A Minor Update

I haven't been playing Creatures much as of late, between work being absolutely hectic and being eyeball-deep in modding Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. But this morning, being too exhausted from the chaos of my job this week to continue more mentally taxing work, I decided to settle in for a relaxing little round of Creatures 2. 

Nothing particularly wild happened, which is good, because I needed the break. That said, once I get my energy back, I'll be vanishing back into WOTR for a while.

Bjorn wandered in the swamp, Sigurd hung out in the desert, and Magni lazed about in the incubator room. Inga's age was showing, but didn't darken her spirit, and aside from occasionally getting stuck on the airlock door, mostly took care of herself.

I focused on getting Sigurd into a better location, as the desert is not friendly to Norns, and he was quite hungry. I lured him over to the calendar tree, where he made friends with the Grendel. 

I had a brief scare when the Observation Kit reported Magni and Bjorn as sick, but it turned out they'd just eaten some badplants. At some point, Bjorn went up the lift and across the glass walkway, so I activated the teleporter and sent him elsewhere. Ultimately, he ended up joining Sigurd by the calendar tree.

At this point, everyone is well over six hours old, and I suppose Mernorns must age faster than their land dwelling counterparts, because nobody else is going gray yet. They've got quite a bit of time left in them, yet!

Grand Botanical Overhaul I: Cacti

I've recently begun my most ambitious project yet: the Grand Botanical Overhaul for Creatures 2. The plan here is to do something similar to my Creatures 1 Herb Update, to improve consistency in plant behaviors and streamline their use for creatures, while also including some quality of life improvements for the player. This includes:

• Including launchers for the plants that don't have them
• Making sure the main plants (pear, triffid, trumpet, aubergine, tomato, and acorn) have proper life cycles including plants, fruits, seeds, and detritus. This includes fixing any bugs in their life cycle.
• Ensuring that anything inedible is invisible - both plants that are naturally inedible and plants that simply aren't ready to eat yet.
• Implementing behavior similar to my updated C1 Herbs: creatures eat directly off the plant, hand pushes plant to pluck the fruit.
• Reclassifying harmful members of edible classes into badplants.

As I go through this process, I'm thoroughly analyzing the code for each plant, so this will be a series of in-depth looks at the CAOS involved. I will be going into the changes I've made, but won't put anything up for download until the project is finished. I'm beginning with the cacti - technically badplants, but still in need of some fixes.

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.