These Parts of the CC Need Activity

After a wonderful bout of activity courtesy of Survivor and a couple of wolfling runs, the CC has hit yet another period of silence. If I had to take a guess, this is mostly due to the winter holiday period ending and people returning to their usual work/school/what-have-you schedules. It's a boring silence, as silences tend to be, but I don't think there's much that can be done about it apart from waiting.

That said, there are parts of the CC that have been silent a long while before this current one, and so I decided to blog about these parts and see if I can help snag them the activity that they really need.

First order of business: the Creatures Wiki. We all know about it - it's probably the prime hub of knowledge as far as the community is concerned. However, it's in need of a little help - no one's been actively keeping it up-to-date for a while (most likely due to the fact that there was talk of a move that never went anywhere). So, the place needs curators. I'm planning on doing my part soon, starting with the pages for my own stuff, but there's no way I'm going to be able to update the whole wiki myself. For anyone else who's interested, here's what I think we need:

• Cleaning up the older pages. There are some dead projects that had a wild history and therefore deserve pages, but there are other projects that have but a few lines dedicated to them on their pages. I think the latter should have their pages axed and their contents moved to the "Development Ideas" page. This category also includes going through the older pages and updating them with things like new versions, spelling and grammar corrections, rewriting the pages so that they're more informative and seem less like advertisements (a lot of pages seem to have this problem...), etc. 
• Adding new pages for the things that don't have them. This includes a lot of my own work (which I'll get to adding myself at some point), but I can think of other things that deserve to have a page, but don't have one.

That's pretty much all I can think of; perhaps other people can think of a longer checklist?

Second thing: The Creatures Repository. It has 2000+ creatures, but recently it's been suffering from a lack of uploads. The only person who's been actively uploading creatures in recent history is Ylukyun. No doubt the recently improved CCaves Download section is giving it some competition, but that doesn't mean that the place has to be shafted. It's just as viable an adoption center as any place, and submitting a few creatures is easy.

The final place that I can think of that could use some activity is the Garden Box forums. The Garden Box is quite possibly one of the greatest agents ever made, but there has been an extreme lack of drive to get anything made for it, and all in all it hasn't been making the splash that it should have been (the fact that it didn't get a spot on Ghosthande's C3/DS Must-Haves isn't helping matters). It's not so much that there's a lack of people using it; there's a lack of people making agents that work with it (even Amai hasn't been doing anything with it as of late). We either need more developers making stuff for it, or increased awareness of it so that the developers can get the motivation they need to make stuff for it.

All three of these websites can be found in the Links section, but I'll also link to them here:
Creatures Wiki
The Creature Repository
Garden Box Forums

Let's give these websites some more love; they certainly need it!

C3/DS Downloads Page Now Up

As the title says - I've finally finished formatting the C3/DS Downloads page and you can now access it. It looks quite a bit different from the C1 page (and C2 page if you actually count that) thanks to the fact that most of my work was made for C3/DS (and considering how many things I've made...yeah). I'm pretty sure I've gotten everything I've released on the blog onto the download pages, but if I'm missing something please let me know.

As of this typing, this is the shortest blog post I've written so far. Nothing special - I just thought you'd like to know. :P

Edit: Oh yes, I forgot to mention that I've disabled comments on the Download pages. This is just to make them look more professional rather than to shut anyone down. If a download link gets borked, just post here, message me on CCaves, or e-mail me.

Blog Revamp

After reading the responses to my last post, I decided that the blog was in need of a slight makeover, and so I gave it a redesign.

First thing - I've changed the theme almost entirely. Hopefully the new color scheme will make things a little easier to read. I also applied some more CSS effects. Finally, I've also changed the banner (although I'm probably going to update it later since the text is a bit hard to read).

More notably, I've added download pages! The C1 Grendel Breeds that were originally found at the CCSF 2007 site and the topic at Creatures Caves can be found under the appropriate page. The C2 Downloads page just links to the section at CU7 where my C2 breeds are hosted - if I ever start developing for C2 again I'll update it.

Now, you're probably wondering where the C3/DS Downloads are. Well, I've made a lot of stuff for C3/DS. A lot. The sheer amount of all of it would just make it difficult to host it all here. I'm still deciding what to do about it, but it'll be up in due time.

Comments would be appreciated - I'm still seeking suggestions for improvement, after all. 

The Current State of Things + Blog Improvements?

I should be making another post about Ark World, but nothing much has happened since the last time I posted about it. The population is still doing nothing but munching on carrots, no one has moved from the spots where my last post left them, and no one seems to be interested in breeding.

So instead, I want comments about the blog. I recently was told that the current color scheme (specifically, the black text on a dark gray background) was somewhat difficult to read. Is anyone else having problems reading the blog, or is this a one-off?

As well, I'm also wondering what everyone thinks of this blog thus far. If you have any suggestions, comments, etc. about how to make this place look nicer, be more easily accessible, etc. I am treating this place like a bona-fide website, after all - I'd like to make it the best it could possibly be.

Besides that, I also have a few projects planned. The first and biggest of them is yet another collab with Mea - The Sea Garden, which is a pack of aquatic lifeforms that should hopefully help alleviate the lack of standalone aquatic plants and critters (in case you're reading this Mea, it's okay to leave the images for that up at your blog - this isn't supposed to be a secret or anything P=).

Speaking of aquatic plants and critters, I'm also planning on completely revamping the fish + anemone from the Biodome Pack if that's alright with everyone who worked on the pack. The anemones are classified as "critter" and their spores as "animal egg" when they should be classified as "plant" and their spores as "seed" (prevents carnivorous creatures from trying to eat the anemone and getting turned off as a result, and the spores can be a valuable source of starch). Most of the fish are also in dire need of a recode (I have no idea what went wrong with them, considering the cod/mackerel in Devil's Reef use similar coding and they work perfectly fine), and the one fish who isn't also can't be eaten, which is again a bad idea from a design standpoint.

The final future project is yet another breed update - the Sea Monsters V2. For those of you unfamiliar with the breed, V1 was the first breed I ever publicly released (although they didn't receive much fanfare considering they were put up for download at Alien's Norn Adoption Center). They were amphibious grendels who were generally friendly unless slapped, crawled around on all fours, and ate critters instead of food. V1.4 was the result of my thinking the originals were badly done, and updated them to use less third-party sprites and to only lay eggs underwater. Since I was never happy with that version, a proper V2 is in order. I have no idea what I'm going to do for them besides the features in the original versions; however, with any luck they should be released sometime before the Sea Garden is.

Yay, another wall of text without pictures. P=