Creatures 3 In Docking Station

After a really long hiatus and after running around in circles to fix a really strange error with my DS, I think I'm ready to go back to playing Creatures. And lo and behold, I have something that isn't a release that I think is worth posting about!

The above picture looks fairly normal at first glance (apart from being maximized on my computer's crazy huge resolution). However, look a little closer. Where'd all the favorite place icons go? Why is the DS welcome screen showing up in C3?

Well, in my usual insanity, I decided to see if Docking Station could load an undocked Shee Ark, as an extension of an old project to get C3 to load with DS's engine. In the past, such an endeavor was attempted by replacing C3's engine.exe file with Docking Station's, which was woefully unsuccessful (the result was an unpassable catalogue-related error).

For this approach, I decided to mess around with .cos files instead of .exe files. So I ripped a completely unmodified "001 World" folder from my Creatures Trilogy CD (for those of you who don't know, that's the folder that holds all the files for the agents of a C3 standalone world at startup). Then I did the following things:
1. Applied Vampess's fixes to it.
2. Compared it to the "010 Docking Station" (DS's equivalent to the "001 World" folder). Any C3 .cos file that had an equivalent in DS (for example, "creatureBreeding.cos" and "DS creatureBreeding.cos") got deleted and replaced with the DS counterpart.
3. DS also had a few improved scripts for C3 agents (such as the Creator) for use in docked worlds. I took these scripts and replaced the originals in the C3 .cos files with them.
4. Made some alterations to DS's Welcoming Screen to account for the differences between C3 and DS.
5. Finally, I renamed the altered "001 World" folder to "010 Docking Station," replaced the original "010 Docking Station" folder with it, and made a new DS world.

Unbelieveably, instead of some error complaining about invalid map positions or catalogue errors, the result was a completely functional C3 world using the DS engine. All the C3 agents work as they do in C3 standalone. Even the bioenergy feature works.

However, adding new agents to this world isn't quite as easy. As can be expected, the C3 Creator looks for C3 agents, not DS agents. Even though this is technically Docking Station, the stuff that shows up in the Creator are C3 agents. This isn't a big problem, but trying to inject one of these agents can cause problems if it has a separate .catalogue file for both C3 and DS (for example, the Grendel Upgrade) and the DS version of the agent was previously injected into a DS only world.

So the Creator also needed to be modified to look for DS agents instead, and that proved to be another surprisingly simple task. When reading agents, the C3 creator looks for the PRAY chunk "AGNT," which indicates a C3 standalone agent. DS agents, meanwhile, are indicated by the PRAY chunk "DSAG." Getting the Creator to read DS agents was a matter of replacing all mentions of "AGNT" with "DSAG" in its .cos file.

And just like that, the Creator loads DS agents.

There's further complications involved in this process, however. Apparently, the animation routine some DS agents use is different from C3 agents. When the Creator tries to read one of these agents, the result is this:

Considering the Agent Injector can read these .agents files just fine, I think fixing this is possible; just look at how the Agent Injector handled it and fix the Creator likewise.

Even after that, there's still a few things here that make this whole affair awesome, but impractical in the long run:

1. Most agents (including my own) that are compatible with both C3 standalone and DS use the "gnam" command when determining where to place an agent. In Docking Station, this usually means placing the agent in one of the DS areas (like the Meso). This world, while only having C3 areas, is still a DS world. So the "gnam" command interprets it as a DS world and tries moving the agent into a nonexistent DS area. You can probably guess what happens afterwards.
Unfortunately, fixing this means fixing loads upon loads of agents to determine placement through other means, and ultimately I don't think it's worth the effort.

2. C3 standalone, obviously, has no online functionality. The same is true of this world. While I could move some things concerning the online functionality over without causing issues, most of DS's online is focused in the Comms Room and Workshop. Trying to find a place to put online stuff onto the Shee Ark is again more trouble than its worth (since it involves extra spritework, among other things), and copying it over whole-cloth creates "invalid map position" errors. So worlds created in this manner cannot get online, or at least not completely. Granted, this doesn't matter so much now with the lack of a functioning DS server, but if one of those projects to bring DS back online ever succeeds, it will matter then.

3. This probably goes without saying, but making docked worlds with the new Bootstrap folder in place is a seriously bad idea. If the result isn't outright errors, it's at least going to create loads and loads of duplicates. Granted, this is just guessing; I actually haven't tried to do this since changing the folders, but I certainly don't want to.

This was a fun little experiment, though; I'm probably going to make a few proper worlds in this manner. I might even share the new bootstrap folder if I manage to fix the Creator error mentioned above (and change a few things around with the DS welcome screen so that the other options work properly).

Before anyone asks, I have no intentions of trying to do this the other way around (that is, trying to get C3 standalone to load the Capillata). DS can run anything C3 has coded just fine; however, C3 cannot just run any DS agent just fine as DS has a lot of CAOs commands that are exclusive to it, and these need to be replaced with a C3-friendly equivalent for use in C3 standalone. Furthermore, I just don't see the point - the Meso is really the only area that might be useful in C3 standalone; the Comms and Workshop are completely useless thanks to C3's lack of online functionality. It'd just be a lot of work for too little reward.

Gotta Whole Lotta Love

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you! Granted, as of the time of this writing, the day is almost over, and I imagine it's probably already over for some of you. Even so, I hope you all got some quality time with your significant other (or at least some candy if you're single like I am).

Unfortunately, I can't give you candy over the internet, so this new release is going to have to do.

The Sweetheart Colorful Grendels are the first of the Colorful Grendel sub-breeds. Coming in an array of bright, hopefully lovely colors, they're best known for their love of pushing other creatures. In fact, they're so friendly that they can feed by interacting with their fellows! Just keep them away from Hardman Norns; they take the phrase "Make love, not war" to a decidedly ridiculous extreme.

Download the Sweetheart Colorful Grendels!

Tiny Little Water Bugs

After that little rant in my last post and some Googling, I figured that doing some CAOs might very well help me with the issues I've been having. To begin, I decided to code something quick and easy to help me ease back into it and Creatures in general. Converting an agent to the Garden Box would be a good place to start. And so....

I decided to turn the C3 aquamites into a GB agent. They're based on the originals and behave similarly for the most part, but they're much more interactive than the originals and are less prone to dying out (and the originals were pretty extinction-resistant as it was). 

Download the C3 Aquamites for the Garden Box!

I think I'm going to focus mainly on Garden Box agents for the next couple releases, and keep things reasonably simple as I work my way back to being able to focus on more complex agents and breeds. Until the next one, folks.

On a Lack of Interest

So I've been thinking about why I haven't been playing Creatures lately and why I haven't had much of an urge to do any developing. I guess part of it is that the community has been rather inactive as of late (although granted, it seems like everyone is horribly busy and/or sick right now, not just the Creatures community), although that's definitely not all of it as I'm finding Creatchi to be more enjoyable than the actual game right now. 

I've come to the conclusion that the biggest problem is the way I tend to play the game. 

I'm not the sort of person who can just inject a few metarooms, some agents, and then hatch some creatures and get to playing with no issues. No, I have to gut every single metaroom to remove any creature-unfriendly agents or navigation and replace them with fitting creature-friendly substitutes. This sounds simple on paper, but more often than not every world I attempt to create turns into a coding project. 

Creating a new agent/metaroom every once in a while? That's fine. I can do that. Having to code every single time I want to start a new world? Not so much. 

Even if I manage to make it past the initial setup, I have to contend with my finicky taste in agents. I generally prefer natural-looking agents, or at least agents that don't look "goofy." However, my brain is extremely particular in what it considers not to be "goofy." Furthermore, even if an agent manages to look good, it also has to be creature-friendly AND fit the metaroom I want to put it in. The end result? There's somewhere in the range of twelve agents I can use without my brain throwing a fit. I can generally fill up a small room (like the Grendel Hideout) without issue, but small rooms aren't good for large creature populations - besides the fact that everyone's likely to get crowded and start beating each other up, a lot of creatures tends to be a major strain on the room's resources. 

So there's not a whole lot of metarooms I can use, either. Notably, the list of metarooms I can't use effectively include the C3 Jungle Terrarium, C2toDS, and Chione (the latter of which is particularly bad, considering I helped make that one). All of this also probably helps explain why I don't find Veridia to be as enjoyable as everyone else seems to think it is. 

Setting up a world should not be this hard, and yet it is. Beyond the fact that I'm probably ADHD, I have no suitable explanation as to why I have to do it this way. All I know is that it blows and I wish I could be more flexible. 

Chione Update Update

My memory is really horrible.

As it turns out, in updating the mapping of Chione, I completely forgot that the Map Editor file I was using hadn't updated the room types from Liam's original mapping. That is to say, while the ice over the lake is now Air and the flat area before the entry cave is now Drained Soil, the tunnel through the lake went back to being Outdoor Concrete (when it should have been Indoor Corridor) and the random Air spot at the bottom of the lake came back.

Long story short, I've updated the room to remove the unintentional reversions. It should be available from the same link as before, but you can also pick it up here.