Monthly Update

I think I'll make these monthly update posts a semi-permanent thing. Anyway, last month I said I was going to go in a "new direction" with my blog. I was aiming for a Caos tutorials direction, but made very little progress on them. I did finish some projects though! Admittedly, it's mostly because the CCSF looks like it's going to happen this year. The Sound Emitter and giant list of agents are only two of the projects. Another one, the Hoverdoc Lite, is waiting for the CCSF. (If you've seen the green and blue/pink thing floating over my norn's heads, that's the Hoverdoc Lite.) I'm also a few steps away from completing version 2 of my Stinger Norns. So they might, finally, be finished and post before the end of the year.

Besides for finishing some old projects, I've also been toying around with a few others. The biggest of one is a newer version of the weather generator. I do have more details about that, but I'll save that for next week when I actually have something coded. Another project is something I've been working on for a while, autonamers that give out names based on all of the Elder Scrolls races. There are a few Protective Tub replacers for Elder Scrolls races, but I decided to make my own autonamers for them. This also includes Orc names that actually work like real Orc names. So females pass on their first name to their female children. And that's pretty much it for projects and what's going on in-game. The only non-testing world I have is a wolfling run I threw together a few days ago.

Besides being carnivorous, the genome is fairly boring. I just wanted a new genome to throw in a wolfling run.

A new direction for the Ray

Regular updates to the ray stopped a while ago and it's likely going to stay that way. I have various reasons for it but the main one is that documenting nurture worlds has become more of a chore then fun. So I'm not going to do that. Instead I'll likely switch to writing about wolfling runs or Caos projects. I've been meaning to write about Caos here most of the year and now is a good time to do so. I'm itching to start a new project or two and my current ones are some where close to being done. I'm pretty sure I said that my projects were nearly done earlier this year though. So maybe take that with a grain of salt.

Besides messing around with Caos, the only other Creatures-related thing I've been doing is reorganizing folders. Exciting stuff, I know! It's only beaten by the excitement and fun of reinstalling C3/DS and tracking down various agents. My old install was a couple of years old and was bloated by agents and sprite breeds I never used anymore. So I decided to just backup the old one and start fresh. It's surprisingly renewed my interest in it. Or maybe that's just the world-eating butterflies I've been playing with.

Yet another update

I don't have a nurture post today. I've been feeling terrible since this weekend and haven't gotten around to playing the nurture world yet. Even before that I was absorbed in some Caos coding and didn't play in the world. There's also been an update to the OLS ark, one that fixes the shivering. So I also need to create a new world for the norns. I might have something on Friday, but don't count on it. Instead of a nurture post, here's an update on some projects.

Look away, it's a spoiler!

Firstly, the new version of the Stinger Norns is done... well I'm done working on them. My interest in them has been nonexistent for a while. The base genomes haven been done for months, but work on the sub-breeds has been slow. I even thought it was my interest in genetics as a whole that was gone. Turns out that isn't the case, it's just the Stinger Norns. So they'll be release around their fourth anniversary sometime in late July. I do have something, hopefully, interesting planned for their anniversary. I won't be saying more then that because spoilers.

Secondly, the caos projects. The Simpler Hoverdoc/Hoverdoc Lite is almost finished. The main part of it is done but I keep finding things I want to change. Another caos project of mine is a monogamy script I wrote for a user on Creatures Caves. It's in a pretty stable state at the moment. I have a few ideas on improvements to it. So it'll likely have one last update to it before I upload it on CCaves. Lastly, there's two agents from last year I'm finally getting around to finishing. I'm not spoiling what they are. There's also a mystery agent but, guess what, I'm not spoiling it.

Lastly, the blog is likely going to be updated randomly once the current nurture world is over. Instead of the regular Wednesday posts, it will be updated whenever I have something to post. The main reason is that I don't have a blog world setup yet. I'm also getting tired of writing about DS. So what ever world I end up writing about won't be a DS world. There's a few interesting C3 agents that I've never tried out. Maybe it's finally time to give C3 standalone a try.

Small update

Whoops. I never actually edited and posted last week's post, did I? A friend was in town for the week. Add in some wonderful allergies and the blog was the last thing on my mind for a while. I'm still not feeling great and I'm rather distracted at the moment. So the next 2017 genome post will be going up Friday instead of Wednesday.

I suppose I could give an update for a few other things as well. I've occasionally been messing around with Caos teardowns and a weird wolfling run setup. The Caos teardowns will probably start going up sometime later this month. I've decided to start with my many buttons of Caos, which are literally just buttons that run small chunks of code. Some of those buttons were used while testing an agent, and those buttons will lead into actual agent teardowns. Eventually, I'll get around to tearing apart my current project, the Simpler Hoverdoc/Hoverdoc Lite. That will be an... interesting thing to write about.

As for my wolfling run setup, I don't have much to say bout it. I could explain how it works or even what has gone into it. That would ruin the surprise though. So here's a few random screenshots from it that don't show anything too spoilery.

The blog is alive!

I didn't have a fitting picture, so here's SimEarth instead.

The Creatures blogosphere is somewhat dead at the moment, so let's see if I can change that by posting. Starting next week I'll have a regular Wednesday post for at least a month. Most of the posts are going to be about a nurture world I started while taking a break from my seemingly endless Stinger Norn tests. I've also been considering branching out into writing about other Creaturey things like ripping apart some of my cos files or documenting my ever constant struggles with genetics. So there might be a few random posts here or there.

The blog itself has also been updated somewhat. I finally tweaked the Mobula Ray's layout a bit and gave it a new background. There's also two new pages for my downloads and a links page. The downloads page is slightly out of date, and the links page is completely empty for now. (Both will be updated eventually.) I've also redone some of the tags since a few posts didn't have tags and I figured why not.

I suppose I should post an update about my projects I wrote about during the CCSF as well. The Simpler Hoverdoc is basically finished and, hopefully, bug-free. I ended up with two versions of it: one that follows the currently selected norn and one that you can attach to multiple norns. In my own play-testing I've found that I use both of them for different things. The first one is good for wolfling runs or worlds with autotab in them. The second one is good when I want to monitor more then one norn in any sort of world. It's currently waiting on me to get un-lazy and send it to a few people for some final testing.

The other major projects from that CCSF post were two genomes, a swimming ettin breed and an update to the Stinger Norns. I worked on the ettin breed a bit but forgot to write down what changes each of the different versions had. So it's on the back burner until I get bored enough to sort through the different version. Meanwhile the Stinger Norn update is going.. very, very slowly. The base genomes have been finished for months now, but I've run into some trouble with the first sub-breed I tried making. I'll save that for another post though.

For now I'll end this update by saying that I started a Mobula Ray Tumblr thing months and months ago. I have no idea why I created it, but it's become the occasional dumping spot for large screenshots that didn't end up on the blog or other random Creatures pictures. And that's pretty much it.

Whoops

I'd like to blame the Starbound 1.0 update and Skyrim for the gap in posting. I've been playing Creatures a bit, if tinkering with caos and splicing norns counts as playing. I just haven't been in the mood to document anything. I did leave a certain grendel world in the middle of a generation though, and those posts will be going up every Wednesday until I run out of them. There aren't that many left, which brings me to my next point...

This blog is probably going to be random for a while. I have one thing I'd like to write about, but it still needs a lot of work. So I'm just going to write about what ever random thing I'm doing in the games at the time or some weird things I've done in the past few months. I'll save all of that for the actual posts though. For now I'll just leave a screenshot from my Skyrim game bugging out. I didn't install a texture pack properly and got this lovely image:

Everything was missing a texture!

Random updates

I was on a roll with the blog posts, and then it fell off a cliff. So let's see if I can't write a few posts and maybe avoid a month long gap. It's also a good excuse to shake off the rust and to show off what ever little progress I've made.

The wolfling run I'm doing for the CCSF is safely nearing it's end. I'v decided to end it when they hit gen 600, and that isn't to far away. The Norns in it are probably dumb as rocks, but the original Norns weren't spectacularly smart either. They also had a weird stimulus mutation where they would get antigen 7 when hit by another Norn. All of the Norns had dead muscles and were limping everywhere. So I decided to fix the mutation and the fixed genome in to the vast backlog of eggs. Maybe it will work, though I have my doubts.

Speaking of which, the genome I've been working on for the CCSF might not be done in time. I wanted it to be CFF, so I decided to convert the Banshees to CFF. I successfully convert it once, only to realize I had saved over the Grendel with another Norn genome somehow. After reconverting them a second time, someone posted a CFF Banshee the same day. I decided to keep working on my conversion though, and I'm morphing it into what I want. Hopefully I get it done in time for the CCSF.

I will have a stupidly complex toy for the CCSF though. I found a clock sprite while digging around in C2's sprite folder a while ago and decided to make a toy out of it. And so I did. It has two states, broken and working. When it's hit, it's considered broken and won't loop the animation. So in the very least, I will have a toy agent and a pack of dumb Norns for the adoption sampler.

An Update

Just a small update on the blog. I've decided on a blog post schedule that I'll try to stick to this time. A new post will be out every Tuesday and Thursday. There might also be a Wednesday post called Wolfling Wednesday. I'm thinking it will be a one-time post about a specific run and what happens in it. If it is a long wolfling run, then I'll obviously post about it more then once.

Also, I've reinstalled my game. Before I did, I had to scroll through many, many pages of agents to find the one I wanted. I'm also hoping I fixed the random crashing when eggs hatched. So all of my old worlds are gone. This didn't hurt the CreatureLink world at all, since the Norns in there have long since died of old age.

Pardon the dust?

I've always been terrible at keeping up with writing, and this blog will probably be forgotten about from time to time. So pardon the dust as I try to figure out what I want to do with this blog. I sadly lost the migration world I was going to do. I think I accidentally deleted it when I was cleaning out my worlds. I don't keep more then four worlds usually, and the old migration world probably got caught up in that.

So instead of that world, I'll probably be writing about what ever world I'm running at the time, or some experiments I'm messing around with. Currently it's my longest feral run ever, and maybe future CCSF submission. It's currently up to the 320th gen and not much has changed in it for the past 50 or so generations. The only exciting thing happening is a killer Grendel that helps the generations move a little faster by killing Norns. To be fair, there's almost always 20+ extra eggs just laying around.