The Realm's First Anniversary

Like the title says. This day marks the first anniversary of the Realm's opening. I'm pleased with myself that I've been able to keep it running for this long, even if it's been rather inactive as of late.

So, considering that I tend to celebrate these sorts of things with a release, one would naturally think that I had one ready for this occassion.

Well...unfortunately, I could not think of anything to make. It's not helping matters that I spent most of the week slacking off (or swamping the CCaves breedlist with other people's breeds) and the day's about over here. So the only thing I have for anyone reading this today is this post (unless you're really wanting to settle for a really sloppy breed made in an hour or so).

But! Rest assured, I do have something planned. It's definitely not making it out tonight, but if all goes well it'll be out within 24 hours of this post. And to (belatedly) celebrate the Realm's first birthday, it will be really unorthodox to boot. Stay tuned; I'm not done yet.

My Breeds and the Creatures Caves Breedlist

In case you haven't noticed, one of my breeds - the Twilight Norns - has finally appeared on CCave's breedlist. I wasn't the person who did so, but as adding my breeds to the list there is low priority for me at the moment I really don't mind if other people want to go ahead and do so.

However, before you start flooding the CCaves breedlist with my stuff, I have one request: Please do NOT just copy-paste the description and image provided here at the Realm onto the Creatures Caves breedlist. It's a major pet peeve of mine when people do that; even if it is convenient, I find that it makes for a much nicer-looking breedlist when people provide their own images and description when listing breeds - it's part of the reason why I find CU7's breedlist to be one of the nicest around, even if it hasn't been updated in a while.

I'll probably get to it myself once I don't have college to worry about (read: when I'm out for the summer), but this notice is for anyone who wants to beat me to it.

So Much for Schedules

That hiatus I mentioned a while back is still unfortunately ongoing (real life is getting demanding). I have absolutely no idea when I'll get back to my old projects - it's definitely not coming back this month, I can say that much. I imagine it'll be shortly after Creatures Caves finishes upgrading, though I make no promises.

In the meantime, I figured I'd release something for you to mess around with while waiting for the CCaves upgrade to finish and to make up for this blog's relative inactivity:

 After my Oasis review, I mentioned that I made a swimming agent that allowed creatures to retreat from each other. After some more tweaking, I decided that it was in a releasable state (there weren't any autokill errors, anyway). And so, here it is. There are still some bugs with it (notably, you might have creatures start swimming backwards), but for the most part it's a major upgrade from the original swimming agents that fixes almost all of their major bugs. I'm proud of it, and I hope you'll enjoy playing with it.

Download the Swimming Agent V2! 

Dear Metaroom Developers....

Please stop making walls like this. Your baby creatures will thank you, and personally I'll be much happier.

Sincerely,

Grendel Man

Hiatus IV

As so happens when a new college semester starts up, I've completely lost interest in doing anything related to Creatures.

I don't have any major projects going on right now (apart from an easily-finished metaroom and maybe updating the Metallophagus Pack with bugfixes), so nothing much of value is getting lost there. However, "anything related to Creatures" includes Survivor. This is unfortunate since Mahk Mako got a little too friendly with the remaining contestants, and as a result my lack of activity has kinda left that plot thread hanging.

Mea and C1anddsaddict, if you're reading this, go ahead and assume Mahk buggered off and has gone back to his usual "watch and record" style of reporting. I'm not certain I'll get my drive back before the game ends - if I don't, then I probably won't update the column again until the time comes to bid it farewell.

For the same reasons as above, I apologize for the slight delay in getting the next Freak of the Week uploaded. I had to move back in to college Sunday, and as a result it kinda slipped my mind. Which means Mea's Borgetta unfortunately lost a day for her feature here. But she's up now, so anyone who got interested by her Survivor antics can download her and see how she acts in-game. To make up for that, Borgetta might get two weeks as Freak, since I'm not certain if I'm completely willing to make a new Freak for next week.

And that's the update.