A New Base Genome: Picking My Battles

At this point, I think I've incorporated most of what I want for RA's Standard Genome 2.0 from the CFF and beyond. Watching my new testing feral run, I feel pretty satisfied with the direction it's taking so far. At the start they did seem a little reluctant to leave their hatching area for lack of need and most of them still haven't strayed far, but at least they're actually doing interesting things otherwise.

So now the question is: how much more do I want to incorporate from the CFF/2017s/TWBs/TCBs? Do I want RAS to be the ultimate combo of all the improved genomes that have been made over the years, striving to be the most realistic creature I can possibly strive for (seeing I still don't understand the brain very well and I'm not sure if I ever will, barring a "The Creature Brain For Absolute F-argh-ing Morons" guide being published in the future)?

Well...as I said at the end of my breakdown for the initial test release of the 2017-based RAS, I'm not setting out to push the boundaries of what the game can do. There's a breed that is doing that; they're called the TWBs/TCBs. And I'm definitely not setting out to make the new standard base genome.

My ultimate goal is to create a genome that I feel comfortable basing future genetic breeds on, but works just as well as a breed in its own right. I'm hoping to create creatures that are capable enough of tending to themselves, while being interesting and fun to watch (again, as much as possible without needing to make brain edits). I'm hoping to create a genome that's more compatible than my last base genome was.

Do I need my base genome to be ultra-realistic? After all, Creatures is a game that has the fandom it does in part because of how realistic it manages to be, especially for the time in which it was made. However...it must also be said that Creatures is a game. While it's setting out to replicate real-world biology, it's also not meant to be a super-complex simulation scientists use to help them study the real world and solve real problems. It's a pet/life simulation game that at the end of the day is meant to be entertaining.

So in a way, I'm looking at this like a game designer and not a biologist. I have a vision in mind for what I'm looking for with RAS and thinking hard about what will and won't help me reach it. If that means sacrificing realism here and there, so be it.

There's also my motivation to consider, too. Just how far can I push this while not burning out? How much testing and tweaking the same set of genes over and over again can I do without just getting frustrated? I already ran into that wall once; it's partially why I decided to restart RAS from a CFE/Gizmo base instead of pushing onwards with the 2017 base.

So with all this in mind...let's take a look at what I have so far, what I know I still want, and the things in CFF and beyond I haven't incorporated and might want to.

As of this writing, here's the full list of everything I've incorporated into RAS 2.0 thus far:

• The base, as I've already stated, was Darcie's Gizmo Norn genome. I plan on keeping most of this base as intact as possible, albeit with some changes here and there.
• I've incorporated almost all of the CFE edits, barring what conflicted with the Gizmo edits. The major thing I left out was the elevation lobe as that doesn't actually work, as noted in my last post.
  
• From the CFF:
• I've added in the Hunger Overwhelmsion organ (leaving it at the end of the genome this time to avoid compatibility conflicts).
• I've also added in the Lactate Cycle in its entirety this time; I did some testing with the 2017 norns versus norns that didn't have it, and decided that it was a preferable alternative to the issue of drowning to just making RAS 2.0 amphibious regardless of whether the breed was meant to be aquatic or not. Also, lactate-based mutations are very common due to lactate being chemical 1, and pre-CFF creatures have no way of getting rid of lactate whatsoever, so a lactate-based mutation more often than not winds up killing the muscles and results in permanently-limping creatures.
  
• I also added in the reproductive changes; I like the pace 2017 breeds at, so I kept it for RAS 2.0.
  
• And from the 2017s and TWBs I've added in the new hunger system that's based on nutrient levels rather than the old one that's based on permanently-active emitters and arbitrary stimuli. This way they're much less prone to eating themselves out of house and home.
  
• A new organ called the "Enhancement Gland" was created and put below the Hunger Overwhelmsion organ and used to hold all the CFF genes that originally were dumped in the brain, and will be used to hold any other genes . The name is a reference to the Enhanced ChiChi Norn, who have a very similar organ and who I've also been referencing quite a bit (I've been thinking about making a post breaking down their genome at some point).
  
• As opposed to going with an Activase-based system like the 2017s and TWBs/TCBs to help build muscle tissue, RAS 2.0 fixes the vanilla Anabolic Steroid emitter so that it actually functions.
  
• And anything that was unable to mutate in the original version of RAS is unable to mutate here.
  
• Based on some research done in the Norn Nebula Discord, RAS 2.0 has an instinct to return home when lonely, and the loneliness/other drive drop provided by the "Found company/Reached peak of <Species Smell>" stim has been silenced. With any luck, the combination of the two will help solve the problem of lonely creatures never thinking to go find each other when they're the same species; something that turned out to be a problem with C3/DS creatures in general and not just the 2017s like I originally thought.
  

And here's everything I know I'm going to implement at some point.

• While there's no need for Activase anymore, I still plan on adding the TWB's system of activity-related stims consuming a small amount of glucose. This is to serve the goal of making RAS 2.0 fun to watch and to better balance their hunger drives.
• I'm also re-adding the TWB/TCB facial expressions. They were helpful and also pretty charming.
  
• Rather than sticking with the base Gizmo's muted boredom instincts, I'm adding in a wide variety of boredom-related instincts ala the 2017s and TWBs/TCBs instead. This includes the 2017's tendency to use teleporters as well as portals (which are two separate things; DS's teleporters are classed as "teleporter" while the Warp Portals are classed as "portal").
• In a similar vein, I also plan on adding the 2017's wider variety of instincts in general, to help encourage more varied behaviors.
  
• I'm also adjusting the Gizmo's life stages as they feel a little wonky to me (for one, they effectively skip the Youth stage and age to Adult immediately after adolescence, and they spend a lot longer in the old/ancient stages than I'd like).
  
• Any original RAS edit that wasn't specific to the way 2017s handled things is also making the jump to RAS 2.0.
  

So that leaves the other things CFF and beyond added that were perceived as fixing errors. Let's take a look at that list again, and also this list of features across the common base genomes. Some of these, particularly requiring glucose for antibody production, might be interesting to have but will also take a while to test out for something that doesn't feel entirely necessary for what I'm aiming for (I never play with bacteria anyway, so the chances that'll be relevant for me personally are pretty low). Some of it also probably wouldn't matter that much in the long run but also wouldn't take much effort to implement. And some of it (the alcohol variants in particular) just feel outright extraneous.

So ultimately, I think my time's best spent implementing and balancing the features I know I absolutely want for right now. Once that's done, I'll see how I feel about adding in anything else.

Until the next one, folks.

A New Base Genome: Back to Zero

 While I was still waffling on whether or not to continue to try and make the 2017 genome fit my needs, I decided to just go ahead and start prepping the Gizmo genome as a new starting point. Said prepping involved converting it to a CFE genome, since Vampess's guide on how to do that is (as of this writing) still available via the Wayback Machine. 

(I am aware Kezune did a conversion already; I opted to make my own just for the sake of knowing exactly everything that's going into my version.)

I also decided to ask what parts of the Creature genome don't work because of engine bugs over on the Norn Nebula discord (random aside: I've updated my contact information on the left hand sidebar with my new username and Discord username). Verm, one of the most knowledgeable people I have ever known, replied with this list:

• Organ values always start out with maximum lifeforce regardless of their life force start value in the Genetics Kit.
• Mutation chance and mutation degree effectively do nothing (always a 0 or 1 chance out of 255).
• Neuroemitters don't work (and even if they did they wouldn't work like how you'd expect from the Genetics Kit).
• The brain organ doesn't actually exist (all genes below the brain are actually considered part of the muscles, or whatever organ it's immediately below). 
• The "Reaction" value in Stimulus genes does nothing.
• Which is because the Intensity value does nothing (it always returns 0).
  
• The "Modulate using sensory function" switch also does nothing.
• Also worth noting is a reference to a unused lobe marked "elvn," which you may recognize as the Elevation Lobe in CFE-based creatures. However, it needs an (unreleased, as of this writing) external script to actually function, so it doesn't actually work in the CFE and beyond.
  

The exact technical reasons behind all these is beyond my understanding. But did I mention C3/DS suffer a lot from "Had to rush it out the door" syndrome? Fortunately, none of this is vital, can be worked around, or both (even if both the neuroemitter and stimulus bugs are mighty unfortunate as far as a gengineer's toolkit goes).

However, you might notice that something I did call an engine bug once actually isn't one. Specifically, the emitter locus "Muscle Energy Used." In a past post I noted that it almost never fired. Well, Verm corrected me on this one, too. It DOES work; specifically, it triggers whenever the creature's skeleton updates (that is, things like changing poses, position updating, and collisions). The actual issue is that the values on it were set way too low. 

So I tweaked and tested until I got muscle tissue levels similar to what I was getting out of the Activase system in the 2017-based genome, and much more reliably at that. So...one of the biggest reasons to keep trying with the 2017s is gone. 

Between that and the Gizmo's other biochemistry changes making it so I no longer have to futz about with trying to balance that stuff as I talked about in my last post, my desire to stick with the 2017s is basically at an all-time low. But nevertheless, there's a new obstacle in my way: the fact that the Gizmos, as a pre-CFE breed, don't have all the edits the CFF and beyond introduced.

And it's a long list. And that's just the CFF, to say nothing of the 2017s and TWBs/TCBs.

But...I believe it may be an effort worth making, even if the majority of what I wind up doing is just adding genes from the CFF/2017s/TWBs/TCBs. Because I have the new option of implementing these changes in a way that suits me better. For example: I'd prefer to create a new organ to store any new receptors, emitters, etc. rather than do as the CFF did and leave them in the Brain organ (actually the Muscles, as noted in the list above). And I can do some futureproofing as well, like having this new organ be underneath the Hunger Overwhelmsion organ as opposed to the other way around; a convenient spot to put new genes without having to worry so much about compatibility. 

(Both organs would still be at the bottom of the genome this time, though. My previous base genome had the Hunger Overwhelmsion organ grouped with its related organs higher up in the genome, which probably was a big reason why that genome had so many compatibility issues.)

So the journey continues. Until the next one, folks.

A New Base Genome: I CAN'T STAND IT!!! I THINK I'M GONNA HAVE A [[HeartAttack]]!

I have very mixed feelings on the gene that damages the heart when adipose tissue gets too high in CFF-derived genomes. 

On one hand, I don't think it's a terrible idea. It might in fact be a great way to punish creatures who eat themselves out of house and home, as vanilla creatures are known to do. On the other hand, it absolutely SHOULD NOT be the number one cause of death.

Unfortunately, the latter was the case for the testing feral run for my base ettin genome. Way too often they'd get caught up in hanging around sources of food, seeing no reason to abandon that spot, and not generating enough activase even with the disappointment stim constantly triggering from their failed attempts to push food (WHY they were constantly trying to push food in the first place is another extremely frustrating mystery I've yet to solve). As a result, ettin after ettin after ettin dropped dead of heart attacks. 

Eventually, I decided enough was enough. This wasn't something that's unique to the ettins; the fundamental flaw leading to it's also in my norn genome. So it was back to the norn genome to figure out a better way of balancing it. 

The first order of business before editing anything was hatching a norn of my base genome and watching it go about its business on a mostly-vanilla version of the Capillata. To my great dismay, I found my earlier observation about the disappointment stim being triggered constantly was flawed. The norn barely generated any activase and was constantly low on muscle tissue.

Based on this, my first thought was to throw out the 2017 Activase system entirely and replace it with the TWB's. And that's what I started doing...before I realized that the two systems didn't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. With that thought in mind, I added the TWB version of the Anabolic Steroid emitter (which triggers when muscle tissue gets low) and tested it out. 

Working in tandem with the existing 2017 activase system, the results were actually pretty good. So I was free to ditch the activase from the disappointment stim and move on to the next step: properly balancing the adipose tissue. 

For this, I referenced Darcie's Gizmo Norns quite a bit. My old base genome took their digestive system edits wholesale, but I wasn't about to do that this time. This time around I tested what I felt was most relevant to what I wanted: for adipose tissue to build up slower and break down faster. As it turned out, I was getting good results only from tweaking the reaction that converted adipose tissue back into triglyceride (it was originally 1 adipose -> 8 triglyceride, I dropped it to 1 adipose -> 6 triglyceride).

Even more surprising was the good results I was getting from making the reactions that had activase consume glycogen and adipose tissue dormant. In my initial tests I'd assumed muting those would result in a lot of norns dead from heart attacks, but it didn't happen. In fact it seemed like the risk was significantly lower. My best guess is that since creatures are getting less hungry in general they're less inclined to overeat.

I ultimately left the adipose tissue reaction dormant, while changing the other reaction so that glucose was consumed instead of glycogen, mirroring how the TWB version of the Activase system had movement stims consume a little bit of glucose in addition to generating activase. Feeling satisfied with this outcome, I added a batch of the new norns to my norn testing feral run....

...And wound up failing a major fundamental goal in making creatures that are interesting to watch. As it turns out, it's possible to make creatures who are TOO good at taking care of themselves. These new norns had zero reason to leave their hatching area because they never got hungry and none of their other drives got high enough to warrant it. Out of the four I hatched, only one eventually did. 

I also eventually decided that now they had too little adipose tissue, in that the only way they'd have a heart attack was if I forced them to do nothing but eat food via CAOs. Otherwise, they simply never ate enough to even get close to having one, regardless of how fat-heavy their diet was. I solved the heart attack problem, but I still had the problem of creatures who didn't do much. 

Back to the drawing board it is, and if I'm honest I'm starting to get a little frustrated with this project. I'd very much like to be at the part where I've gotten all this stupid tweaking and testing and balancing done and am making cool new breeds like the ones I talked about in my last post instead. But nope; it just feels like for every problem I've solved another one or two raise their ugly heads, and that goal gets even further away.

It's for that reason I'm giving serious thought to just abandoning working with the 2017 genome altogether and restarting with a different one. In particular, I hatched a Gizmo Norn to observe its nutrient levels with the X Ray to get a feel for how they looked, and as I went about tweaking my base genome that Gizmo Norn took care of itself and died of old age in a manner that's pretty unusual for non-CFE creatures. So the Gizmo genome feels promising for such a task...if I don't mind having to add all the stuff CFE and beyond added that the Gizmos don't have, that is. 

Sigh.

A New Base Genome: Miscellaneous Musings

 Progress on my base ettin genome has been a little iffy, as I briefly touched upon in my last post. I've been making changes, even figuring out a couple things I've since backported to my norn genome, and some of them seem to be working out. Others, not so much. In particular I've been having a lot more problems with heart attacks than during the testing of the norns, and also having problems getting them to approach each other and thus breed, even when they get lonely (to a lesser extent this has been a problem with the norn genome too; it's something Arnout noted was a problem even in the original 2017 genome). 

One part of me wants to keep pushing forwards with the ettin genome, another part of me's wanting to put the ettin genome on the backburner for now and move on to the grendel genomes...yes, grendel genomes; I'm planning on making two versions, which I'll detail the how and why of in a future post. And then there's a third part that's saying "All this activase and these heart attacks and these dumb creatures that won't approach when lonely are annoying; let's throw everything out and restart with the CFE instead of the 2017s." Maybe it's just the tiredness as I write this speaking. 

 In the meantime, I'm just going to dump a ton of miscellaneous thoughts and future plans I hope to accomplish. Will any of it happen? Not making any promises. I know me. 

• First and foremost: aquatic creatures. 2017s, and thus RA Standards, have a gene that gives a creature that's underwater an increasing desire to go up (that is, call an elevator to go up), and like their CFF ancestors possess a stimulus gene that makes them afraid when they start drowning (as I briefly touched on in my last post). Fortunately, it's not difficult to make them amphibious and happy underwater; it's just a matter of muting the aforementioned up drive gene and setting the air emitter to permanently active, after which they're as happy underwater as any non-CFF based amphibious creature. 
• Swimming, however, is another matter. Previously I just took the easy route for swimming creatures and set an emitter to always emit chemical 63, plus adding the swim bladder edits to allow female creatures to lay eggs. However, thanks to Lurhstaap's musings about his Abyss Dragons, I've hit on the idea of making the production of 63 tied to the creature's nutrient intake, particularly of muscle tissue (which tends to be in excess in 2017-based creatures). On top of the realism factor, it's also a nice way of circumventing the issue with swimming creatures having trouble interacting with things; if a swimming creature is having enough trouble that it can't feed itself, it'll stop producing 63 and thus eventually stop swimming. Then it can interact with things as normal, and hopefully get full enough to start swimming again. The issue is balancing the consumption of muscle tissue with the activase system, since RAS creatures generally produce less of it than their 2017 ancestors. 
• Of the future breeds I'm hoping to make, I must give special mention to Jesseth's and CosmiSynthetic's remastered conversions of the C2 Bulbous and Boney Grendels, and also the Worker Ettins. They have some goobers here and there, but all in all they simultaneously scratch my itch for C2 aesthetics in C3/DS while matching C3/DS's style much better than the previous conversions. The Bulbous Grendels in particular have been something of a mainstay during my RAS feral runs; I added Bulbous Grorns to the norn run while the grendels proper make for good "dither" grendels (that is, grendels that can bring out defensive behavior while being mostly harmless, taken from the aquarium hobby term dither fish) for the ettin run. Naturally, they're all getting RAS versions, and I'm also thinking I might even use them to convert some C2 genetic breeds like Frimlin's long-lost Amphibigrendels and my own Great White Shark Grendels (which I'm going to rename "Shark Boney Grendels"). 
• Other breeds whose general aesthetics I greatly jive with are Dragoler's Basilisk Norns (who I keep wanting to call "Uglee Norns," probably confusing them with the grendel breed that uses their sprites) and PapuBuntu's Carna Norns. Both of these breeds have TWB/TCB-based genomes at the moment, though the Carna Norns also have a CFE-based version at last report. So I'm also hoping to give them RAS versions, though they might not be exactly like the original versions (for the RAS Basilisks at least, I'm planning on giving them the ability to "eat" creature eggs by picking them up, similar to how my Metallophagus Grendels V1 "ate" gadgets and machinery by hitting them). 
• Also on the list: Cyborg's Angler Grendels. Despite their problems (adult females crash the game without a Bigger Sprite Allocation patch and are also too big to fit in the Swimming Agent's vehicle), they're a breed I've absolutely fallen in love with. They already have a 2017-based genome, but I'd like to give them a RAS version that doesn't require the Sensorimotor Lobe script. I'd likely give my version the name "Ceratoid Grendels," after one of my older ideas for a similarly behaving grendel breed.
  
• Then there's revamps of older genetic breeds, whether they're my own or not. One big plan are a sort-of revamp of Trix's Shark Grendels; the originals are just colorful, amphibious jungle grendels right down to the "children make you old" gene, but nevertheless I remember enjoying them a lot in the days before I started gengineering myself. My planned revamp would combine them with my own Shark Grendel breed to become colorful, aquatic predators based off the Rainbow Sharkling...which is confusing because I've ALREADY made a breed based off rainbow sharklings, via screwing around with CRAG all that time ago. As it turns out it is possible to make a CRAG based creature capable doing things other than sit there, as Verm's Nurse Bots and GAIA prove, but I don't think that's something I want to mess around with right now. So the new Rainbow Sharkling Grendels would be a typical genetic breed that uses the C3 grendel sprites like the original Shark Grendels, but I'm hoping they'll be fun anyway.
• I'm also thinking of redoing the Potamogeton Grendels/Pond Weed Grendels V3. Knowing what I do know, I'm thinking I could do some fun stuff with their genome to make them even more plantlike. 

 Until the next one, folks.

Genetic Mysteries: The Grendel Twitch

 If you've ever played with the vanilla C3 grendels or any creatures based on their genome (such as CFE grendels, or Osiris Norns), you may have noticed they have a tendency to dance. That is, sometimes while they're doing something else they'll randomly strike a pose for a second before going back to whatever it was they were doing. It's most noticeable in creatures suffering from EES; while other creatures just tend to stay locked up in one position, grendels tend to twirl around and around until they're snapped out of it. 

Since it's one of those things I find charming about grendels, I naturally sought the means to replicate it in other genomes. Since it also happened in creatures based on the vanilla C3 grendel's genome, I concluded that it had to be genetic somehow. However, what exactly was causing it was not so easy to figure out. 

Since it involved grendels striking a pose, I figured that it might have something to do with the pose or gait genes...but nope. The actual poses and gaits themselves are more or less identical in both the vanilla norn and grendel genomes, and while there's some differences in the receptors that trigger them replicating these differences in a norn didn't result in a norn that twitched. 

I could also confirm it had nothing to do with the brain, as all three species have the same brain structure in their vanilla genomes, and I also ruled out the grendel-specific chemical Grendel Nitrate (which reduces a creature's reluctance about hitting things, particularly other creatures; the brain gene responsible is actually present in all three species). So if not all of those, what was it?

My next guess was the involuntary actions (flinching, sleeping, etc.), as those also involve striking a pose sometimes. Grendels have two differences from norns involving those genes. One of them involved flinching from pain...but that wasn't it. The answer was in the other changed gene:

141 Different in file 1 201   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 6, Creature, Sensorimotor, Involuntary action 7, chem=Air, thresh=77, nom=255, gain=255, features=Inverted Digital  (0) 

124 Different in file 2 201   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 6, Creature, Sensorimotor, Involuntary action 7, chem=Air, thresh=77, nom=255, gain=0, features=Inverted Digital  (0)

Involuntary Action 7 is drowning. This particular gene works by checking for the level of the Air chemical produced by a creature's body. Since it's set to Inverted, it triggers at low levels of the Air chemical rather than high levels.

In a norn (the first gene listed), both the nominal and the gain are set to max. Nominal can be thought as as the "default" level the receptor fires at if the associated chemical's level is below the threshold. Gain, meanwhile, can be thought as the level the receptor fires at if the chemical's level is at or above the threshold. And it's set to Digital to basically act as an on/off switch; a creature is either drowning or it isn't.

In a norn that's not drowning (that is, has a normal amount of Air in its system), the gain is subtracted from the nominal, and since they're both the same that's a value of 0 and thus the receptor doesn't fire. Should air drop below the threshold, it's not subtracted and the nominal value of 1 takes over, triggering the involuntary action.

In the grendel (the second gene listed), the gain's set to 0. So the nominal value is the only thing determining whether or not it's firing, and it's set to 1. So the receptor's always firing, regardless of the level of air in a grendel's system.

So that charming grendel twitch? That's what the drowning involuntary action looks like (if the grendel was underwater it'd also produce bubbles). So the twitch means grendels are always drowning. Which...isn't so charming. 

Fortunately, the drowning involuntary action is separate from the actual breathing of the creature and doesn't impact their quality of life at all, so while vanilla grendels might technically be drowning all the time they're still breathing normally so long as they're not underwater or affected by anything else that could impact their Air levels.

The CFF and beyond changed how drowning works as part of the larger cycle based around lactate and pyruvate, so grendels based on those genomes shouldn't twitch any more. Which is fine, since CFF and beyond also added a stimulus gene to make creatures scared while they're drowning, so if it worked like how it does in vanilla grendels you'd get grendels that are scared all the time. 

Suffice to say, now that I've learned what makes grendels twitch, I've decided that it's not worth reverting the changes to drowning in my standard genome, whenever I decide to start working on it. Which might be sooner rather than later; I'm a little stuck on my ettin genome at the moment, and I know I'm probably going to get a lot more use out of my grendel genome than my ettin genome.

Until the next one, folks.