, feed, entertain, and raise your first two creatures. However, when your creatures get on their feet, learn the basics, and start getting restless, they start -digging-.

There's quite a bit of a random element in this ideal-world. I guess that is because, to me, keeping things new and constantly changing is what keeps things interesting. As an added bonus, generating things randomly means I have less to design, and personally, the aesthetics of the game is much less important to me than the inner-workings. But stepping back a bit to explain:

The world map would basically consist of a series of ideally 50 or more tiny, single-level metarooms. These would likely be 5-10 basic rooms that are just repeated (like a basic small cave, a large cave, a narrow tunnel, an underground pond, a (very dangerous) surface area, etc etc). However, when the world is created, each room would pick randomly from several backgrounds, foregrounds, plants, and wildlife to make each area unique. Every world would be different.

But back to where I was, when you start out, you would only have one room. Eventually, your creatures would dig a tunnel that would essentially be a door to another random room. Creatures would dig when they are crowded or scared or territorial. More than one tunnel could be dug from most rooms, so there would be multiple branches. Theoretically, eventually, creatures would dig through the the entire system of rooms, but occasionally earthquakes would destroy the tunnels, so the pathways would be relatively dynamic. Furthermore, occasionally rooms that had been completely cut off from the rest of the tunnels would re-randomize themselves to create the illusion of infinite areas to discover. You would only be able to visit rooms that your creatures would be able to access.

But your creatures wouldn't be the only ones digging. There would be other creatures, wild creatures that you couldn't initially select, that are off in their own tunnels, digging, breeding, and carrying out their lives. These would also be of randomized tribes.

I am toying with a few ideas for how I would handle the "wild creatures" aspect. My initial idea was to just allow you to select them as soon as you saw them, but that would completely take all the excitement out of an encounter with a stranger, and that's something I really want to maintain. Another option is to have some process you have to go through to befriend or tame a creature in order to be able to select it, but I feel like that might eventually become a nuisance. Currently I'm stuck on the idea of having a limit of creatures you could track at a time, eight or so maybe, so while it would be easy to start tracking a stranger, it would require losing track of another creature, so you would have to play favorites and choose carefully. But even that sort of pigeonholes me into a role I may or may not want to take all the time. So I'm still thinking about that.

I don't want to restrict who is selectable based on tribe. I think that even though the basic instincts of the tribes are to hate and fight each other, the idea of raising a mixed group that lives together (relatively) comfortably should still remain an option. Though ideally, the player would grow a bit of a natural attachment to their starter tribe.

Home smells and territory would play a role in this whole tribal clashing thing. The longer an area is inhabited by a certain tribe, the more that area would start to smell like that tribe's home. Creatures would generally feel more comfortable in their own home and want to stay in those areas when they are not feeling well. Meanwhile, strong, healthy, and territorial creatures may explicitly seek out other areas to claim for their tribe.

Territoriality is a strange sort of "sympathy drive" I want to introduce. It's a drive maintained by an external script that assesses the general comfort of the local tribe population based on their average anger/fear/crowded/etc drive levels and then silently adjusts the territorial drive of each creature to match. Thus, the drive won't actually go down until the tribe as a whole is happier, but creatures could reduce the drive for themselves temporarily by doing things that might help their tribemates feel comfortable, like digging tunnels, approaching enemy territory, hitting enemies, and so on. I'm thinking about two of these if I have the slots, one for tribal discomfort and one for tribal hunger.

Food, I want to be a resource that has to be maintained to an extent. I don't want it to be impossible to come by, but I don't want it to be plentiful and everywhere. Food is something that creatures would actually have to forage for. Digging in shallow soil or pushing a plant may yield something edible-- sort of like a chance-based vendor. Since creatures would be instinct-less based, they won't have the half-strength instinct trick to properly use vendors. Instead, the tribal hunger drive would be what drives a creature to forage.

Since I mentioned instinctless creatures I feel that I should elaborate a bit on that. Creatures would have no genetic instincts. The wild, unselectable creatures that are generated however, would have some scripts kickstart basic instincts into them just so they are viable. But the creatures that you raise would have to be taught everything. They would find out on their own that eating reduces hunger, pushing toys reduces boredom, hitting enemies reduces tribal discomfort and so on, but only if they try it-- and they are unlikely to try it unless the hand tells them to. Your creatures essentially won't be able to survive without guidance, and creatures would act quite differently depending on what they were taught as younglings. The lack of genetic instinct also means it would be entirely possible to raise peaceful cohabiting tribes if you did so from non-feral creatures, because you could teach them peaceful ways to reduce their anger and territoriality. Handling angry feral invaders would still be a problem, however.

But creatures would have other things to set them apart from others aside from their upbringing. The action scripts and genetics would be written in such a way that a creature's reaction to a certain action wouldn't be entirely hard-coded into their genetics. Upon birth, each creature would be assigned a unique set of characteristics-- some hereditary and some random, that would act as filters on how they see the world.

These characteristics come in the form of percentages. A creature with a "pushing toys reduces boredom" characteristic of 100% would receive the normal amount of boredom reduction when they push a toy. But a creature might have a filter of 50%, meaning they simply don't find toys very interesting, and would only receive half the boredom reduction from them. Most creatures would have fairly average percentages-- between 75~125%, but a few of them would stretch further. These characteristics should ensure that no two creatures are really the same.

Creatures would have randomly generated quirks, too. These are along the same lines as characteristics, but instead of being more or less percentages of average things, they would be additional and somewhat strange things, like a creature that gets a boredom decrease in addition to a hunger decrease from eating food, or a creature that gets a fear increase from pushing creatures. These quirks shouldn't be too crippling to a creature's well-being, but should serve the same purpose as characteristics-- to give individual creatures a little bit more personality.

Since these are all done through action scripts instead of genetics, they also have the potential to change over time, though I'm not sure the average creature lives long enough to warrant that.

Really, I want to make a lot of things script-based to cover flaws in genetics. For example, genetics would not determine (as much as I can help) when a creature dies. A sort of reaper script would monitor creatures for low levels of certain critical chemicals, high levels of others, and so on. The script would decide when a creature dies (or passes out, C2-style, something else I would bring back), not genetics, so it would be extremely difficult or hopefully impossible for creatures to mutate into immortals.

Wow. Okay so I've thought way, waaaay too much into this, considering it's something I'll never have the time or energy to actually pull off. But I guess it's just really nice to daydream. A world like this... I think.. I -hope- would be something I could get attached to, that would keep my interest.

What about you guys? If you were to rewrite DS within the limitations of the engine, what would your ideal version be like?

New LNA Site!

2011-05-26T14:12:00.000-07:00

So in between settling in at both my new home and my new job after moving across the country, I've really been trying to get LNA a decent site running; check it out!

If you haven't visited LNA in a while, I hope you'll give it another peek-- I've made quite a few improvements to it and I'm going to do my best to find time to improve it even more as time goes on. I really hope people will enjoy it.

Grandroids and LNA

2011-03-07T15:16:00.000-08:00

So in case you've been living under a rock, you probable know that Steve Grand, the original mind behind Creatures, is working on a new artificial life project and has a kickstarter fund going to help cover his cost of living while he works full time on it.

This is essentially our Creatures 4, guys. It may not have norns, but I'm telling you, if you were drawn into Creatures for the science and lifelikeness of it, this is more than worth getting really, really excited about!

Even though the project has passed its requirement to be funded, you can still pledge until April 8th, and the rewards are more than generous. For $50, you get a copy of the final version of the game, and you get to beta test it. Seriously, fifty bucks isn't much more than what a lot of games retail these days, and those games don't generally contain groundbreaking developments in AI. Just think of it as a really, really early pre-order. Or, for $75, you not only get to test the game, but you get access to development tools such as gene editors and the like to get a jumpstart on developing (my personal interest of course). Just the thought of being a part of that whole process thrills me to no end.

There are other pretty nice rewards if you can afford to pledge more, so check it out and support the next generation of sillicon-based life!

On another note, yes, I've pretty much dropped off the face of the earth and I don't know that I'll really ever have the time to climb back up, but I did get a new computer and used the old one to fire up Live Nornish Action again, so pop by and say hi if the stream is up! I have a few ideas I'm working on to make it a bit more interactive-- an agent that lets you adopt creatures straight from the LNA world for instance, but I'll see what time I can find. You guys probably know by now that my ideas tend to far outweigh my actual productivity, heh.

"Voice" activated agents

2010-07-06T06:22:00.001-07:00

Wooow life has been busy lately. Between running the CCSF Surveys and having some friends in town, on top of work, keeping the house clean, and all that fun stuff, I haven't had a whole lot of time for Creaturely enjoyments. Regardless, I figured I would make a post about something I have been fiddling with the last few days.

As a few of you may know, I can't sprite. As fewer of you may know, I don't -like- to sprite. Okay, I can enjoy spriting things when the sprite is the charm of the agent, like a critter or a plant, but when I'm coding something utilitarian, like a control panel or a machine, spriting is just this annoying necessity that I have to do to make my code accessible to the majority. As such, I generally seek to find ways around it. Shortcut keys are one example. But lately I've been experimenting with "voice" activation, that is, simple commands are typed into the hand's speech bubble to trigger certain scripts. I'll share what I've found so far-- it's fairly simple if you understand some CAOS basics.

You'll want to set this on short timer script-- shorter than it takes for speech bubbles to possibly disappear unseen.

enum 1 2 9

1 2 9 is the classifier for all the speech bubbles, including those made by creatures. This script is essentially going to search every speech bubble in the world for a certain trigger phrase.

doif ov80 ne 1
setv ov80 1

When the script is running possibly several times within a speech bubble's life, it's very possible that it will search the same bubble more than once, and thus produce the effects more than once. To stop this from happening we want to "mark" each speech bubble that we search by changing an ov (I use 80, but you can really use anything the speech bubble doesn't already use) to reflect this. If the bubble has been marked, the script passes over and ignores it, if it is unmarked, the script marks it and carries on with the script.

part 1

part 1 is the text part of the compound agent that is the speech bubble, so the script needs to focus on that to see what's inside.

sets ov82 ptxt

And in just about five lines of code, you have the text of a speech bubble stored in ov82! But it's not finished yet, because when you're searching the bubbles for a trigger word, the searches are case sensitive, so to prevent problems with that you'll want to convert it to all lower case:

sets ov82 lowa ov82

Better. Now you can set your trigger scripts here. Most commonly you would do something like:

doif ov82 = "cheese"
*insert whatever script the word "cheese" will trigger
endi

but the trigger word doesn't have to match the speech exactly, you can also used a SINS command to search inside the text instead of matching it directly.

doif sins ov82 1 "cheese" ne -1
*insert cheesy script
endi

This option will trigger the script if your speech bubble contains the word "cheese" at all, so if you said "I love cheese" or "This cheese is green" the script would trigger. You can actually make some very complex commands if you use SUBS to break up the strings, too.

Make sure you close out your script with endi and next!

It's worth reminding you that this does read all speech bubbles including those of creatures, so you could do something like search the text for the phrase "hungry for starch" and cause the script to get the location of the bubble and go drop some seeds there (though you would probably want use the catalogue tags instead of directly searching for the word/phrase to keep it compatible with non-english versions of creatures).

The upside to these command-activated agents is that they require no sprites and no items to clutter your screen or keep track of. I guess the downside would be that if there were a lot of commands involved, people would be more apt to forget them all.

What do you guys think? Would you use a "voice" activated agent or do you prefer to push a button?

Windows App for Development Research!

2010-06-14T21:29:00.000-07:00

If you're a developer who's still learning the ropes of CAOS, Windows Grep may be of great use to you. It's not a tool made especially for CAOS development-- it is just a simple, light application that searches the text of all files in the folders that you designate for a word or phrase, but if you are just learning CAOS, this can be pretty invaluable for learning how different CAOS commands are used.

Let's say, for example, you don't quite understand how the "anim" command works and would like to see it in context to get a better idea. You would open up Windows Grep, type in "anim" and make sure the "find whole words only" box is checked so it doesn't return comments that might contain "animate," "animation," or "kanimakoo" (if that was actually a word).

Next you'll want to select the folders that the cos files are stored in. For most of you this will be the bootstrap directories in both your C3 and DS folders. If you often use a PRAY decompiler such as Jagent or REVELATION, you may want to select that folder as well so it can search the cosfiles of agents you have decompiled.

Next you'll want to add the *.cos extension to filetypes to be searched. You may have to add it in the "Custom file specification" box.

Tada! The search process takes almost no time at all, maybe five seconds at the most on my computer. The window will list all files that contain the "anim" command, and selecting the file will list every line where that command appears in that file. If you mouse over the page-shaped buttons in the top bar, you will find that you are able to toggle between showing the matching lines and showing the whole file, making it relatively easy to see how a command works in context.

The nice part is that the program remembers the folders and extensions you last selected, so if you want to look for a different command, all you have to do is search again, enter the new query on the first page, and click "finish." Even after you exit the program, it remembers the conditions of your last search.

This really is a very nice tool for developers or just generally curious people. Just be careful what you touch-- the program is also capable of searching and replacing words or phrases in the files-- something that could easily screw up your game if you're not careful.

I hope this can help some of you guys out. Happy searching and developing!

Help Plan CCSF 2010!

2010-06-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

It's time to start planning the wonderful festivity that will inevitably be CCSF 2010, and we need your input!

The CCSF 2010 Surveys are currently underway! Right now Survey 1 is open and will run until June 22nd. This first survey runs a bit longer to give us extra time to spread awareness, but later surveys will only be open a week, so hopefully we will come to a decision quickly.

Visit the CCSF 2010 Survey Center to input your ideas! And please, please help spread the word of this around as much as possible! I would hate to have people show up with great ideas after things had already been decided.

Happy Planning!

Half-released cosfiles

2010-06-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

I call these "half released" because they've technically been available in other parts of the CC-- usually in a thread where someone requests a fix and I upload it directly to that thread. But I've pulled a few of them together into this post for everyone to enjoy.

Again, these are cosfiles, not agents, but most of them are the sort of thing you'd like to drop in your bootstrap folder so they'll affect all your worlds anyway. They also have not been fully tested, so please do report any problems you have. Additionally, you may have to right-click and "save as" in some browsers to download them.

No Seasonal Gender Bias -- Gender, as you may or may not know, is affected by the in-game "seasons." You can't generally tell, as very few agents depend on them, but the world does go through an invisible cycle of seasons. In the spring, creatures have a 75% chance of giving birth to females, and in the autumn, a 75% chance of males. Summer and winter grant an equal chance. This can sometimes be frustrating, especially for feral runs that rely on a good male/female balance, so this modified egg-laying script gets rid of that and makes the genders 50/50 regardless of the season. (Someone requested this in CC IRC, and I can't for the life of me remember who. But I hope you find it, whoever you are!)

Bypass Import Cloning -- You know that annoying box that pops up and makes you clone and rename most creatures when you try to import them? It's there to stop the warp server from getting confused, as it tracks creatures that go through the warp based on their moniker, So if you try to import a norn that was not directly exported from one of your worlds, the game clones it, gives it a new moniker, and all is well. But norn tracking has been broken on the DS server for ages anyway, and it really can be frustrating to rename every norn that you download, so this modified script will import creatures without cloning them. However, it will still clone a creature if another copy of it already exists in your world (or has existed in the past and died).

Wolf Control Fix -- This is something that may not be needed much yet, but I honestly think will become more and more necessary as time goes on and computers get faster. I first noticed when trying to run small wolfling runs in near-empty worlds, I would come back to find that wolf control had thrown a strange "divide by zero" error message when left in fast ticks. I dissected the cosfile to find that RACE, which returns the time in milliseconds which the last tick took, was being divided to find the frame rate. When DS is in fast ticks on a fast computer, it is possible that a tick can occasionally take less than a millisecond, causing the game to try to divide by zero and crash. This fix simply checks to make sure that RACE is not zero before it divides it!

CV Shortcuts -- This is not a DS cosfile; it is actually for Creatures Village. Some people have reported problems with it that I have not been able to reproduce, so use at your own risk. This just adds a few keyboard shortcuts to make CV a little easier to explore-- Ctrl+0 will "disconnect" your camera from your selected creature, allowing you to scroll around the room as you please. Ctrl 1-9 act sort of like favorite place shortcuts and take you to various places of the world (you can edit the cosfile to easily change these). Shift+Ctrl+1 will teleport the currently selected creature to your hand, and Ctrl+Q will export the current creature, though I haven't bothered finding a way to import them again, so it's fairly pointless.

Hope you all enjoy! :)

Agent: Population Control Options

2010-06-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

A thread came up on Creaturetopia recently regarding a feral run, and one of the topics covered was population control. I did make some cosfiles a while back to help with population control, but I was inspired to construct them into something a bit more tangible:

This options panel provides you with several options for population control within your world. It can be toggled on and off with the keyboard shortcut shift+ctrl+O

For the most part, the options are self-explanatory-- click on the buttons to turn them on (green) or off (red). The blue numbers are editable and can be tweaked to your desire.

The first four options are export options-- naturally, if these are switched on they will override their infertile counterparts. The first option exports creatures automatically once they hit old age. The second is a bit complicated; it exports creatures of the lowest generation once the next generation is established with as many male/female pairs as you define. For example, if the number is set to three, the agent will watch your population and export all generation one norns when there are at least three male and three female norns of a higher generation than one. Keep in mind that it does not (yet) distinguish between species, so if you have the grendel/ettin egglayer running you will probably get a lot of generation 1 grendels and ettins in your exports folder.

The next two options are gender-specific; you can choose to have females exported once they have laid a certain amount of eggs, and choose to have males exported after fathering a certain number of children.

The fifth option should be used with caution, if at all. If you are leaving a wolfling run for a long time and/or your creatures are multiplying very quickly, the large amount of export files can add up fast. This option allows you to export only a fraction of the creatures meeting the criteria above, and painlessly kill the rest.

The remaining options are similar, only they attempt to keep the creature infertile instead of exporting it. Under normal conditions creatures will be unable to breed when they meet the selected criteria; however, if the creatures are exposed to fertility agents, it is not impossible for the infertility to be overridden, so use caution.

Keep in mind that this is a beta and hasn't been tested completely, so please report any bugs you come across, and as always, suggestions for future versions are welcome!

Download the BETA Population Control Options here, then head over to The Arch and read up on ArchDragon's feral run that inspired the agent to begin with!

Action Script Modes

2010-06-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

I wrote a few strange little scripts today that ultimately resulted in a creature's ability to randomly tint everything it pushes, just for fun. Kinda useless, but the scripting behind it might not be.

I've had this idea in my head for a while of the ability to switch the game into different "modes" when needed, modes that basically affect everything in the world and how it works. Creature action scripts, to be specific.

Creature action scripts (I don't know if that's the proper name for them but it's what I call them anyway) are the default scripts that define what happens when a creature does something or when something is done to a creature. You can find these in your bootstrap folder in files like "DS creatureDecisions.cos" and "DS creatureToCreature.cos." These are the scripts I modify to make my Critical Hit or Interspecies Breeding scripts.

What I set out to do today was to essentially create an easy way to shift between different sets of action scripts, between the default push/pull/eat/hit/mate/etc scripts and my custom ones, without having to reinject them every time (which often results in errors if there are creatures making use of those scripts).

It worked basically by making a "state" agent who's purpose was to act as a switch between the default scripts and the altered scripts. Then at the beginning of the default push script, I added a bit of code that basically said "check the state agent to see what to do." When the state agent is in the default state, it will tell the script to go ahead and run the script as usual, but if it is set to another state with a mesg wrt+ command, it will run an alternate script instead (or if the alternate script isn't there, the default script again).

To do this, the "state" is set to a number, 0 for default, and something like 1000 for alternates. If the push script is activated (script 17) and the state is set to an alternate of 1000, the script will add its number to the state number, thus running 1017 instead. But first it checks to make sure 1017 exists-- if it doesn't, it'll run script 17 anyway. So I can make a set of modified scripts one script at a time and not worry about errors being thrown if it's not a complete set.

I'm really not sure if there's a decent purpose for this system outside of development and testing, but it's an interesting little system. Possibly it could be used to switch easily between "easy mode" and "hard mode" sets of scripts-- right now I'm using it to switch between scripts that stim writ the creature and those that don't to try and find a way to teach creatures regardless of genetics.

Coming soon (hopefully): Population Control Tools!

Why Develop?

2010-05-23T14:49:00.000-07:00

So Moe recently made a fantastic post on his Creatures 2 to Docking Station development blog (which is awesome in and of itself, you should check it out if you haven't), aptly titled, "Motivational Speech."

Reading it really got me thinking about why I develop the stuff that I do for Creatures. I can't honestly say it's just for the community; though the community certainly inspires me, I don't think it's the sole reason I do what I do. The large number of personal projects kind of rules that out.

But after sorting through my head a bit, I think I've narrowed it down to two main reasons that I spend so much of my rare free time developing for this game.

The first is honestly just to see what is see what I can do. Pushing the previously-known boundaries of Docking Station is one of my greatest joys. I like to try completely new and strange things, in particular, things that radically change the way people play Creatures, or create another playstyle completely. Battlestance, though I never completed it, was probably my biggest attempt at this. SERU was another. Most of my little tweaks, the Hit Script and Breeding Script modifications stem from this too. Sometimes I like to just scroll through the CAOS documentation and come up with interesting or creative ways to use certain commands. I get endless joy from just taking the tools that I have and trying to explore every realm of possibility.

Though it has nothing to do with CAOS, LNA stems from this as well-- another attempt at doing something interesting that hadn't been done before. Heck, even blogging barely had a presence in the community; that's part of why I started this, and now look how it has taken off, with new wonderful creatures blogs springing up left and right! Maybe I'm a tad conceited but I like to think I had some hand in inspiring that.

So maybe my motivation does wrap back around to the community. I love to try new things at least in part because I love to inspire the community to push the boundaries as well, whether in creating new playstyles or new ways of networking. Huh. I always end up finding out new things just as I am blogging about them, hah.

But the second reason I develop is the one less-seen, and this is something I'm fairly certain is completely personal-- to find ways to make C3/DS creatures as emotionally attachable as possible.

This is a somewhat embarrassing story, but I was really into Creatures at a young age because I wanted to find a way to essentially program my own friends (I had quite a bit of social anxiety back then). I even went and learned enough about C2 genetics to make an near-immortal norn, and for a period of time I ran a C2 world 24/7 with nothing but this norn in it, growing relatively attached to it (though more as a pet than a friend) as I cared for this same creature for days on end.

Though I've long since found human friends, I still remember how attached I would get to C1/C2 creatures and how much C3 lacked that. Most of my development on this front never gets off the ground enough for me to talk much about it-- the instinct-less norns are one example, but my endless genomes and various script edits really haven't made it to light yet. It may be something I talk a lot more about in the future though.

So I ask you, developers of all sorts, why do you do what you do? Is it completely for the sake of the community, or is do you have a more personal goal you set out to accomplish?

Norns, sans Instincts.

2010-05-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

This is something I tried a few months ago and have completely fallen in love with, and if you're the nurturing sort of norn breeder that can't get much enjoyment out of C3/DS because it is just too "easy," I would highly recommend trying this at least once.

Silence all the instincts in your norns.

It may or may not be widely known that norns are pre-programed in their genetics to eat when hungry, push toys (or buttons, lifts, or machinery) when bored, rest when sleepy, and so on. They are also pre-programmed to push/pull a lift when they feel too high or low, or push a call button if no lift is nearby. Furthermore, C3 norns instinctively want to push tools (powerups) when they are bored, and DS norns want to push portals when they are crowded.

To me, this really doesn't make a lot of sense. A chichi norn might never see a portal in his life but still suggest another norn push portal when crowded. There's also really no reason for a creature to pop out of his egg and completely understand the mechanics of elevators. I can understand knowing to eat when hungry-- that's animalistic enough, but if norns are born knowing all they need to make it in the world, what do they need us for?

It's quite simple-- load up your favorite genome in the genetics kit, sort the genes by type, edit each gene labeled "Creature: Instinct" and check the box that says, "Do not express (carry)." The mutation chance will show up in parentheses to show the gene is silenced; it will sit in the genome, but not actually have any effect.

Or, if you don't want to go through all that, you can simply download Lily from TCR, a CFE bruin norn with the instincts already silenced for you.

If you leave a creature like this alone while it is young, it will die. It may last slightly longer if if happens to grab a piece of food and decides to try putting it in it's mouth, and it's quite lucky if it just happens to do so often enough to learn that eating is good, but even if it lasts to adulthood it will likely have no idea that it's supposed to push other norns to reproduce. So these creatures are most certainly not viable for wolfling/feral runs.

These are norns for those nurturing hands out there that enjoy it when their norns actually need them to survive. Fairly nostalgic of the C1/2 days really; I find it a lot easier to get attached to creatures like this.

After you spend some time teaching these norns the basics, they can usually survive alright on their own while you're raising the offspring, but beware that are some pitfalls to not having instincts.

First, the lift call button system and the food vendor system are both mechanics based on the half-strength instinct trick (scroll down to "Reactive Planning" at the bottom). Without instincts, these simply don't work, so while norns will still learn that they need to use lifts to go up and down, they won't understand the link between calling the lift and the lift appearing. The same applies to food vendors as well. This just means the hand will have to help out these creatures a little more when it comes to these areas, or just house them in metarooms where these things aren't necessary.

The other tricky thing is that norns with no instincts don't seem to properly learn to rest when they are sleepy. That is because resting doesn't actually decrease sleepiness--to my limited understanding, it increases it until the involuntary action of sleeping kicks in at a certain threshold and the norn falls asleep. This is logical, but the instinct-less norn doesn't understand this sequence, and instead believes that resting does nothing for his sleepiness and generally won't bother unless the hand commands it. I think there's a possible genetic solution to this, but I have yet to perfect it.

I think there's some potential in these little guys, helpless as they may seem. If you guys try it out, please share your experiences!

Crossbreeding Script

2010-05-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

This one's been on my youtube for a couple days, but I'm only now getting around to writing about it. This is one of those weird things I did during one of my sick days this week. It was more or less just to see if it could be done, since to my knowledge no one has ever written a script to make crossbreeding possible, and it really wasn't that difficult. It just involved writing a breeding script out manually instead of using the the convenient "mate" command that does it all for you.

I wish I could say "no norns were harmed in the making of this video" but I would be lying. Guess I better watch out for ERFN. The thing about this script is though it makes interspecies breeding possible, it would still be very rare for it to happen naturally, since by instinct creatures generally stay within their species when looking for a mate (and normal grendels would probably beat a norn senseless before considering fathering her mutant child). It would probably either take a lot of encouragement, or a script like the one I used for this video that keeps creatures fertile and tells them to constantly push each other.

Still, it's really nice to have that possibility open. We've all had situations where the rogue norn wanders off to join the ettin tribe or the supposed-vicious grendel finds an odd friendship among the norns... What if those interactions had the potential of going further? It could add a whole new dimension to the game.

Anyway, like all my projects, the script is far from finished (right now it's not even checking to see if creatures are old enough before executing the script which is a little weird); I more or less just wanted to see if it could be done so I didn't bother coding in all those doifs. How long it takes me to finish it will depend on my free time and how interested you guys are in it, so if this strikes your fancy, do make your voice heard so I can figure out where to fit it in my priority list!

Creatures Fanfiction Podcast?

2010-05-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

So I'm not entirely dead. I just needed to take a break from the community for a while, as life was getting a bit overwhelming. Stuff happens. I wouldn't even go so far as to say I'm "back." Well, I'm not sure I ever technically "left." I just found myself with nothing to say, nor time to say it, for an extended period of time.

I've still been doing plenty for Creatures, but they're more or less personal projects not really meant for release, partly because some of it is derived from copyrighted content and I can't be bothered to go about getting the necessary permissions to release the stuff, and partly just because I'd like to sort of do something for myself once in a while, without the pressures of making something that the community will be happy with. Nothing against you guys, it's just sort of the difference between a pizza that I order for myself, tailored exactly the way I like it, with Roma tomatoes, onions, sausage, and mushrooms, versus the pizza I order to feed my whole family, which really can't deviate much from cheese and pepperoni without a little brother or cousin exclaiming, "ewww!"

But delicious analogies aside, I wanted to toss an idea out there that's been floating in my mind for a while: A Creatures fanfiction podcast.

In sorting through some school stuff in the attic from around ten years ago, I discovered countless print-outs of Creatures fanfiction (and admittedly, some terrible attempts at writing my own). These were the stories I was essentially grew up on in the Creatures world, and the more I read them, the more I really appreciate the effort and creativity many of these authors took to take the Creatures universe and use it to tell a story with meaning that extends far beyond the boundaries of the game.

But fanfiction is, as I see it, one of the most under-appreciated things to come out of the Creatures Community. Literature in general has seen a bit of a decline over the years as TV, movies, and music have become preferred choices for entertainment. It simply takes a lot more mental energy to read words on a page and imagine the story unfolding than it takes to watch a movie telling the same story, providing all the visuals and sounds for you.

My proposal is to do an audio podcast, in which community-submitted Creatures fanfiction is read aloud, in some attempt to make these stories available to a wider audience. Those that might never have time to sit down and read usually still have time to turn on their MP3 player while driving or walking to work/school, performing mindless tasks, and so on. You could even listen to the stories while playing Creatures or idly browsing forums. By making an audio format available, it will be easier for Creatures fans to enjoy the literary crafts the CC has generated, and hopefully inspire the writing of even more.

I'm not quite sure how I would do the format, but the plan in my head is to first open submissions, inviting anyone to submit their fanfiction to the podcast. No limit to the number of submissions, but probably not all of them would be read. Stories would be picked to fill the space of an hour, possibly longer if the project really took off. Particularly long stories would likely be handled two ways-- either they would be split into parts and one part would be read each episode, or the first part would be read alone as a sort of teaser, with a link provided to where one could read the rest of the story. I would also be open to the idea of doing special edition series or something.

If it took off, I think it might also be fun to set themes once in a while, like stories about ettins or Creatures 1, stories told from a shee's point of view, or even poetry. Themes might help inspire people to generate new content rather than just submitting old stuff, too.

I also would like to look into possibly getting in contact with some of the authors of "classic" creatures fanfiction to get permission to read their stories, but I'm not sure how possible that is.

How often episodes come out would depend purely on the number of submissions. At the time of brainstorming I am thinking, for the size and activity level of this small community, that once a month sounds reasonable-- though I would love to do it more often if it ended up drawing a lot of attention.

There are a few things I am concerned about-- the first being the readings themselves, which is more or less a bit of self-consciousness I may just to get over. I've done readings before-- not necessarily in podcasts, but I've gone to live fiction/poetry readings and for the most part have received positive feedback about my reading voice. That said, not everyone is going to like it, and I know from the many fiction podcasts that I listen to that an annoying voice isn't worth listening to no matter how engaging the story is. So whether or not my reading voice is decent enough will really be up to the community to decide.

Another concern is that I don't have any professional recording equipment or anything, so the readings wouldn't exact have the high sound quality you're probably used to if you listen to a lot of podcasts. I can say, however, that they will be audible and not monotone. I may have nothing to work with but a $20 desktop microphone, but I know enough about recording software that I -think- I can produce something decent enough that people can tune out the imperfections and enjoy the story. That will, of course, also be up to you guys to judge.

These two concerns are things that can fairly easily be answered with a pilot episode, and (assuming there is enough interest for me to pull this off) that's probably what I'll end up doing: just record a "trial" episode and see if people enjoy it, taking into account any criticism.

The other concern is dealing with rejected stories. Not to sound like some sort of literary snob, but I while I have read many amazing Creatures stories, I have also read several that honestly were not worth my time. I don't want to seem like I'm putting aspiring authors down, but if I'm going to take the time to record fanfiction for others to listen to, I really want to try to ensure that I am reading stories the majority of the audience will find enjoyable, and that means I have to be a bit picky and choosy about what I put on the podcast. Nevertheless, I'm sure somewhere along the lines someone will get offended or upset that their story is not read, and I'm really not sure how to be completely objective and fair about my selection, as it really is a matter of personal taste. Obviously proper spelling, grammar, and formatting are important, but there is also a world of difference between a Creatures story and a soap opera with norns. I'm really not sure of the best approach to take to this. I still have to think a lot about this; I'm more than open to suggestions.

But I am possibly getting way, way ahead of myself here, as I haven't even gauged community interest to know if this is a worthwhile venture. I guess that's just my way of thinking-- I have to fully plan something out before I decide if it's worth doing or not.

So let me open this up to you guys. Would a Creatures fanfiction podcast be something you would be interested in listening to? Something you would be interested in contributing to? Not sure? Why/why not?

Any and all feedback is always appreciated; thanks guys!

Selective Muco Prototype

2009-11-26T13:36:00.000-08:00

This is more or less a mock-up and in no way close to being done. I'm just excited I actually got the list to work properly:

If you can't tell though, it's an attempt at an edited version of the egg layer to allow you to pick norns from a list rather than going through them one at a time. The panel can be shown or hidden using the little circle on Muco, and when a creature is selected on the panel, the breed will show up on Muco, where you can select male/female and lay eggs like normal. Since you can scroll through pages of 14 breeds at a time, it should just make selecting different breeds a little easier so you won't have so many of those moments where you are clicking through to find a certain breed and then accidentally click past it. Don't you just hate when that happens?

Again, it's just a shell prototype right now and is not in any way functional nor close to being so, and this thing is such a horrible headache to code that you probably shouldn't hold your breath. But as always, feedback is appreciated-- little words of encouragement here and there go a long way in keeping my motivation up, heh.

Revisiting C2

2009-11-24T04:23:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before, with the GOG version of Albian Years, I can finally run C1 and C2 again on my computer, for the first time in years. And what a nostalgia trip.

C2 was my first creatures game, and it has a ton of emotion attached for me, granted, I was all of 11-12 years old at the time and I feel like I understand a lot more now. At least one would hope, right?

I decided to run a vanilla world before introducing anything 3rd party, even genomes, just to see how things might pan out. I remember as a kid I never actually used any special genomes, I just always injected the holodoc and let creatures be script-coddled all their lives, really having no idea how this affected their intelligence. This way I can have a reminder what what creatures are like 'normally' before I try say, canny norns.

Luckily the GOG C2 isn't actually completely vanilla; it includes the life kits and an updated genome, making it a little more tolerable. Throughout my playing time though, I did notice a lot-- some things that I realized I really missed from C3/DS, some things I forgot existed, and some things I really didn't know existed at all.

This little sitting/kneeling position, for example-- that's so cute! Why does that not exist in DS? Creatures just go straight from standing to lying down with no in-between. Maybe I'm silly, but this really is one of my favorite little poses. Who was it that decided C3/DS creatures shouldn't be able to do this. This creature pictured is Eva, by the way. She was the first norn born into the world-- I always loved the goldies; certainly one of my favorite breeds in C2.

This inquisitiveness too-- creatures constantly asking, "what dat?" and "what dis?" is just so silly and charming, I completely forgot it existed. Though I don't know anything about C2 genetics and scripting... is this something genetic that young creatures just feel the need to ask questions, or is it just a scripted event that runs often in newborns to prompt the hand to answer questions? The latter shouldn't be too hard to replicate in C3-- so I wonder why it was left out? This little dude is Ichi-- I hatched him after Eva was pretty well trained to offer companionship and possible future mateship.

I must say, teaching norns to talk in C2 can be frustrating. In some aspects I do miss it-- in the same way that I really enjoy hand-teaching norn in C3/DS, but as I've found, the DS way of teaching nouns has still spoiled me to death. It is endlessly frustrating when you want a norn to "eat food," yet they don't yet know what food is, and until they get bored enough to look at it, you can't even teach them what it is, let alone get them to eat it.

"Ichi yes"-- someone remind me what that means. Judging that from the hand's perspective, that 'yes' essentially means, 'good job,' I suppose this means that Ichi is quite proud of himself? This is certainly a level of depth we're missing in DS.

Norns in general are a lot more chatty in C2, it seems, and will actually speak out single words like "come" or "hit" or "food" etc, while C3 norns pretty much only speak in either "name-verb-noun" or "name-modifier-feeling" strings. Also, the "Ichi very hungry, get food" strings that state both their need and what they intend to do about it are certainly an Albian exclusive.

I remember this face. More specifically, I remember seeing it on my creatures 90% of their lives-- the darn things are always tired or sleepy, and don't seem to want to sleep at all, ever. I certainly don't miss that about C2. Poor creatures always looked so miserable, and it was so hard to keep them happy.

After quite a bit of close training though, they seemed to respond, at least relatively well to my commands. I remember that much about C2 norns-- if you let them run feral they were nearly impossible to tame later on (as it should be, I think), but carefully raising them by hand and giving them a lot of individual attention made them quite loyal. I'll admit I was just extremely charmed to see how eager my little nornlings were to "Come Aiko" every time I showed up to check on them (though, nornlings as they were, sometimes they believed I was delicious).

I managed to snag the science kit and the neuroscience kit without really looking for them-- I remember how old that used to get and would always bypass hunting those down with agents, but for this round, I just wanted to explore. I remember relying on those kits pretty constantly back in the day, but I guess not having them in C3/DS got me used to just doing everything by hand.
Oh, this boat thing was something I didn't recall having a problem with, probably because the first thing I always did back when I played was inject one of the many 'bridges' cobs. But my poor creatures kept getting stuck in the boat and I couldn't get them out, because when I tried to click on the boat to move it, I would just tickle the creature. It really became a nuisance after a while, so after a lot of "push lift" and "come Aiko" later, I took the creatures exploring.

Somewhere along the journey, they grew up, and immediately kisspopped-- I was fairly impressed! Then they both collapsed and took a long, long nap, much to my relief.

I don't suppose I'll make any sort of long-term move to C2 or anything, but right now it's doing a lot to both entertain me and bring back memories. It's also just nice to have norns that need me-- and it's half inspiring me to pick up one of my old genetic projects for C3 to develop a more frail genome. So we'll see where this takes us!

What GoG Creatures Means to Us

2009-11-23T17:21:00.000-08:00

Unless you haven't been keeping up with any community forums lately, you're probably well aware that the entire Creatures series, divided into The Albian Years, Creatures Village, and Creatures Exodus, is now available to download for $9.99 a game at GOG.com

So what does this mean to us?

Creatures is now available, instantly, to just about anyone. No more hunting around for used copies on Ebay or Amazon if something happens to your disks or if you want to introduce the series to a friend!

The entire series has been upgraded to work on newer systems. That's right, these games have been tested on Vista and seem to run flawlessly, and some have gotten the games to work on Windows 7 as well. My Albian Years disk didn't run properly on my XP system (I believe due to video card incompatibility) but the GOG version runs without any problems. Finally, we have a simple way to run older versions of Creatures on newer systems!

These two things are wonderful for us, and also have a good chance of impacting the community:

Older community members may return. It's possible that people attached to C1 and C2 that left the community when they stopped working properly may resurface in a fit of nostalgia and say hello. In this way the community may experience some growth.

Newer community members may join. Now with the series available to anyone (and for the moment, featured on GOG's front page!) it's quite possible that the game will be getting more attention and more people will start playing it. This might also result in some growth for the CC.

But in order for these things to happen, we as a community need to be the catalyst. If we make an effort to make the most of this, the CC will surely benefit:

Spread the word. Let people know about the Creatures series! Let other CC members know that older versions of Creatures are now playable on Vista, and let potentially interested people know that the games are finally, painlessly available. Don't become a spambot, but do all you can to promote the series and bring others into the community.

Offer support on GOG. As this is where the games are being sold, this is where you're probably going to find a lot of new and confused players. Register on the GOG site and begin offering help and support in the Creatures section of the GOG forums. Be sure to offer lots of helpful links back to community forums so they can meet the rest of us and find additional help and support.

Write a Review. It may seem daunting at first, but having a lot of positive reviews for the games on GOG will do a lot draw even more people in. It's not as difficult as it seems, and it doesn't have to be a writing masterpiece either. Just write a few paragraphs about why you love the game! My creepy old History professor used to say, "An essay should be like a girl's skirt-- long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to still be interesting." My guess is the same goes for the length of reviews too.

This little piece of news has the potential to bring a lot of new faces into the community if we do our best to draw them in, so just remember to welcome newcomers, introduce them to the skull-shaped basket, and do what you can to help them feel at home in our tiny but dedicated community of Creatures fans.

Hit Script Modification

2009-11-20T12:41:00.000-08:00

Eventually, I would like to tweak several of the creature's action scripts to make them more interesting and make the game a little more challenging, and this notion came to me the other day while I was trying to nap.

So this is a modified version of the hit script, codenamed "Critical Hit." Essentially what it does is allow especially angry creatures to have a chance of hitting a creature extra hard, sending it flying across the room and injuring it quite badly. Short demo video below, just be forewarned it contains a lot of nornish death:

(Yes, that orange chichi at the end is immortal, that's the only reason it doesn't die, heh!)

As you might notice I make a lot of use of my homemade shortcuts, in particular the one that makes all creatures hit each other and the one to create random creatures. I still have quite a bit of tweaking to do to the script-- I would like to make the amount of injury it inflicts dependent on the relative age of the creatures, IE an adult hitting a baby would do more damage than an adult hitting an adult, or a baby hitting a baby. I'd also like the amount the creature is knocked backwards to depend on this too. I think I would also like to lower the chance of it happening a little more-- I don't feel that critical hits should be extremely common.

Still a work in progress like many things... I'd appreciate any thoughts you guys might have though!

CCSF '09 Releases

2009-11-20T12:09:00.000-08:00

Well with the awesomeness that is CCSF having come and gone, I suppose I ought to release my own agents on my own site, eh?

SERU Contact Button

It has been years since the invention of the wonderful technology that is the Warp, and years since the adventures of the Lone Shee. These days Shee young and old are gallivanting through space in their new, used, and home-grown ships, searching for adventure around every star. Unfortunately, the great number of space traffic in this age means a great number of space collisions, and an even greater number of unfortunate norn, ettin, and grendel eggs scattered to the stars.

Luckily, we at the Stray Egg Rescue Unit (SERU) are constantly patrolling the galaxies, searching for creature eggs floating in space that may still have a chance of survival. We collect these eggs and give them to loving volunteers who try to raise these unfortunate creatures to live the best lives they can. But while SERU is rescuing thousands of eggs every day, there are not nearly enough volunteers to care for them all, and each day we are regretfully forced to toss several eggs due to lack of storage space. We desperately need your help. All you need to do is install the mechanism below onto your ship, and it will establish a direct line of contact with us so that we may warp these eggs to you upon request. You never know what will come out of your rescued egg, and it can be challenging as many of them are damaged, mutated, and unpredictable, but the feeling of giving a helpless creature a second chance is worth it.

Download the SERU Contact Button (now with a beautiful new beam sprite by Borg12345!)

This agent was the most unexpectedly well-received, I think. Originally it wasn't something I planned on releasing at all, it was just a genetic experiment I was playing with that somehow turned into a silly story. The more feedback I get on it though, the more I'm considering updating it now and again, perhaps adding a more complex storyline and some extra options. We'll see!

New Shortcuts
This was another one of those cos files I made for my own purposes just to make my life easier, and decided to share it. Just drop the cosfile in your \Bootstrap\010 Docking Station folder and use these new keyboard shortcuts in all new worlds you create:

Ctrl+0 -- Create a random egg
Shift+Ctrl+0 -- Create a random creature. Useful for quick random runs, or when you just need a few creatures around to test something without the hassle of hatching eggs.

Ctrl+9 -- Make all creatures fertile and tell them to breed
Shift+Ctrl+9 -- Make all creatures angry and tell them to hit

Ctrl+8 -- Teleport all creatures to hand (except for those currently held by something else, such as an elevator or the containment chamber)

Ctrl+7 -- Freeze all creatures, make them pose to face you. This can be useful for a ton of things, from getting a decent group picture of creatures to forcing all creatures to stop what they're doing so you can inject a behavioral script without getting "old script in use" errors.
Shift+Ctrl+7 -- Unfreeze all creatures

Download New Shortcuts

Vocab-Bot

This agent some of you might remember I created on a whim while running my Mixed Nuts world. Several people requested that it be made into an agent, so I did so. What is particularly awesome though is that this agent was released for CCSF on the same day that Vampess' teaching updates were released, and the two go hand in hand quite nicely for those who just miss the old-fashioned way of hand-teaching their norns.

Anyway, this toy injects as a random color (just for kicks) and teaches surrounding creatures a random (non-noun) word when it is pushed.

Download the Vocab-Bot

Splicer DS

Ahh yes, the noble legendary DS splicer that has been pending release for way, way too long. This one almost didn't get out, to be honest, I had some horrible issues getting it to PRAY together properly, but it was just barely rushed in at the last deadline.

If you don't know, yes, this splicer does require C3 to be installed, as it makes use of the C3 splicer sprites and sounds. However, it must be injected into an undocked world or else it will clash with the C3 splicer and all sorts of messed up things will happen.

The following video should take you through the various special functions fairly easily. It is capable of much more than an ordinary splicer, including creating random creatures for you to splice and automatically splicing all creatures in your world.

Download Splicer DS -- a million thanks to 3kul, Grendel Man, jdownie2, GodKira, and Officer 1BDI for giving their time to test this agent!

This CCSF was really the best we've had in a long time-- maybe I'm biased, since it was the first time I actually participated, but it was really a ton of fun and a lot of innovative content came out of it. I hope the rest of you had as much fun as I did!

CCSF is Coming!

2009-09-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

The time has flown, and this year's Creatures Community Spirit Festival is quickly coming upon us. All around the world creatures fans are writing, drawing, spriting, coding, breeding, gengineering, organizing, interviewing and otherwise preparing for the biggest CC event of the year.

This will be the sixth annual festival for the Creatures Community, but if it's your first time or if you're looking for inspiration, this post will (hopefully) help you understand what the CCSF means to you-- and perhaps more importantly, what you mean to the CCSF.

So what's the CCSF?

Even though it has been years since the last Creatures game was released, the Creatures Community is still fighting to stay alive and keep up the morale of Creatures fans everywhere. Despite the dwindling of the Creatures fanbase, we continue to show our support for the Creatures series as well as each other. This is what the Creatures Community Spirit Festival is all about.

Think of the CCSF as a big online holiday, full of celebrations, special events, and of course, presents for all. Everyone is invited to participate by contributing content, hosting events, and just showing support for for the Creatures Community.

The majority of CCSF content generally centers around a website, the URL of which is released as the festival draws nearer. Everyone submits their content, events, and other contributions to the festival organizers, along with a suggested release date. The CCSF organizers are then in charge of posting up all submissions on the site throughout the festival for everyone to enjoy.

This year 3kul has taken the bulk of the responsibility of organizing the CCSF, which is scheduled to run from November 1st-14th. An ever-changing calendar of events, as well as guidelines for submissions can be found here.

Each CCSF has a theme, and this year the theme is Time. This broad topic could encompass a number of things-- reflections on the past, predictions for the future, the complexities of timer scripts, the changes of the seasons, and so on. Generally, submissions are encouraged to have some relevance to the theme, but it is by no means required. The theme is meant to be an inspiration, not a hindrance, so don't feel shy about creating content or organizing events just because they may not fit the theme. What is most important is participation-- sticking to the theme is just bonus. Even I joke that the only thing time-related about my submissions will be that I will rushing to finish them in time for the festival!

But what can I do?

Community participation is the core of CCSF. The festival would simply not exist if it wasn't for all the work each member of the community puts into it! Everyone can contribute, no matter what their talents may be. If you're not sure what you can do for CCSF, here are several ideas to inspire you:

In-game content: This is the most obvious (and common) sort of contribution. If you have the skills necessary for writing/spriting agents, gengineering breeds, or even creating metarooms, CCSF is certainly the time to put those skills to good use!

Fanart/Fanfiction: If you're a more creative sort, Creatures-related art and stories are always appreciated by the community, especially as Creatures artists/writers become harder to find.

Guides, Tutorials, and other Articles: You might call this Creatures Fan-non-fiction. CAOS tutorials are the most common in this category, but you can write anything else you would like to share with the community in the form of an article, such as your secret method for breeding creatures as fast as possible, a guide to drawing a basic norn, or a descriptive list of underused agents.

Music, Video, and other Media: These may be few and far between, but if your talents lie in the realms of other media, by all means record a creatures parody of a well-known song or produce a video of your creatures doing something entertaining!

Interviews: An extremely popular part of earlier CCSFs that has since become a lost art. Is there a member of the Creatures Community that you think the community would like to know more about? Perhaps an upcoming project has raised your curiosity and you wish to ask the developers a few questions? Contact the community member in question and (politely) ask if you can interview them for the CCSF! Past interviews can the found on both the CCSF06 and CCSF07 websites.

Hosting Events: If creating stuff just isn't your thing, maybe organizing an event or a contest is more your style. Run a community wolfling run, start a fanart competition, judge a norn pageant, or anything you can think of! You may even choose to award prizes to winners if you like, but this is completely optional.

Participating in Events: On the other side of the coin, event participants are just as important as event hosts! Join in the fun and show your support for the community by participating in the many events going on during CCSF.

Participating in the Community: While this is something most of us do year round, activity in community forums such as CreaturesCaves, Creaturetopia, and Albia2000 becomes extremely important during CCSF-- seeing as community is what it's all about! If you tend to lurk around forums rather than post, CCSF is a wonderful time to start getting more active within the community. Checking the forums to see that several new posts have been made does wonders for the morale of a small community. Just be sure to follow the forum rules!

Posting Creature Adoptions: (As Malkin reminded me-- thanks!) This is a special sort of contribution because single creature adoptions don't need to be formally submitted to the organizers-- there's a special CCSF09 group on The Creature Repository for you to simply upload your special CCSF09 creatures to!

And if you still need more inspiration, there's no better place to look than at the old CCSF websites to see what others have done in the past.

Do feel free to leave any questions, comments, or suggestions you might have. Let's work together to make this the best CCSF yet!

Mixed Nuts Screenshot Dump

2009-09-13T02:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not shy of labeling myself as a norn breeder. Keyword being norn, not ettin or grendel. It's always been about the norns for me, in all their infinite variety, personality, and cuteness. But after chatting with a few people in IRC and DS, I was inspired to try a mixed world-- containing all three varieties of creatures, ideally living in some form of harmony.

This screen-shot intensive post (warning, I mean it-- this one has a lot of images) documents the first few hours of my experience with this handful of creatures.

It started simply enough -- I hatched six creatures: Gon, a male Bruin Norn, Okt, a male Atavist Ettin, Kona, a female Jungle Grendel, Finn, a male C2 Grendel, Kyla, a female Chameleon Ettin, and Sepenta, a female Draconian Norn.

Suddenly I had six babbling babies running around the Capillata.

Okt and Finn almost immediately saw a kinship in their graphic style, and took a teleporter to the workshop together to gaze in awe at the training dummy.

Meanwhile, Gon and Sepenta's "run grendel" instincts made themselves quite apparent as poor Kona tried to make some new friends. They were just creatures being creatures, I thought.. this won't be much different than any other world I've run.

But when I looked away for literally five seconds to check on Okt and Finn, I was shocked to see a notice appear telling me that... Gon had died.

Kyla had come out of hiding and apparently managed to beat the helpless norn to death without any warning at all. Maybe this was going to be more complicated than I thought...

Quite on time, I received a few creatures through the warp from Papriko-- a female banshee named Areguzandora, and very nice gargoyle/chichi cross, who I named Skai.

Alright, I told myself. This isn't a docked world for nothing. It's time to migrate everyone into their own space. Despite the aggression of the ettin, I decided the grendels would be first to go. I just didn't trust them.

Sadly, the migration was not without its consequences either. Areguzandora mysteriously died after the journey, though not before expending her last bit of energy to walk to the aquatic meso. Perhaps she knew she was dying and wished to go to a peaceful place.

Really, none of the creatures wanted to stay in their assigned areas. Kona took a liking for little Skai and began following her around. I kept a wary eye on them both.. I do not have much trust in grendels, but I let them do as they pleased.

But I had made another mistake. Sepenta the Draconian was complaining of cold, so I led her into the desert meso, hoping she would find it more to her liking. But my heart froze as I noticed yet another death notice on the screen.

Kyla had murdered her second creature, and if I had anything to do with it, it would be her last.

As much as I wanted to beat her to death then and there (see how she likes it..), I managed to control my rage and instead, decided she would simply be imprisoned until she was properly trained.

I spent a good 15 minutes or so slapping her whenever she hit the norn dummy and tickling her for pushing it. She was a stubborn creature, but she would either learn or stay in that workshop for the rest of her life.

Skai, in the meantime, was growing up. I considered hatching her a mate, but with Kona still sticking close to her, I decided I didn't want to interfere with that strange but charming relationship.

Deep in the shadows of the Shee ark, between the point of docking, Finn begins to hatch a devious plan...

Okt hasn't been mentioned in a while. He's been happily living on that little hillside in the norn meso, munching carrots and generally enjoying life.

Skai and Kona continue to spend every waking moment by each other's side...

...Sleeping moments, too!

Finn, noticing the crobster dispensor, considers the possibilities..

Kyla remains imprisoned, but is starting to do a lot better.

What's this? Skai wandering alone without Kona? And in the jungle, no less? It seems... she was suddenly seized with a burning desire for knowledge.

Another death notice. Wow, I'm worse at raising creatures than I thought... Okt, our happy carrot-eating ettin, suddenly drops dead from ATP Decoupler. Never even saw it coming... sigh. So sad. I'm sorry Okt. I'll get better at this.

Crobsters... more crobsters! I gotta have more crobsters!

Humming sounds backed by dramatic instrumentals signifying the passing on of wisdom.

No, I don't think he ever stopped staring at the screen throughout this entire crobster-raising venture.

When Skai returned from her vision quest, filled with new knowledge and speaking in a language Kona did not understand, the poor grendel (I can only assume) felt quite left out and hurt, and began beating Skai in a rage.

Skai moved back, but Kona pursued viciously-- wait, is that the medical bay teleporter?

"Now look what you've done! How are we supposed to find our way home now?" Kona can only express her disgust with the one word she learned from Skai's foreign babbling:

And with that, it seems the friendship has been torn.

...Meanwhile, Finn's crobster army seems to be revolting against him.

(I feel the need to mention that I'm not interacting with these creatures at all-- I'm only watching them. If I was interacting though, this would have been a great time to create a meeting between the bickering pair and the crobster army of doom..)

Kona and Skai both made it back to the norn meso... and while they ignored each other for a while, they slowly started to warm up to each other again.

I guess sometimes friends just can't stay mad at each other.

Kyla, while being technically "free" now, still has yet to leave the workshop. It must be the sheer number of all those strange and wonderful machines to push.

Finn falls into a bit of a depression after his plan to take over the ship with crobsters falls through. I really don't know where all those crobsters went-- it's possible he ate them all.

In the meantime, I hatched a male guppy ettin named Flail; in the event that Kyla ever leaves the workshop, she could use a companion of her own kind. In the meantime, he's chilling out in the DS meso.

Enter Etincelle, a very pretty creature from the warp who was eagerly welcomed onto the shee ark.

At this point I was a little tired of all the creatures speaking gibberish, but as I really don't find much joy in instant vocabulary and don't have the time to hand-teach them all, I worked a bit of CAOS magic and modified the robot toys to teach nearby creatures a random word when they push it. Like a toy version of the C2 doozers. Finn seemed to take some comfort in learning new words like, "ill". (Hey, is that a surviving crobster?)

(Then just for fun, I gave them all randomized pigments. Leave it to me to pause my PERFECTLY NORMAL creatures world just to start scripting something wild.)

At this point I decided it would be best to guide poor Finn out of his ex-crobster lair and into his natural habitat, where he stared awkwardly at the mushrooms like he had never seen one before, then promptly devoured them.

While performing a routine bacteria/toxin check, I noticed Kona was split from Skai again, and was aggressively slamming around a gadget. Did she say something to make her angry? Something like, "go take a bath, you bacteria-infested lizard!"? Luckily she wasn't at all sick, just carrying the bacteria, so a few sprays and she was clean again.

Meanwhile, Finn wanders out of the jungle again (complaining of homesickness the whole time), and into the desert, where he takes joy in setting off the volcano.

And this is where we leave it for now. So far it's been quite a crazy trip. I really wasn't expecting a mixed world to hold this much drama, but it's had far more than its share of both touching and depressing moments.

Who knows what the future holds for Mixed Nuts?

Overheard on LNA, Installment 1

2009-09-09T02:22:00.001-07:00

I've been absolutely hit hard with personal family/life drama and really haven't been able to put much time into my Creatures ventures, but I'm still around. I've received a few messages over the last couple of days that have reminded me that people do get some joy out of the random stuff I throw together in the name of Creatures, so it's inspired me a bit to try and find more time to stay active in the CC. Thanks guys :)

I finally put LNA back online (It was still streaming, just an offline world), and it's a bit chaotic but the queue is starting to clear out. I thought this would be a good time for a little segment I've been planning called, "Overheard on LNA"

For those of you that don't know, LNA, or Live Nornish Action, is a live video stream of Docking Station hosted on Justin.TV (formerly on Ustream). Because it's publicly hosted, quite often random strangers will stumble onto the stream and leave very shocked messages in in the chatroom. Other times even regular visitors will have something odd to say. Some of these amusements have been screened for posterity and will now be posted here for your amusement, with usernames blurred out, of course:

Some of these are amusing enough to use as satirical slogans for the channel. I can see it now:
LNA: Right when I entered this channel, I believe I have developed a drug problem.
or
LNA: It's like the ewoks take over hell
or
LNA: WHY ARE THEY HAVING AN ORGY IN THE CORNER?

...Okay maybe not. I think I'm just amusing myself now.

Next post when I get around to it will probably be an image dump of my latest pet world, Mixed Nuts.

Updates for LNA

2009-08-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

I did a little developing for LNA today. If you check it out now you'll notice that next to the creature's name is a notification that displays one of two messages-- if there are creatures in the queue, it will display the number, but if there are no creatures in the queue, it will display the number of population slots waiting to be filled by your charming creatures. And it looks a lot better than that red box in the corner used to.

On another note I think I'm going to be sticking with Justin.tv for hosting, at least until I get an uproar of feedback demanding otherwise. I really haven't had much feedback at all though, and since it's overwhelmingly easier for me to deal with than Ustream, I don't see any reason to choose otherwise. The Justin page seems to overall get more strangers stumbling in too, most of which express confusion, but it occasionally attracts a few former creatures players who really appreciate it, and that just makes me feel all fuzzy inside.

On Creatures Fanfiction

2009-08-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

I've always loved creatures fanfiction.. especially the multi-part series.. the epic stories with characters you can really get attached to. As a child my favorite series was the Holodeck series-- I still have the entire thing printed out and kept in page protectors in a special binder, hah.

I tried my own hand at writing creatures fanfiction at a young age, but never really got anywhere. Lately, however, I've had the remnants of a story start to form in my mind that I may, at some point, decide to pen down.

The basic premise behind the story is that it takes place on an alternate/secondary/future shee ark with several small terrariums, supposedly once used for experimenting with different creatures in different environments. Allegedly, this ark was also abandoned, but the creatures inside have taken it over, developing their own form of society.

One thing about this ark makes it very odd, however. The creatures are completely unable to produce offspring, no matter how much they kisspop. Instead, the population is maintained by mysterious eggs that occasionally appear in random areas of the ship.

The story, therefore, centers around the creatures as they seek to figure out where the eggs are coming from, how they deal with them, and so on.

I'd like to write it out eventually.. it's just another thing on my long list of creatures-related things I'd like to get to someday, heh.

The Future of DS

2009-07-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

Let's face it guys, we're all but abandoned by Gameware. It really is time we start taking our beloved game into our own hands, and this thread is an awesome place to start. Even if the DS engine doesn't support creature "memory", migratory instincts, or personality traits, with enough CAOS workarounds we can simulate this stuff and make the life sim we've always loved into the game we've always dreamed of.

Wow, did that sound corny or what. Seriously though, check it out and make your suggestions-- you never know, there may be a way to make it happen.

I actually did a lot of work on project BattleStance today-- I finally fixed the lifts to slow them down so creatures wouldn't obsess over them so much, and created the seasonal fertility fruit tree that only bears its fruit in the fall during the time of peace. I also created the tasteless and only barely nourishing rockgrass, which is the only relatively constant food supply in the room. The sprites are really ugly though-- I'll have to work on that. But on the upside, the room is now fully capable of sustaining a small population, so I've been running small wolfling runs in it, just for fun. Maybe I'll put it on LNA one of these days, just to show off the progress.

Unfortunately, I got none of my non-creatures related stuff done today, so I'm going to be pretty busy this week. I'm pretty inspired though. Great things are coming, I think.

A COS for every occasion

2009-07-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

I have to say I'm very satisfied where my desire to learn CAOS has gotten me. It's now pretty easy for me to write simple scripts from scratch to suit whatever purposes I have. But I don't ever really make these scripts public, mostly because I'd rather release them as agents than scripts. But I know some people will find them useful even in .cos form, so I might as well make them available.

I would like to eventually devise an elaborate, expandable options panel that contains on/off switches for all these little tweaks since manual injection is generally a pain. But until then-- here, have some cos files!

Use these at your own risk! Some may be buggier than others.

AutoAge: Check your world every few minutes for creatures that are not adults, and make them adults. Probably the first script I ever wrote for DS, with the help of Fuzzie

AutoEgg: Monitors your creature population and automatically creates a random norn egg if the population drops below four.

AutoTab: Made especially for Live Nornish Action. Automatically cycles through norns so you're not stuck watching the same one (really, really annoying if you're trying to play normally though.

EggLimit: Checks for females that have laid more than four eggs and keeps them infertile. This has only barely been tested-- you have been warned.

Generation Check: Checks for the lowest generation in the world and exports all creatures of that generation-- but only if it will be leaving behind at least 3 creatures of each gender.

Infertility: Attempts to keep all youth, old, and senile creatures infertile, making adulthood the only possible breeding time.

Enjoy :)

Targeting certain norn breeds

2009-07-22T13:50:00.001-07:00

Figured I'd write this down before I forgot it, and in case it helps anyone out.

It appears to be quite possible (and strangely simple) to create agents that will only affect certain norn breeds-- or at least the breed according to the head sprite.

The key string is FACE, and can be used something like this:

enum 4 0 0
sets va00 face
doif va00 = "a00d" or va00 = "a40d"
sezz "I have a chichi face!"
endi
next

Such a command will cause all the chichi-headed norns in the world to proudly declare their heritage.

FACE returns the file name of the baby head sprite of the target creature. In this command, if the head sprite matches a00d (the baby male chichi) or a40d (the baby female chichi), the norn must have a chichi head. It doesn't matter what life stage the creature is actually at-- FACE will always return the name of the baby sprite.

You can also easily find out the head sprite name of a creature by targeting it and caosing, "targ norn sezz face". The creature will tell you his/her face sprite so you don't have to go digging through your image folders to find out what matches. Just make sure you get both male and female sprite names.

Now whatever havoc you decide to wreak on specific creature breeds is up to you. You might make a toy that comforts treehuggers, calms down hardmans (hardmen?), poisons toxics, and so on.

I'm still trying to see if there's a way to retrieve the names of sprite files of other body parts. It would be neat to have a script that allows norns with butterfly bodies to fly, or to allow creatures with magma tails to emit heat. No luck so far though.

Live Nornish Action Test Stream

2009-07-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

Ustream has been giving me grief for quite some time now-- mostly because its broadcaster client likes to randomly freeze up and cut out the sound, and I have to reload it to get it to work. So I'm going to test running it on Justin.tv for now, to see how it works and how people like it. You can check it out here, and feel free to give feedback! Depending on how it runs, and if people like the newer stream, I may switch over permanently. I'll have to see how it goes though.

Meanwhile, the Splice DS agent is currently undergoing some heavy testing much thanks to the nice folks at Creaturetopia, and should be ready for release soon :)

Sorry for the lack of updates-- I've been extremely busy with some career-related things and it will probably actually get busier as the weeks go by, but don't worry, I'll come around eventually.

Omnomnom Norns

2009-07-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

It's getting hard to tag these posts when I'm covering like three different topics in a single post, haha.

I found a few people willing to test my DS splicer, so we'll see how buggy it is on other people's computers. I managed to work out the bugs I mentioned before. Here's a tip if you're ever going to make agents that move creatures using the mvsf command; it's helpful to preface the command with a "doif movs = 0". If a creature is currently in a vehicle (like say, a splice pod) and you try to move it using mvsf, you'll get an error saying mvsf only works on autonomous agents. If a creatures movs value equals 0, that confirms it is autonomous and it won't try moving it if it's not.

LNA is down, sadly, mostly due to the computer it was running on completely blowing up. I'm currently fixing up one of my older computers to try running it on. It might be a while, but I'll get it back up eventually.

In the meantime, when I'm not splicing creature in mass quantities, I've been working on other horrible things like a script that allows creatures to eat each other. It's easy enough to script something that simply allows creatures to be edible, but I've been trying to script something a little more realistic... so far, the script in its current state allows one creature to eat another, but "eating" won't instantly kill a creature, just wound it a lot and make it very prone to infection (it's more like biting than eating, really, but the creature will still die if bitten several times in succession). Though the biting creature receives nourishment, it still gets stim'd for disappointment-- sort of like a guilt trip for eating one of your own kind. However, the hungrier a creature is, the less disappointed they will feel, so hopefully creatures just won't eat each other unless they're really desperate.

I suppose I'll tweak it a little so say, grendels won't feel any guilt for eating norns, norns will only be able to eat a grendel if it's dead, among other things. Just to add some realism to the game, however gruesome it may be.

I still feel that C3/DS is far too easy if your goal is to raise a family of norns, and while it's not difficult to pick some more frail genomes to raise, that still really limits your variety. So I'm trying to come up with some ways to make the game as a whole a bit more difficult. Ideally these would be changes they would take effect regardless of the breeds of norns or metarooms that were used.

Perhaps a scripted "mating season," a script that essentially only allows creatures to become fertile during the in-game summer season, to make it a little more difficult to keep the population high. I wonder what other sorts of changes could be made to up the difficulty of raising creatures...

Of Streaming and Splicing

2009-06-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

The amusement never seems to cease when I'm reading the comments people leave in the LNA chatroom. Most people just ask "what game is this?" despite the show description blatantly stating it (I do wish that was a bit higher on the page..). Others will come in the chatroom to tell me to play warcraft/starcraft/other various games. And yet others who know and understand the concept will ask me to "kill off" some of my norns so theirs can warp in.

I wish there was a way to mark myself as away or something, because though I want to be around to answer questions and help people out, I don't appreciate it when people leave nasty messages because I'm not watching my chatroom every second. I also really wish the show description was somewhere other than the bottom of the page. That's kind of critical information, and I don't really appreciate how ustream pushes it underneath the comments box and other recommended shows.

Ah well.

In other news, my DS splicer control panel is coming along rather nicely! You'll have to click the thumbnail to see the full image though-- I didn't want to break the screen with it.

Right now it works decently-- the top button divides all creatures in the world into two groups and drops a group over each of the splice pods so they don't have to be dragged over to them, the second button automatically imports all creatures from the My Creatures folder, the third button will create a pair of random creatures from two randomly selected genomes in the Genetics folder and drop one over each of the splice pods so they're ready to mix. The fourth button is the sedative gas, which can be turned on or off; it lowers all drives of the creatures in the splicing area and lulls them into a deep sleep, which ensures the creatures are the happiest they have ever been and as a bonus stops them from moving around and getting out of the range of the splice pods. For the most part, these buttons work pretty flawlessly.

The AutoSplice button, which is pretty awesome when it works, is still giving me a few problems. Essentially it systematically splices all the creatures in the world until there are only a specified amount left (6 is the default, but that number can be changed by the user). It starts by splicing all the creatures near the splice pods, (realigning them with the pods if they wander off), and then teleports the second generation under the splicer up to the pods to resplice, and so on until the desired number is reached.

I'm having a few issues though-- one is with the teleport segment of the process; even though I'm using the exact code from the top button which works perfectly, it likes to give me "invalid position" errors. The second problem is an issue with the splicer itself: occasionally it will mistake an empty pod for being full, which throws the cycle into an endless loop of trying to splice something that isn't there. So I might have to actual modify the code ripped directly from the C3 splicer, which I was hoping to avoid.

Nonetheless, I'm pretty happy about how well this is going. I've never created anything this elaborate before, and even though much of it is just altered code from the C3 splicer, the control panel thing was pretty much done from scratch, with the exception of the import button which takes a lot from the DS import script. Now if I can just figure out how to fix these bugs... then I'll need to seek out people interested in testing. Developing is certainly a fun path :)

You can't be serious.

2009-06-22T01:55:00.000-07:00

I thought adding the WarpMonitor to my LNA world would be a nice way to let viewers know how long they would have to wait to see their creature on screen. I wasn't expecting to find a line of 70+ creatures awaiting entry. My goodness.

I didn't know what else to do-- I cleared out the backup by exporting all the creatures as they came in until the queue was empty.

Wow though. I knew there was a queue but this came as a serious shock. Now that I have this agent running though I should be able to monitor the queue more carefully. If this continues to be a problem I might have to figure out a way to limit things.

More Efficient Splicing

2009-06-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

First of all, I need to gush about how much fun session 1 of the first Live Wolfling Run was today (erm, yesterday technically, seeing as it's 1 in the morning now). It's been so long since I was in a chatroom with other creatures players, and all the silly commentary that was made about what was going on onscreen just made it so much fun. It was like we were all raising norns together. I am both excited and apprehensive about tomorrow-- Hopefully the fun will continue, but I also know creatures will start dying out, and that will be a sad thing to watch...

In my personal worlds though... I have been splicing hundreds of creatures that have been found in export files on my harddrive, doomed to an eternity of being frozen in time otherwise. But during my splicing adventures, I kept thinking how nice it would be to be able to have the splicer in an undocked world so I wouldn't have to deal with the slowdown that all those extra metarooms in a docked world bring.

So just out of curiousity to see if I could do it, I poked around in the C3 splicer .cos files, changed some coordinates, then messed around with some of the scripts involved in the powerups and bioenergy to actually get the thing running. And tada:
I found myself with a fully functioning splicer in my DS hub.

I then went so far as to add some extra rooms to the area underneath the main hub area so freshly spliced creatures land on a floor underneath the splicer-- this is so I don't accidcently splice them again until the whole first generation has been spliced.

Then I was on a roll, so I decided to fix another problem-- a ton of adult norns running around the splice room tend to block the hand from being able to click the pods to get the creatures inside them. So I created a "sedative," an invisible agent that lowers all the drives of creatures in the hub and puts them in a sort of a delerious, happy grog, while strongly suggesting them to rest. Not only does this make their splicing the most pleasant and painless experience of their lives, but while they're lying down the hand can click the pods without accidently tickling a creature.

Still having way too much fun with this, I then created a Creature Call button, which, when pushed, teleports all creatures right above one of the two splice pods, alternating between the two so that the creatures are evenly distributed. This, combined with the sedative that makes them sleepy mean I virtually never have to chase norns around to get them into the splice pods ever again.
It's just a matter of clicking each pod and pressing the splice button now.

At that point the most painful part of the process is importing all the creatures to splice. So again I tinkered with the import button found in the DS UI and created a similar button that essentially automated the process of importing. One click imports all creatures in your My Creatures folder (or at least, until you reach the population limit or your game explodes from holding too many creatures).

So now my splice process consists of moving 40 creatures from my Random Creatures folder to the My Creatures folder, one-click importing them all, using the call button to place them all by the pods, click-click-splice, repeat until the first generation is all spliced, call the second generation to the pods, repeat two more times or until I have about 5 creatures left, which are exported.

It's quite an improvement over manually importing each creature, dragging it to the splice pod, getting it in without tickling it, repeat for second creature, splice, move offspring somewhere safe, and so on and so forth.

Right now though, this splice system is spread out in about 6 different cos files and the buttons are in random places and are unlabeled, so perhaps I'll eventually structure them into a decent control panel and use proper sprites for the buttons, and compile and release it as a tribute to fellow splicers.

I'm also considering a button based on my Random Run script that creates a pair of completely random creatures for the beginning splicer who doesn't have hoards upon hoards of exported creatures sitting around on their hard drive.

...I'm sure I'll get back to working on BattleStance and my random run and all my other projects eventually. I just have so many nutty ideas.

New Layout/Life in Girls Night

2009-06-10T22:49:00.000-07:00

I got a bit tired of the default blog template, so I tweaked it a little. The metaroom shown above is Children of Capillata: Daedalus (images by Silvak and coding by Zzzzoot, downloadable here). It's quickly becoming one of my favorites.

I plan on eventually re-tagging everything on this blog to make it a little more organized, so people can use the tags like a menu bar/contents listing, so if things look a little funny, that's why.

I don't have a lot of time to play around in my pet worlds lately, but today I exported all my girls from my all-female world, Girls Night, wiped and remade it. This time they're exploring the Children of Capillata rooms.

There have been a few timely deaths-- nearly three of my older norns passed on around the same time. But more were born via insemination and I even broke away from my CFE-only mode to hatch a new butterfly norn named Wyng. She later had a child (the one in the banner above) who sadly and mysteriously died when I wasn't looking. Leffa, the bruin-headed norn in the banner, is due to norn heaven herself-- in about four minutes if she lives an average lifespan. She has had the joy of mothering two children and "fathering" a third. I suppose soon I will give Wyng another chance at motherhood. She's been pushing the door for five minutes now though-- I may have to chase her around with the inseminator.

I have been having problems with Kiara, another one of my bruin-headed norns. She seems to have developed a mean-streak and has been beating the snot out of Kimmy, the newest baby. In fact, it's a little concerning how much time she spends just looking at other norns. I wonder if it's something genetic.

Oh dear... Kimmy is insisting on eating the door. I really don't ever plan on having human children.

Live Nornish Action FAQ

2009-06-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

I've been getting an awful lot of questions about LNA-- most of them left in the chatroom (which is an impossible way to contact me since I'm usually not around to respond). So this is a little FAQ to answer the questions I get asked the most.

Last update: June 14th, 2009 -- added a new question: What is the maximum population of the LNA world?

About Creatures
What is Creatures/Docking Station?
What exactly is going on here?
What are the creatures saying?

About LNA
What is Live Nornish Action?
What software is used to record the video?
What breeds/agents/other addons are installed?
What is the maximum population of the LNA world?
How do I contact you?

Sending Creatures
How do I send you a norn?
Can I send ettins or grendels?
Is there anything I shouldn't send?
Did you get my creature?
Where is my creature?
Can you send my creature back?

About your Creatures
Why does my creature look different in your world?
My creature is starving! Do something!
Will my creature be able to breed?
Why was my creature exported?

--

About Creatures

What is Creatures/Docking Station?

Creatures is a series of Artificial Life programs starring the Norns, a breed of curious furry creatures eager to explore their world. Norns are unique in that they are far more complex than any "virtual pet" game on the market today. They have a realistic simulated biochemistry and a neural network brain with which they make descisions. None of their actions and behaviors are pre-programmed-- norns learn about the world around them as they grow and experiement, then make their own choices. Each norn also has its own set of genetics, which it passes on to its offspring, allowing for endless variety in crossbreeds made even more interesting with the random chance of mutation.

Creatures Docking Station (often abbreviated as DS) is one of the more recent additions to the Creatures series, and is completely free. DS adds a new level of functionality-- it allows users to swap and share their creatures with each other online via the in-game warp. As its name suggests, Docking Station may be "docked" with the retail version of Creatures 3 to expand the world, but the world is also expandable with thousands of free new breeds, objects, and rooms, all created by the community.

If you want to learn more about Creatures, check out the Creatures Wiki. If you want to experience Docking Station for yourself, you can download it free at Docking Station Central, and be sure to check out the small but dedicated Creatures Community at Creaturetopia.

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What exactly is going on here?

No one is actively playing the game; it is running by itself (though if you watch for long enough you may occasionally see the hand checking the world for immortal norns, responding to messages, and so on). For the most part you are watching the norns (or ettins or grendels) in their natural habitat, eating, sleeping, exploring, and interacting with their environment and fellow creatures.

The following diagram will help you to more easily understand what you are looking at:

1. Name of the currently selected creature. Every few moments a script will select a different creature.

2. The connection indicator. Green means the world is online and likely open to receiving new creatures. Orange means the world is offline.

3. Life events. These icons depict the last three major events that took place in the LNA world. The small egg inside the larger one represents a pregnancy, the egg icon means an egg has been laid, and the cracked egg means a newborn creature has just hatched. A cross icon means a creature has recently died. The cross icon is generally the most common in LNA, because the population is usually too high for the creatures to breed or lay eggs.

4. The small red arrow hovers over the selected creature. This makes it a little easier to see which creature is selected in a crowd.

5. The small green arrow hovers over the object or creature that the selected creature is looking at or thinking about. Right now, Skitty is thinking about the bit of purple food she is holding.

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What are the creatures saying?

Norns speak in their own gibberish language (generally referred to as Bibble) but activating certain objects in the world will allow them to learn very simple English, which they use to express themselves and make suggestions to other creatures.

Creatures speak in third person, referring to themselves by their own names. They will often speak about how they feel, what they are doing (or thinking about doing), and make suggestions to other creatures. Their overly simplified vocabulary may be confusing at first, but it is not difficult to catch on. The most confusing thing to understand at first may be the verb "push" which is an all-purpose word for "interact with." To push a toy is to play with it; to push a vendor is to get it to dispense food, to push a bug is to poke it. Pushing a creature is a gesture of affection. For objects with two different interactions (such as elevators which can either go up or down), creatures will push the object for the first interaction, and pull it for the second.

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About LNA

What is Live Nornish Action?

Live Nornish Action (abbreviated as LNA) is a stream of video from the game Creatures Docking Station. The game is left mostly unattended (except in certain events) so the creatures are left to fend for themselves.

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What software is used to record the video?
The software I use is called WebcamMax. Its primary function is to add various effects to a normal webcam, but it includes a feature to turn a portion of your screen into a webcam. The trial is free, but you'll have to register if you want to get rid of the watermark.

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What breeds/agents/other addons are installed?
I have made an effort to include as many different breeds as possible so norns sent into the world will show up correctly on screen.

Depending on what is currently going on in the world, there may be any number of agents installed. There are, however, two invisible scripts that are always running. One is AutoTab, a script I wrote that targets a new norn every few minutes so you don't have to always watch the same one, and the other is the Supernamer, which automatically gives a unique name to any unnamed norns.

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What is the maximum population of the LNA world?
The total population of creatures allowed in the LNA world is currently set at ten. The goal is to keep the population small enough that it doesn't get too crowded, so people don't have to wait an hour for the auto-selecter to get around to selecting their creature, and so the world doesn't slow down too much.

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How do I contact you?
Honestly, the fastest way to contact me is by sending a private message on the Creaturetopia forums to Amaikokonut. Alternatively you can leave a comment at the bottom of this page. You can also send a message inside Creatures Docking Station to LNA, but beware, it may show up on screen. You can also send a message to my personal DS ID, BluburryNorn, but response may be slower as I don't check that every day.

Leaving a message in the show chatroom is not an effective way to contact me, as I don't watch it constantly.

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Sending Creatures

How do I send you a norn?
If LNA is online and the warp is open, you are perfectly welcome to warp it into the LNA world and watch it on screen. To sending a norn into LNA, you must warp it in via the Docking Station warp. A simple guide is as follows:

- Make sure you are online.

- Go to the Workshop.

- Select the 'Configure Chamber' icon at the top of the warp champer interface (the one that looks like a norn in jail)

- Use the arrows to add and remove names the "send to" list. Make sure LNA is the only name in the list. If LNA is not in your contacts list at all, you can add it manually from the Creature Labs site. If LNA is shown in red, the world is currently offline and is not accepting creatures from the warp at that time.

- Drop the creature you wish to send into the containment chamber and make sure it is locked.

- Click the green checkmark to send off your creature! You may need to reselect the Configure Chamber icon if the check doesn't light up at first.

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Can I send ettins or grendels?

Despite the name of the stream, yes, you are perfectly welcome to warp in Creatures of all sorts.

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Is there anything I shouldn't send?

Because the warp portal is wide open to the randomness of the warp, it is understood that anything might show up. However, please try to avoid sending immortal or especially violent creatures. Creatures older than 8 hours will be routinely exported to keep from clogging up the queue of incoming creatures, and sending creatures to kill everyone else is just mean :(

You should also avoid sending creatures with special needs, dietary or otherwise, because the creatures are not cared for by hand and must be able to fend for themselves.

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Did you get my creature?

Ideally, LNA is up and running 24/7. Unfortunately, I am not. For this reason I am not watching the game constantly and cannot give you specific information on your creatures. You'll have to keep watching the stream yourself to see if your creature shows up.

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Where is my creature?

When you send a creature through the warp to LNA, it is unlikely that it will show up in the world immediately. Often there is a queue of creatures sitting in the warp waiting to get into the world, and it may take a while before yours appears. There is a population limit, so a creature must die or be exported before the next in the queue can show up.

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Can you send my creature back?

LNA is not constantly monitored, so it is highly unlikely that any creature you send can be returned to you before it finishes living out its life. Please keep in mind that when you send a creature anywhere in the warp, it is could end up anywhere and its fate is no longer in your hands.

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About your Creatures

Why does my creature look different in your world?

If you warp in a creature and it looks quite different on screen from how it appears in your world, it is usually either because LNA has a breed installed that you don't, or because you have a breed installed that LNA doesn't. If you are fond of a particular breed that does not display properly on LNA, feel free to leave a message with a link to where the breed is available so it can be installed.

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My creature is starving! Do something!

In LNA, creatures are left to fend for themselves. The resources in the norn meso are more than adequate for a creature's survival. Unfortunately, if the creature leaves the meso and cannot find his/her way back, there is often nothing that can be done. If this troubles you, avoid sending creatures with poor survival instincts into LNA

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Will my creature be able to breed?

Technically, yes. If your creature comes into the world during a time of low population, it may find a mate and produce offspring. However, this is highly unlikely, because quite often norns are coming in through the warp as others die off and the population rarely gets low enough for breeding to be possible. If you want your norn to produce offspring, please let it do so before sending it in.

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Why was my creature exported?

Creatures are exported if they are considered detrimental to the population. For example, if a creature is immortal, or is more than 8 hours old, it is exported to make room for more creatures; it's not fair for a norn to stay in the world for so long when so many others are waiting to get in. On the other hand, a creature will also be exported if it is quite violent and excessively beats other creatures. A creature may also be exported if its name is considered inappropriate.

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This FAQ will be updated as necessary. If you have any other questions, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

Enjoy the show!

Random LNA Ideas

2009-06-09T02:07:00.000-07:00

So I'm still racking my brain for ways to make Live Nornish Action more interesting for the community. And while I'm planning on doing a few community live wolfling runs, so far the idea really hasn't gained much support or contribution.

One of the problems with streaming community live wolfling runs is that the lives of the norns are so short. People might be interested in watching their own norns and maybe their first offspring, but after that the creatures are foreign to them and there's no real motive to keep tabs on them.

So I'm trying to come up with some more ideas for "programs" that hopefully people can feel a little more connected with.

The first and simplest notion to come to mind is just a feral run with genetically altered norns-- just changing the half-life gene so the norns age very, very slowly. I'm talking a lifespan of 100-200 hours (less so if the run was shown in intervals rather than stream 24/7). Some other modifications might be made to make pregnancies longer as well as recovery time afterward, but otherwise the run would proceed as normal. It would give everyone a chance to see their creatures in action and perhaps put more emphasis on actual survival, since the longer a creature lives the more likely it is to come in contact with antigens and other dangers. People might be able to get a bit more attached to something like that.

Now, developing the notion a little further, I might consider running some sort of Survivor-esque game show (which.... probably wouldn't be very survivor-esque, considering I've never even watched survivor) in which members of the CC send in creatures under their names. The creatures are genetically altered to be fixed at a desired lifestage and never age (they are still perfectly mortal, just not by aging). These representative Creatures would be released into the world and occasionally be subjected to certain obstacles-- be that disease, a particularly vicious creature, an elaborate version of the IQ test, etc.. Creatures would be awarded points based on how many children they had (which would be exported after note was made of them) and for exceeding in certain obstacles (being the first to finish the IQ test or killing off the vicious creature). Most of the time though, the creatures would just run around doing their creaturely things-- though I would probably make note of dates and times that certain events would take place so people could watch at that time if they wanted to.

Something like this could work several ways:

- The game could run for a certain length of time and at the end the creature with the most points would be declared the winner. Creatures that died throughout the course of the game may be reincarnated at the cost of half or all of their points.

- The game could last as long as it takes for all but one of the creatures to die off. Points could be spent on reincarnations, but if a creature dies and is out of points, it is out of the game.

- As per tradition, people could vote a different creature out of the game every week. The creature with the most points would be immune to the votes, reincarnation would cost a set number of points, and votes against creatures with negative points would be worth twice as much.

- The game would be ongoing until everyone got bored and and have no real winner, but a point tally would be kept for fun.

In the end though, LNA is just a bunch of creatures running around-- something anyone can witness by firing up the game. Except in the case of special events, it's really not meant to be something you watch for extended periods of time; it's just something you peek in on now and again to check on a favorite creature. Unless the community can really benefit from it in some way, I'm not sure how long it will last after the novelty wears off.

I am considering using it for other purposes though-- perhaps as a way for developers to promote upcoming breeds, metarooms, or agents. I think having an open warp in an unreleased metaroom would be quite a way to get people interested about what is to come.

It doesn't have to be limited to unreleased stuff either... It could also just promote any community-created content that people might be interested in. Might be a fun way to spread the word about new or nearly-forgotten content.

Anyway I'm rambling now. I believe I've been up all night brainstorming.

Belated Warp Week 1 Video Journal

2009-06-07T03:01:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I mentioned it at the time, but during the first Warp Week I kept a little daily video journal, detailing the highlights of the days. I finally got around to compiling it into a single video file which you can download at this link, if you so wish.

Granted, it is a bit long (21 minutes, hence why I didn't stick it on YouTube or anything) and a bit large (78mb, but that's quite a feat considering the raw AVI was nearly five gigs). It's more for record-keeping/archival purposes than entertainment value. But if you want to listen to me ramble on about norns for 15 minutes followed by five minutes of hundreds of norns being spliced in super-speed set to insane DDR music, you're welcome to it!

The Scattered State of the Creatures Community

2009-06-06T17:33:00.000-07:00

I miss the Gameware forums.

Not because they were great forums. Don't get me wrong-- I was annoyed as anyone with the spammers and kids who just couldn't grasp the concept of basic forum etiquette, and it really would have benefited from closer moderation.

But they were a gathering place. People would break off and start their own forums, but all organized events, all group projects, all big announcements could still be discussed on the Gameware forums with the whole community. But when the forums went down, the remainder of the Creatures Community was scattered to the four winds. Some didn't know where to go and disappeared entirely, and the rest scurried to one of several fan-based forums.

Years later, the community continues to shrink, and appears even smaller due to being so split up. It makes it extremely difficult to coordinate a community-wide event (such as CCSF) when several people don't seem to know that there are more people involved in the community outside their forum, or if they do, don't seem to have any interest in contacting them.

But what can we do?

In a perfect world, we could all merge into one big happy forum. But that is far easier said than done.
First to protest I believe would be the admins/mods of the forums. I've run forums for other games/fandoms and let me tell you... merging just plain sucks for the admins. When you've been handling your community pretty well for a while and you have your own set of rules, your own way of handling misconduct, and even your own favorite skin for your forums, it is a serious test of patience to be put in a situation where you no longer have full control over your community, where you have to clear changes with other people before putting them into action, and so on. And if any conflict erupts between the admins, the whole thing is pretty much history. In fact, trying to run any community with more than two or three admins is generally a bad idea. I'd like to say we're above petty conflict and drama, but we are still human (though some of us swear otherwise)

Not to mention that during these past gameware-forum-less years, some of these sub-communities have grown rather comfortable and happy within their little group. Some forums are perfectly fine with mindless offtopic spamming; others will ban you for it. Trying to force those previously isloated cultures to mingle would likely result in conflict as well.

So what do we do? We can't create another general creatures forum and advertise it as the new community gathering, because unless everyone agreed on that concept we would just be creating another sub-community and splitting ourselves up even more.

So the idea I'm turning in my mind is not necessarily a community forum, but a community hub.
It would link to all the other sub-communities out there. It would include Creatures-based communities as well as other general communities started by CC members, and just generally link everything CC-related together as much as possible so we're just not so scattered.

And though it would have a forum-- a small one-- it would be used purely for discussing events that pertained to the entire community, so as to not take away traffic from the other sub-communities, but create a neutral ground for discussing things like CCSF, for coordinating and recruiting people for development projects, or for announcing new sites/content.

As per usual, I have no intent or means of putting this proposal into action, but it certainly has a much smaller chance of happening if I didn't write it down at all.

I really hope someday we can find a way to unite the CC again. As it seems Gameware has all but abandoned us, we really need to take matters into our own hands.

Random Run Updates

2009-06-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

It didn't take terribly long for the first run to homogenize-- by generation 20~ or so pretty much the whole population was Chichi with Astro arms (which actually match very nice on the female Chichi body) and Harlequin legs. Not terribly impressive, but some potential, so I decided to try another.

I actually made note of which genomes were randomly injected this time, and the resulting sample consisted of Hardman, Wasserpflanze Plant, 2x CFE Treehugger, Moon Light, Unkraut Loewenzahn Plant, and "screw.gen", which is probably one of my long forgotten bizarre genetic experiements.

As of typing, the run is creeping into its 20th generation and most of the population consists of these odd grape-hardman-headed moon light norns. Some of them have moon light tails but many of them have these strange ... grendel-like tails? I'm not sure where they came from.. it may be some sort of mutation.

But they don't account for the entire population-- I'm really not sure of the genetic quirks involved in the plant norns but they don't seem to mind hanging out in the bottom of the workshop, thriving despite their lack of food. It may be a while before the population is truely homogenized if two separate populations can exist in different places on the ship, which is quite fine by me!

In other news, I'm going to try to make use of my Ustream channel to do a live wolfling run sometime in the next week or so. Details are in this thread at Creaturetopia if you want to get involved. It should be an interesting experiment.

The Random Run

2009-06-05T02:42:00.000-07:00

Well, LNA has been running fairly nicely for a week now. In an attempt to better the performance I reformatted the hard drive and while I don't know if I see a notable difference in the stream, the computer itself is much easier to work with now.

Progress has been slow but steady on BattleStance. I have added in the overlays, CAs, CA linkers, and have worked a little on the sprites for the fruit meant to grow on the tree. In experimenting with norns in the room though, I am worried that I may have made the lifts too large-- in some of the smaller rooms, they seem to grab every norn into it, willing or not-- and because they move so fast, if one norn is insistant on pulling the lift and the other on pushing, the lifts end up bouncing up and down for quite a time. As much of a pain as it was to do those lifts I am seriously considering reworking them.

There's been a lot of chatter over at Creaturetopia about CCSF '09. A couple of polls finally set this year's festival date for November 1st-14th-- partly in honor of the ten-year anniversary of Creatures 3, which was released on November 1st, 1999. Now there's a bit of dicussion about the potential theme. It's nice to see so much enthusiasm. I have high hopes for this year.

With the required updates out of the way, I'd like to make mention of a new sort of wolfling run I'm trying out. I'm calling it a "random run" and essentially beginning it with this block of code injected eight times:

new: simp 3 4 1 "eggs" 8 0 2000
pose 0
attr 195
bhvr 32
elas 10
fric 100
aero 10
accg 4
perm 60
gene load targ 1 "*"
setv ov01 0
tick 900
mvto 443 9167
anim [0 1 2 3]

It is a generic egg-injection script-- but the bolded line ensures that a completely random genome is injected into the egg. I have recently downloaded just a ton of new breeds and thought this would be an interesting way to test drive them.

It looks like the initial line-up consists of some chichis, an astro, a fallow, a harlequin, a couple plant norns, and a weird purple bengal. Not as many of the strange new breeds as I initially hoped, but randomness will have to take its course for the sake of the run rules.

I intend on letting the run go on until the population is mostly homogenous. Nothing special is being done to accomodate those norns with special needs-- the resulting genetic sample needs to be able to survive and breed normally in a typical DS world. I've rigged up the egg finder with the timer in the workshop and killed all teleporters as I do for all my runs, but other than than the world is virtually untouched. Nature will take its course now.

On a somewhat related note, I would like to do a few experiments on norn adaptation in different metarooms. It would take a while, and the results may or may not produce anything, but it might be interesting to try.

I would run several feral runs... perhaps five for each room. Starting with normal chichis, and letting them run until generation 100 or so, then comparing genetic samples to see how much they differ from each other and the base chichi genome. In theory, the norns within the same run would differ very little from each other, but differ some from the norns in different runs within the same metaroom, just due to the randomness of evolution. But theoretically, the norns from all runs done in one metaroom would differ quite noticabley from norns raised in another metaroom, because they have had to adapt to different enviroments.

I'm not sure if 100 generations is really enough for the genome to settle though. And I'm not even sure if the difference in metaroom enviroments would cause the genome differences to be greater than the sheer randomness of mutations that take place in separate colonies. But eh... that's what experiments are for, right? To prove or dispprove theories.

But I'll file that away in my nice little idea folder for now. As if I don't have enough projects to keep me busy!

Ever wanted to watch someone else's feral run?

2009-05-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

...probably not, but now you can!

There's an old computer sitting in the family room that serves as a "public" computer... it's the one we let guests use when they visit, and it's pretty much free-for-all for the family to use too, even though we all have our own computers. Since I can't remember the last time anyone used it though, I decided to load Docking Station onto it and start a live Ustream of a vanilla Chichi feral run.

The world is also actually online at the moment, so if you send a creature through the warp to BluburryNorn, it may show up on the screen... as a chichi though, I haven't installed any other breeds yet. In fact, the only thing I have installed is the Supernamer and a homemade script made to automatically cycle through the norns every few minutes so it's not targeting the same one for hours.

I suppose this would be a fun way to do a community feral run-- have several people send in their norns and then watch the run unfold. But I really haven't gauged if there's enough interest for such a thing yet, or if I have the technical capabilities.

See, the computer I'm streaming the run from is quite dated, not to mention full of various applications that strangers have downloaded onto it over the years. That means I have to keep the population low and can't really inject a bunch of extra agents and metarooms or the computer will slow down dramatically. Streaming the video takes an awful lot of resources as it is. Not to mention that since it is a public computer, anyone at anytime could just come by and use it to check their email or something, or just turn it off.

Streaming from my own computer is an option, but a complex one. While I would be able to have a lot more world variety, I wouldn't really be able to have sound. My sound card doesn't support recording from anything but my microphone (most newer soundcards disable it as a form of music piracy prevention... frustrates the heck out of me), so there would be limitations there. Plus it would tie up my computer and prevent me from doing anything else on it, so I really wouldn't want to use it to stream constantly.

Still, I could use it for events that only ran an hour or two and benefitted from narration. I am tossing around silly ideas in my head like a Truman show knockoff: "The Trunorn Show" which would run for an hour per session for six sessions (since most norns live about 5:40) and track a single norn throughout his life (among other norns, of course). But since watching a norn grow up and live its life isn't the most interesting thing in the world, a lot of the show would rely on exaggerated, interpretive narration. I would need a cohost or two and I really don't know a single person that would be interested in such a thing right now. Not to mention getting enough people interested enough in watching live norns to actually set aside a scheduled hour of their day to do so would be a feat in and of itself, considering how small and scattered the CC is.

A lot of these are just overinflated dreams right now, but they're fun overinflated dreams. For now I'll just have to wait and see how much interest this silly little feral run gets.

Lifts can go die in a fire.

2009-05-22T23:27:00.000-07:00

So.... that metaroom I'll never make.... yeah...

Despite my painful lack of knowledge in CAOSing I've spent the last week and a half mapping out the room (which wasn't too bad) and then... trying to make it navigatable. Which... means trying to add lifts.

That... was pretty much the most painful thing I've ever done, CAOS-wise. But after trying about ten different approaches and ripping apart countless other versions of lift scripts, I finally managed to piece together some working lifts.

The hardest part by far was my four-level lift in the center of the room. I'm not sure I coded it in the most efficient manner, but it works beautifully.

I believe scripting lifts must be a Creatures developer's rite of passage. I certainly feel a lot more confident about my ability to... dare I say it... maybe... someday finish this room. Gasp.

I mean, I already have done far more than I ever thought I could do. I now have a fully-functional, if quite barren, metaroom. Built from the ground up with my own two paws.

I've been referring to it in my notes as Project BattleStance for some time now. The name may or may not change as time goes on, but right now it's rather fitting. I have developed quite a list of things to do for this project... next I figure I'll add in the foreground overlays, then I'm going to start working on the plants and critters so it will at least function as an inhabitable metaroom.

Then I get to start working on all the fun stuff that makes the metaroom unique... the grendel egg-layer, the invisible mind arrows for the nesting/breeding/fighting behavior (I've been referring to them as "enviromental instincts" in my notes), and all the tools to help against the killer grendels... I have an interesting complex system planned for that...

It's certainly not going to be an average metaroom in the least. I'm not sure it'll even go over well, but I suppose I am building this for my own personal use, and if it satisfies my needs, I'll be happy.