Of Edits and Improvements of my Work

As of this typing, there's an ongoing discussion on Creatures Caves about rehosting and updating addons created by people who are no longer a part of the Creatures Community. I haven't added my two cents to it myself, largely because I feel I have nothing to add. This bit pretty much says everything I would have:

"I say we fix/patch/reupload everything first and ask forgiveness later if they ever bother to file a complaint. It’s not like this is being done maliciously after all. We’re not trying to take credit from the creators, but if we stand by and do nothing, tip-toeing around antiquated modding distribution policies, we only stand to lose more and more content to an already damaged and emaciated community."

However, it has got me thinking about my policies about my own work. My sharing policies are listed on my main downloads page, and I don't intent on changing them anytime soon. It ensures all my work is found in one, easy-to-find place. 

But what about edits and fixes? My policy says nothing about those. 

In the past I might have been a little possessive over it. However, nowadays I just don't see the point. All this stuff is for a game made by somebody else, and a fair chunk of it's based on somebody else's work as it is. Furthermore, I learn best when I rip apart things somebody else made and figure out how they did this, that, and the other thing. Finally, it's not like I have the enthusiasm nowadays to go back and fix any outstanding issues that might exist in my work. 

So my policy on editing my creations is thus: Go nuts.

Want to make my metarooms TWB/TCB friendly? Go for it. Find a game-breaking bug in one of my agents? Patch it up. Dive into my genomes and see what makes them tick; improve them if you so desire. Heck, feel free to share these improvements with the community. All I ask is that you credit me for the original work (and don't use my work to create something offensive, intentionally hurtful, etc.).

However, I should note that the artwork for much of my agents and metarooms was created by somebody else (Mea for the most part). Before you start editing the artwork I'd suggest contacting the creators of said artwork to see if it's okay. 

That is all for now. Until the next one, folks.

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!