Seriously Belated CCSF 2024 Releases

 It's almost time for the CCSF 2025, and I don't think I've mentioned the things I've released for the CCSF 2024 here at all. 

 Part of that wasn't just me struggling with getting things up in a timely fashion. As I mentioned in the past, my hosting site's been basically offline for the past couple years; at last report you could still download the things that were already uploaded, but checking the site itself just says it's being moved with no way for me to login or do much of anything.

After a while spent mulling over that, I've opted to just start uploading things to my Google Drive for now. It's not a perfect solution by any means. I mean...it is Google. As well, despite the comparatively small size of any given Creatures mod the sheer amount I've downloaded over the years almost completely fills up my remaining space despite the fact it's barely been filled up prior to now, and I have no clue how much space my current body work would take. But for the time being until I can work out a better solution for my circumstances, it'll do. 

 So anyway...I did manage to get out a couple small things for the CCSF 2024.

The first thing was the Warrior Cats namelist for Advanced Protective Tub. I'm not actually much of a fan of that series; my experience with it has mostly been researching the fandom to answer the question of "Why the f-argh- are there so many Warrior Cat RPs on Discord?" However, the naming scheme for the characters in that series is a nice large nature-themed list that definitely pairs well with Advanced Protective Tub's , and I was looking for something less silly and actually pronounceable, so I looked up a Wiki article and threw together this list.

 Of course, I then learned SpaceSR threw together a Warrior Cats list of her own as part of a bigger series of lists well before I got the idea. Oh well. Two Warrior Cats namelists!

The second was the first genetic breed I publicly released since the Lavender Grendels all the way back for the CCSF 2015, not counting the various RAS test releases (I'm old!): the Rainbow Grendels.

They were inspired by Amanora's Rainbow Norns, multicolored norns who had different colors for each gender that changed throughout their lifetimes. I just applied that concept to a CFF-inspired CFE grendel genome, and gave them gender-linked appearance genes on top of that (...not that it really matters for anyone who isn't editing their genome; both genders just use the standard C3 grendel sprites). Because of that, I don't think they'll be the most compatible with the Nornbinary update or similar updates; I don't use such updates and wasn't really thinking about such things at the time.

Their genome actually did have a lot of other changes from the normal CFE grendel, but that's a can of worms for another post entirely. Just know that behaviorally they'll still act mostly like the typical grendel and as such can be hazardous for your norns' health regardless of how pretty they are.

Updating my download pages with this new stuff and prepping them for future new stuff is a project for whenever I can muster up the spoons. But hey, at least these are available somewhere else than the CCSF 2024 site now.

As for my thoughts on the CCSF 2024 itself...it definitely felt a little rushed; never mind the fact I imagine a lot of us were reeling from Certain RL Events (TM), the coordinators were also really busy IRL if memory serves. I do feel like the fact it's been twenty years of the CCSF should have gotten SOME form of acknowledgement, though I guess that was acknowledged for 2023's. All the same, what we got was still enjoyable enough; Freyla in particular did a wonderful job with the wolfling run as always. 

Here's hoping for a successful CCSF 2025! 

A New Base Genome: Born Anew

 Sheesh, has it really been almost a year since my last post here? Guess rambling over Discord's been better for the ol' instant gratification. 

 Anyway, RAS. Anyone remember that? It was the project I spent most of this series documenting the development of. I based it on the 2017 genome, eventually creating something I felt happy with. Then I realized there was still work to be done, explored a bunch of other avenues, before winding up back with the 2017 genome and polished it into something even better...before realizing it was prone to vanilla genome-levels of stupidity, having no idea why, and just giving up entirely. 

 Despite that, however, I have been still messing around, trying to create a base genome I can truly call my own that works as I intended. With most of them I've had a similar amount of luck as I did with the 2017s; they started out promising, but devolved into stupidity for one reason or the other. Sometime in the future, I'll go over those past attempts.

In the process of working on those, there was one genome whose features I kept coming back to: the CFF. Long time readers of this blog might remember me feeling a bit of hype aversion towards that genome in its time. If I'm honest, there really was no good reason for that; it was just petty envy and misplaced pride. Having remedied that now, I've realized that I like basically everything that it introduced. Heck, I've even somewhat come around on the thought randomness, having played with genomes like the Dark Devil Grendels, the Berry Grendels, and the Dart Grendels as well as Arnout's various CFF conversions. As far as I can tell, they can all take care of themselves perfectly fine.

The 2017 genome is based on the CFF, of course. But even outside of my past attempts, I've noticed that 2017s tend to be not great at taking care of themselves. It was something I noticed in my initial testing run, and later in a run featuring the 2017-based Infernal Grendels. At the time, I chalked that up to the aforementioned thought randomness...but the normal CFF breeds I've tried don't seem to have the same issues. So whatever's going on seems to be an issue with the 2017s specifically. Another thing to consider trying to figure out in the future, I suppose.

 So I went back a couple steps to the CFF 1.0 genome. They didn't have the thought randomness (or tryptamine suspectibility, for that matter) of CFF 1.1, but were identical in every other way. The only thing that desperately needed fixed was the broken alcohol receptor that kept them from properly storing glycogen and other long-term energy stores (and I also nuked the heart attack gene while I was at it; I've concluded that it basically had no benefits but "realism" and "being in C2"), and once I did that, I was extremely impressed with what I saw. CFF 1.0 norns were extremely good at taking care of themselves. They barely even pinged the medical monitor, and when they did it was because of fights and not because they started starving to death en masse. Honestly, I could see why evolnemesis added the thought randomness in the first place.

Since the base was this strong, I eventually decided to start tweaking it some more...and I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made thus far, enough to say that the RAS project has been properly reborn, at least in name. 

 Though I changed the name somewhat. RAS now stands for Risen Angel Standard, since I feel that's a little less clunky of a full name than "RA's Standard" was.

With all that being said, there's still a lot of work and testing to be done, so I'm not quite ready to go into depth on the new RAS. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll have something out for the CCSF 2025, but I make no promises. But in the meantime, there's a pair of testers you can play with, that in addition to being the first examples of the new RAS also feature an interesting tweak that I've also seem to be having success with so far. 

Maybe there'll be some more development posts between now and the proper release of the new RAS, maybe not. Either way, until the next one, folks.