The most boring colortrue creature ever

It's kind of nice knowing that the Toxic Norns are safe wherever they go. There's plenty of food even in the halls, disease is not an issue, and there are no Grendels to worry about. Of course, that doesn't mean that nobody's going to slap the Norns. Gaius continued harassing poor Foulvenom, despite my efforts to teach him not to. Even after I hauled him off to the training dummy, he would hit it, I'd slap him several times, and he'd just look at me and hit the dummy again.

Turned out, Gaius responds well to reward from the hand but not to punishment. That green spike is when I tickled him for behaving peacefully, and those small red bumps after were me slapping him multiple times for hitting the Norn. And I don't mean each little bump is a slap, I mean each little bump was three or four slaps, and he still barely felt it! No wonder he wasn't learning! Thankfully, the Biochemistry Kit has an Injection tool, so when he hit the Norn dummy again, I just gave Gaius a full dose of punishment! That seemed to do the trick!

With the unruly Geat under control, I turned my attention back to the Toxic Norns. The females gathered in the lower section of the Woodland, while the males wandered off. I eventually found them camped outside the locked Meso door. I'd declared the Meso off-limits because most of the food contains cures that can be dangerous for Toxic Norns, but it occurred to me that there was no reason I couldn't just kill hots the vendors and fill the area with toxic food, so I did that. Even so, I brought the males back to the Woodland, because you're not going to get any breeding if the sexes segregate themselves!

All around Albia

After double checking that I'd already taught Aurelia all her vocabulary, I injected my better bees and beelacanth updates into the world, and set about planting the flowers in the jungle and near the lighthouse. Then, as usual, I looked over the Observation Kit and went to tend to whoever had the lowest life force - in this case, Julia, at 30%. She was in a small cluster of Norns on the island, so I broke the group up and shuttled them over to the mainland, but scattering Norns is easier said than done. Making matters worse, at around 20% life force, she got pregnant! Thankfully, I was finally able to get her to eat something, and once she started, she scarfed down several more pieces of cheese.

Meanwhile, Verania was also pregnant and hovering at low life force, but there was nothing I could do about that, so I instead turned my attention to Eudocia, the one Norn still on the island, whose life force was now the lowest on my list. She, thankfully, didn't put up much resistance when I asked her to eat. It's amazing how some creatures are so difficult and others so easy to work with. After that, I made my rounds. Verania laid her egg in the treehouse, then took the cable car over to the windmill. Julia laid her egg in the temple at almost the same time, while Augustus looked on. Cassius played in the garden, and Secundus rode the raft back and forth underneath.

I'm a One-Woman QA Department

Things have been slow working from home lately and I finally decided I was utterly fed up with... well, pretty much everything that's wrong with Creatures 2. So with the help of Bella the Beta Norn, I set out to fix as much of it as possible, which turned out to actually be quite a lot. 

You're gonna need a bigger better boat.

I began with my archnemesis: the boats. I've previously expressed my gripes with the boats, especially the light ocean one:

"Not only do creatures constantly get stuck in it, not only are the controls located where you can't click on them when the boat is occupied, but the boat itself is completely pointless because it leads to a small, dead end patch of island with no food on it."

I initially "solved" this problem by just deleting the boat, but did not release a COB for it because the hard part would be re-creating the boat. I started work on that, and then I figured, the dark ocean boat isn't so bad but it's still an annoyance, so I should go ahead and fix that too. So at that point, why settle for just deleting the light ocean boat? If I'm replacing the dark ocean boat, I might as well replace the other one too.

The scriptorium makes the event scripts for any official object trivial to obtain, but with COBs like this, the hard part is always in restoring the original object as part of the COB removal script - while event scripts are easy to rip from the game, the injection/creation script is generally a mystery, and that's where a lot of important values are set: initial values for object variables, attr and bhvr values, and various physics traits. With complex objects like the boats, you need to create the parts in the correct order, too.

The Last Children

In my last post I mentioned that the C2 Norns produced seven new hatchlings, so I'd split the genetic analysis off to a separate post. And here it is!

The first two hatchlings were from the Mernorns. This makes four, and all of them are male, so for the next generation, I'll have to introduce a new female. First up was Vragi! He has seven pigment mutations and one pigment bleed mutation but all are invisible.

He has a minor brain lobe mutation that I expect won't affect him at all; his decision lobe rest state is 81 instead of 80. He also has a stimulus mutation that makes falling through the air a little scarier for him, but given that he'll live underwater, that shouldn't be a problem!

His brother, Halfdan, may look similar right now, but I expect that to change! He inherited the male pigment bleed gene on both slots, although one has mutated to kick in at childhood instead of birth. He also has several pigment mutations, of which four actually changed pigment values, albeit only from 128 to 129. This may explain why he looks ever so slightly different from Vragi already. Aside from these, he has only one mutation, changing an output value in a stimulus from 0 to 1 - but that slot has <NONE> for the chemical, so it doesn't matter.

Continuing the green parade, Baldur is the spitting image of his mother, Gunhild! He inherited none of Bjorn's looks. He has eight mutations. One of them is a half-life mutation for an unused chemical, and one is an instinct mutation that changes the cell number for one of the unused lobes, so no big deal. There's also a small change in the gain value for the crowdedness receptor, which shouldn't have much effect in practice. And he has a small lobe mutation: a relax susceptibility value changed from 0 to 1, which I'm not even sure has a measurable effect given that the slider in the genetics kit will only jump to multiples of 8. At any rate, the associated susceptibility rule is undefined so it probably wouldn't do anything anyway.

The End is Nigh

The very first thing I did on re-entering C2 was to banish that freaking boat. There's a tool at The Shee's Lost Knowledge that can identify classifier numbers, but rather than install that, I just used the script directly in the C2 CAOS tool. Once I'd identified the boat, I simply ran enum 3 6 1 kill targ next. I will eventually make a COB for this, but the hard part of this will be to make it re-create the boat on COB removal, and I frankly couldn't be bothered with that today.

Though I spent this session just playing with Norns, believe you me, I am definitely putting together a to-do list, because there is a lot wrong with this game. Speaking as a professional game performance tester: Creatures 2 should never have released in the state it was in. Even with all the haphazard patches released after launch, it's still buggy as all get out, and should have remained in development for another year or two. But it didn't, so for now I just have to deal.

One of the biggest issues, and the one that might be beyond my ability to fix on my own, is that the creatures are constantly tired. I haven't yet confirmed my theory that most of the food items are busted and that's the cause of their issues with eating, but the sleep problem is almost certainly a genome issue. This didn't stop them from producing seven hatchlings, though! I'll split the genetic analysis into a separate post.