I Was Today Years Old...

 So, I've been playing this game for, what, nearly 20 years now? And I just happened across the page about Blueprints on the Creatures Wiki.

"Blueprints are agents first introduced in Creatures 3 and Docking Station used to hold information on how to connect Gadgets to make Machines.... If a blueprint is put in the Creatures 3 Replicator, then it will replicate the necessary gadgets needed for making the machine."

Wait, what? Let's go to the Replicator page; maybe there's more information there.

"Another feature of the replicator is its ability to create all the required parts of your newly-designed gadgets by replicating their blueprint. To do this, create your gadget by wiring its appropriate nodes together, use the context help to open a window about any one of your nodes, and press the button next to the red one in the top right. This should create a blue rectangular object."

I had absolutely no idea you could do this. How did I miss this? All these years, I've been manually replicating stuff! It can't really be that easy, right? I opened up the test world and chucked some random gadgets together for a quick test, and sure enough, on opening the tooltip for one of the component gadgets, there was the button that I had - somehow - never noticed before. A little arrow going through a circle, right next to the red "close" button. Clicked it; out popped a blueprint.

Well, I'll be. Sure enough, when I put it in the replicator, it spat out a radio, a not gate, and a light. How did I not know about this?

Creatures 3 and Docking Station are now on Steam

I never thought I'd see this day, but Docking Station and all the breed packs are now available for free on Steam, with Creatures 3 also available for six bucks. Tell your friends!

Victory is mine!

[Originally written August 17 2020]

Once more, I did battle with Creatures 2. I clashed with it in the confines of the Windows XP virtual machine, but to no avail. 

Eventually I gave up on this, concluding that the hardware itself is simply too new to run this game (my theory is my fancy modern graphics card lacks the dedicated hardware paths that certain APIs would have used back in the day and therefore has to fall back on emulation, which causes the ever-finicky Creatures 2 to flip out). So it was on to plan B, a dedicated physical system. I dusted off an old Intel NUC and forcibly jammed Windows 7 into it, with significant help from my dad, who was thrilled by the challenge of getting this system off the ground, a process which involved tracking down various drivers and Windows patches that are no longer officially available, among other things.

After a bit of struggling, I concluded that it didn’t like the Remote Desktop. Fine. I plugged it directly into my monitor and a spare keyboard and mouse – so as not to crawl behind my desk and mess with my cables. A little more tinkering, and… voila!

Granted, the hand flickers just a little bit, and the game feels like it might be just slightly laggy (it’s hard to tell without a creature for reference), but it runs. So now I just need to set up some hardware so I can easily switch my speakers, keyboard, and mouse back and forth between the NUC and my normal computer, and do some world setup. That’s for another day, though.

Adventures in debugging

[Originally written July 7 2020]

I decided I might as well complete the Creatures triad, so I downloaded a few quality of life improvement COBs and installed Creatures 2. I decided to make sure everything was installed properly before adding any of my downloads, though, so I booted the game up and… oh.

It’s worse than the screenshot makes it look; it’s laggy and the hand flickers like crazy. That’s alright, I’m quite literally a professional; a good portion of my job is debugging video games and cajoling them into working with hardware and software they were never designed to be compatible with. Let me just…

Err… It’s fine, I can fix it. Fiddle with a few settings here, administrative privileges there…

Good heavens! Okay, let’s try a different screen resolution – 640x480’s in the compatibility tab so that should be a good starting point. 

I can’t get a screenshot that properly conveyed what it looks like because my monitor is decidedly not 640x480 but the screenshots still save as such. But it seems to be an improvement. So maybe if I just continue down that path… Nope, no dice. Back to flickering. 

Alright, one more trick up my sleeve. I'll throw it on a Windows XP VM and see what happens.

… Let’s maybe come back to this some other time.

Let's see where this goes

[Originally written June 30th 2020]

So I’ve been reading Discover Albia lately. Not just the entries but the conversations in the comments, encouraging people to blog their own Creatures worlds, and it got me to thinking. Now, I fully realize the creatures community is… a shadow of what it once was. And I’ve never blogged before. In fact I’ve never done much social media at all.

But still, I thought, maybe I should give it a shot. Even if nobody reads it, it might be entertaining to document my world. I’m about to start a brand new C3/DS world, after all – I had to uninstall and reinstall the game about six times and manually muck about with catalogue files for an hour and a half, but everything seems to be in full working order now. 

So I do want to jump in, but at the same time, I’m not sure I want to start a full-blown blog on such an odd whim. And I’m frankly too tired from work to figure out how blogging actually works at the moment, or decide whether to limit it to creatures or maybe include other gaming or even my adventures in baking – let alone come up with a name! So for now, I figure… why not just write it in Word? Maybe I’ll post it someday. Maybe it’ll just be a private journal. That’s for future me to figure out.

Right now, the Shee Ark awaits! I actually already got everything set up last night, but haven’t hatched any creatures – except the Ettins. I do want to keep Grendels so I snatched those eggs up and put them in my inventory for the time being. I’ve never cared much for Ettins though, so I’m just gonna let them do their thing.

I suppose I should start by summarizing all the world setup I’ve done – mainly the ecological adjustments and maintenance.

• I injected the Popping Pappus, Awkwood Creeper, and several Chili Pepper plants; in addition to the free-growing one in the Jungle, I’ve placed the potted ones in the Desert, Aquarium beach, the far right end of the first treehouse platform in the Norn Terrarium (or Woodland), and in the piranha pool in the Jungle (so that the dragonfly larvae have a plant to climb out of the water on).
• I’ve set up a few aquatic monitor/aquatic launcher combinations in the Aquarium. The left side has Orange Coral, Angelfish, and Handlefish, while the right side has Opal Coral and Clownfish. Both sides have seaweed, Neon Fish, Wysts, and Aquamites.
  
  
  
  
  
• I’ve set up a timer system (which resides in the rightmost airlock; hopefully nobody jettisons it) hooked up to a radio. The other end of the radio is situated in the Ettin hoard and tied into the volcano. This way it will regularly erupt and sustain the gnarlers.
  
  
  
  
  
• I added some Bramboo to the top left area of the Woodland, just because. More practically, I introduced a few ground-bound Balloon Bugs from the Desert into the pond; somehow they act as permanent fish food and sustain the Stickletrout population.
• I introduced Tubas to the Jungle and manually planted some tendrils and mushrooms in the lower levels. I also introduced some grass, just for looks.
• Tubas were also added to the Desert, and I also put some Bramboo in the upper section. Here, too, I added some mushrooms in the bottom level, and manually planted some desert grass on the top layer.
• I made a few copies of the portable empathic vendor and dropped them in the less-hospitable areas of the ship.
• Finally, I’ve set the breeding limit to 30.