Hello, Robotto

A couple of days ago, I updated the wiki page for the metaroom Terra Reborn to add a screenshot and note issues I found with it, as I've done for some other rooms. Unfortunately, it had enough problems that I didn't really want to use it as-is, which is a shame, because it's a lovely room. I could critique the pond (it's a bit too small and barren to do much with), but the background is a nice edit of C1/C2 images, it has a warm, homey feeling to it, and it comes with lots of food sources. The locking door might be useful in some worlds, too.

So I cracked it open with Revelation and did my best to fix it.

I was originally thinking of trying to make a separate patch file, but I found that the problems I had started from the filenames - both the Shee Pears and the Terra Reborn pear plants use the same 'pear' filename, and it looks like someone else had a similar issue with the goldfish. This meant that when the injection script tried to add the pear plants to my game, it didn't find enough images in the file because it was looking at the wrong 'pear' file. I figure people who haven't been active in the CC for 10+ years are probably not going to be too upset about a direct patch to a mod they made 20 years ago, but if I'm wrong, any of the original authors are free to contact me.

Anyway, in short, I also:

• Added CA links and a new favorite places icon


• Removed bad stims and chemical additions and added more possible behaviors to some objects in line with CDS suggestions - I think I got all of them, but let me know if I missed something. I found a script through the wiki that checks behaviors and such automatically, but I couldn't get it to work for some reason


• Fixed the second banana plant never fruiting and the spikotous being unable to progress in its lifecycle


• Tweaked the platform on the lower left so creatures can't walk off of it - you will still need to add an Elevine or something to get them up there, though


• Made the potions into infinite-use water potions, as the original gave a strange mixture of life, tiredness/sleepiness reduction, and protein


• Lowered almost all of the tick script numbers down from 1 to at least 10 - probably could've lowered some of them further, but I didn't want to risk messing up their timer scripts or have to poke through them more than I already did, and it's an improvement

Available for download at CCaves

I did find in testing that creatures tend to heavily cluster on the top level. I don't think this is a problem with the lifts; I confirmed that creatures can push the lifts when cajoled and found the same behavior when I replaced them with Elevines. That area has the most food, so perhaps that attracts them?

Feel free to let me know if there's something else I missed (or may have inadvertently added)!

I don't have a link for this – to the best of my memory, it was on the long-lost Gameware forums – but I seem to remember someone once asking: hey, Japan loves virtual pets like Tamagotchi, why not release it over there? And an employee replied, well, we did release the first one there, but we got in legal trouble with Creatures Inc (one of the companies involved with Pokemon), which was a pain, and anyway it didn't sell well once we did release it.

I remembered this recently when I noticed that ligfx had added some info to the charset.dta page on the wiki about the Japanese version of the Creatures 1 font, which made me curious about this Japanese version that apparently did exist.

But I had a heck of time tracking it down, until I had the idea to search the wiki again and found an old software release database page that had the name. It turned out that the reason I had such difficulty finding it was that I was taking the term 'Creatures' and adding keywords like 'norn' to narrow down results. But for some reason, in the Japanese version, 'norn' was turned into 'norm'! I'm not sure why that is, as the Japanese word for norns – as in the mythological creatures – is a simple transcription that sounds similar. 'Norm' in Japanese is a homophone for 'gnome', so maybe they were trying to evoke that to make them sound cuter or more familiar?

After that, I was able to find some auction and secondhand store pictures, but that was about it. If there were ever any Japanese fans, I couldn't find any trace of them on the modern web. And it doesn't seem terribly likely that there will be many more in the future; both the GOG and Steam releases of the Albian Years are listed as only being in English. (Does that mean the German fans are also out of luck?)

Here is the front of the box that I found:

Translation: Raising simulation - Creatures: The World of Norms

And the back:

Translation: Computer raising simulation software
Creatures: The World of Norms
The world's first virtual pets using artificial life are here!
Character:
The only virtual pet in the world with individual personalities
Because each and every "Norm" has different genetics, their personalities and habits are different. Let's think about an individual norm's character to teach and raise it well.
Learning:
They learn words, too
Norms have the ability to learn language, so if they are told the same word over and over from infancy, they can remember the names of things like objects, their owner, and even other norms.
World of "Norms":
Exchange norms with your friends via e-mail
Using email or floppies, you can exchange norms with other users. Or you can arrange 'international marriages' for your norms or put them up for adoption.
Born:
They have children
When norms grow up, they fall in love, lay eggs, and raise children. The newborn norms carry on the personalities and traits of their parents and form their own original personalities.

One thing I am very curious about is how the language aspect of the game was handled. Translating things from one language to another can be tricky for many reasons – for instance, in English we don't conjugate words based on gender of the speaker or target, but some languages do. (Actually, if anyone knows if issues like this cropped up in the Dutch/German/Italian/etc versions and how they were handled, I'd be interested to know!) An aspect that I could see being a potential problem is that Japanese typically uses verbs at the end of the sentence. Instead of saying 'Norn push food', you would usually say 'Norn food push'. I wonder if they re-arranged grammar in the Japanese version or not?

The one language-related thing I could see – as mentioned on the charset page and barely visible in one of the screenshots on the box – is that the norns apparently speak in katakana in Japanese. Japanese has two syllabic writing systems, hiragana and katakana. Even if you know zero Japanese, if I write the same phrase in both syllabaries, the visual difference is pretty obvious:
のーむたちのせかい
ノームタチノセカイ
Hiragana is on top; it's rounder and, well, cuter. Katakana is on the bottom; it's sharper. In fact, the dialogue for robot characters is sometimes written in katakana to give it a more mechanical feel. So it's a bit curious to me that they used katakana for creature dialogue, instead of the friendlier, childish hiragana. I wonder if either they wanted to emphasize the 'alienness' of the creatures, or if katakana was simply easier to read at the small font size required?

Anyway, this was all I could dig up. If anyone has more information, please let me know!

EDIT: I also found the archived version of the C1 Japan site, although there's nothing particularly interesting on there; some of the links go to the English version, and the archives show 404 errors by 2000. It looks like it may not have even been updated after the release.

I went poking the C2 scriptorium scripts for plants today, in order to update the wiki pages, and I found out some interesting things that are not quite in line with the official ecology info. For example:

• The potatoes, carrots, and puffballs have unlisted 'ideal' ranges for inorganic nutrients; they will still grow in their 'tolerable' ranges, but have a 50/50 chance of dying.


• Triffids are the only plant whose seeds will get their own individual growable inorganic nutrient ranges within their general range.


• Gelsemium flowers decay to give 10 organic nutrients to the soil... but only if the inorganic nutrients level is not exactly 200. (I wonder if this is leftover from some idea for propagating the plant?)

On the one hand, this kind of stuff is cool; the devs clearly put a lot of thought into the ecology, even if it isn't quite as complete as one might like it to be. And having marginal vs dependable ranges for plants is certainly realistic. On the other hand, it's hair-tearingly frustrating, because none of this info is ever presented to the player. Nowhere in the game help documents does it tell you anything beyond 'some plants grow in different conditions'. These more complex ranges are not even in the official out-of-game ecology docs!

This is bad game design. Yes, it's a game marketed to children, and from the age when it was a lot more acceptable to offload information into manuals and web pages than it is now, but this stuff is so buried that even the most hardcore player can't find this out without literally digging through the code. (Well, now you can find it on the wiki, at least.) Even the basics of what the different berries do isn't obvious in the game, despite them having different medicinal effects.

While I was figuring this out, it started me musing about the double-edged sword that complexity is in general in simulation. On the one hand, the world is complex, and simulation necessarily simplifies, and not always in easy and obvious ways (do not get me started on programming diploid genetics). On the other hand, simplification also calls into question the validity and applicability of the simulation, in cases where one is hoping to make real-world inferences and not just play a game.

On the other other hand, complexity can also massively increase programming time and make a simulation harder to understand and analyze - and it's easier to balance an ecosystem with a few independent plants than one with multiple organisms feeding off of each other, as I've seen in other aLife-y games I've played with. And more complexity actually doesn't always equal more fidelity. Sometimes simple rules can produce amazingly complex emergent behavior. Basic cellular automata - similar to Conway's Game of Life, though not necessarily with the same rules - have had biological research applications. You can use a spreadsheet to replicate beautiful seashell patterns.

One of the things I love about C2 is the ecosystem, especially since it just seems less broken than the one that ships with C3. But it's hard not to wonder - does this add anything to the game? Couldn't whoever was coding these plants have spent the time giving the walking vine something to do other than exist instead? At the least, these details should have been in some document somewhere that could be released to the advanced players like the other intended ecosystem details.

To be clear, 'does this add anything to the game?' is not meant as a rhetorical question, even though it probably sounds like one. It's a question I ask myself when I am thinking of adding a new feature to my own work, though I am working with scientific simulation instead of a commercial game (and am a lone dev on it). What does this feature actually meaningfully do? Does this add real depth in a way that brings my simulation closer to its goals instead of being an interesting fiddly knob that doesn't mean anything or a distraction from something else? How do I justify the settings I use for it? What real-world data can I base those settings on? People can and have questioned my simulation's settings and assumptions - at least Creatures, being a game, can get away with everything being aliens and for fun :)

Why do you like Creatures? If your interest in it has come and gone and come again, what brings you back? Despite how hard it can be to run on modern machines and the total lack of official support now, why do you play?

(DS and C1 work perfectly for me on Windows 10, and C2, while not completely functional on my main laptop, works almost 100% on my old one, so access is not a huge issue for me at the moment. I think there is one or two official tools that don't work, and Nornpose can't run on W10, but that's about it so far.)

For me, the appeal of Creatures is the appeal of alife: of seeing something new and wondering what it can say about the things we see in the real world, or could in an alternate world.

Creatures is alife that has nice graphics. Creatures is alife with complexity - social interaction and learning and genetics and biochemistry and neural net. Creatures is alife I can take apart. Creatures is alife that I have access to.

(There are more than few fascinating-sounding alife programs out there that aren't freely available, but which you can only read about in the author's papers.)

(The scientific part of me is also fascinated by how people interact with and get attached to and emotionally driven by Creatures and virtual life critters, but that's a topic for another day.)

On an emotional level, I love the community and the creative things it's kept coming up with even more than a decade after the last game had an update - like the Garden Box and Magic Words and the recent work on new C2 genomes and CreatureLink and really, I could go on. There's an active and helpful wiki, forums that are rather slower than the heyday but still full of people, and generally everyone is quite friendly.

And the creatures. Even now, I still get attached to one occasionally, and feel compelled to help them out when they're in trouble (when it's not my fault). They're frustrating, but they're lovable.

My interests wax and wane - don't most people experience this? But some things I leave behind and never come back to. Creatures has yet to be one of those things. It may happen someday; but even now, even when I don't play it much, it keeps popping into my head. It helped inspire me to do a senior project at college, which got me into graduate school - and now an extension of that program is the core of my research project.

So.

Thanks, Creatures. Thanks, CC. Thanks, Steve Grand. I'm glad I threw my sanity into the skull-shaped basket with you all (if anyone still gets that joke).

Do you create content for Creatures? If so, what sorts? What do you use to make things, and what would you like to make in the future? If not, what would you like to make if you could?

I primarily make agents for C3DS, though I've tried out gengineering before and have branched out to the other games for my CCSF submissions. Also, I made a metaroom once! I also edit the wiki sometimes, if that counts.

Art is done in Photoshop, though I tend to use freely-available sprites when I can. Everything else is the usual set of official tools and Bobcob and so on. One thing I use sometimes that I'm not sure is popular is the CAOS debugging tool - who else uses it? It's not mentioned in tutorials and so on that I remember, but it's quite useful for more complex agents, especially if (like me) you're used to using print statements for debugging.

I have a whole list of things I'd like to make in the future, including a second list just for C2 annoyances that I would like to fix. Other than that...
C1: [stuff related to my main CCSF submission] and making the hummingbirds do more.
C2: More plants, and maybe more critters for creatures to eat. A teardown of the evolving pidgeons. Colortrue C2 creatures, if that would work.
C3DS: The second version of Desert Ruins, with ecology fixes/new plants/a new feature for the beetle/sound effects/music/etc. A metaroom with a Japanese theme. A snowflake patch 'plant'. An annoyance fix for the DS injection screen. My own version of the corpse cleaner. Doing something with some of the incomplete sprites you can find in the image folder. I also have this written in my list but I'm not sure what it is anymore! "magic words drop food? drop things in general?" What?
Misc: I have a folder in my bookmarks for wiki pages I want to add or expand (usually creators whose works aren't fully up).

I'm not going to run out of projects for a while.

How has the way you play Creatures changed since you started? What has stayed the same? Do you play a different game more, have you picked up a different play style, have you thrown out one species and embraced another?
For a long time, I played C3DS almost exclusively. It's still the one I play the most, but now I spend more time with C2; the ecology and graphics of that game are my favorite. C1 I play on and off, but I think at about the same level as I have since I've owned it.

When I was a kid, I used to be a lot more into nurturing-style play, and one way I would do so is that I would use the selective force field to keep babies, and usually children, in the incubator pan area, so I could teach them and keep an eye on them. I would usually put an older norn in with them, too. I've been thinking of trying something like this again, actually, although with something a bit more norn-friendly than the force field. Nowadays I also do more wolfling and feral runs than I used to. Also, I always used to install the Norngarden; I've had problems with plants from there dying out, and the pond kills creatures, and there's a larger variety of rooms available now, so I only use it sometimes.

I only cared about norns as a kid, and even now, I don't care that much about grendels. I do make my worlds grendel-friendly in C1 and make sure they have food and toys, but for C2 I still remove the grendel mother most of the time (the default sprites for them are bad and they die so young) and disable it in C3DS. Like I mentioned yesterday, I did try to do a grendel wolfling run, but it didn't work out that well.

I do have a newfound love of ettins, however. Their big eyes and round bodies are just so cute! Plus, they have some nice breeds - it's a real pity that the snail ettins don't work better, because they're great, but the striped ettins in C2 and C3DS, the pegasus ettins of C2, the rain and cheese and poodle ettins for C3DS... there are options, which I like.

Geats weren't really a thing beyond Gaia and the C1 Shee when I was a kid. I've now tried out a couple of Geat breeds and I think they have their own charm, though they're quite different from each other.

Also, now that I can code, using CAOS - even just to make quick little scripts - is like part of the gameplay for me. CAOS is actually my second favorite of the programming languages I've learned (the first being Python) - yes, it has some annoying features, like not being able to name your variables, but the logic of how it works just clicks with my brain, and it doesn't, for example, have the curly braces of Java, the confusing points (and curly braces) of C++, or the strange decisions of R (error message weirdness; and why do the arrays start at one?!).

One thing that has stayed the same is that in C3DS, when I get bored I often get out the inseminator to make a new batch of eggs from the most adventures or interesting or pretty norns. In C1 and C2, I always tend to leave the toys, for example, where they are placed by default, and the last time I opened it up to play rather than to test I had to almost force myself to try moving them around to different places. The reason for this is that when I was younger I hated 'messing up' the world... but if the norns did it, that was okay somehow. In all of the games, I tend to keep different genomes separated instead of mixing them up, but different species in one world are okay.

How did you get into Creatures in the first place? What game did you start with? What intrigued you about it or was the most fun? Do you have any special or fond memories?
I got into Creatures (many, many years ago now - back when Albia 2k was still up, back when the Gameware forums hadn't been shut down, back when the VLforums still existed, back when you could still trade creatures and chat with random people on DS) because I absolutely loved virtual pets and related games as a kid. There were points were I was obsessive about them.

I played Petz. I played Babyz. Eventually I would pick up Pinna (a virtual bird game). I tried out that one Aquazone game where you could breed colorful guppies. I had multiple games where the point was to be a vet and treat pets, zoo animals, or wild animals. I even had a real cat and yes, I did play with her too.

At some point I found a website about virtual and artificial life - I think it was called the Virtual Life homepage - and right next to a page full of links to virtual pet websites, FinFin, and gobs of Tamagotchi, was Creatures. I remember spending a while reading the official page, then downloading DS as soon as my mom would let me use her computer (which must have fit the requirements better; I did play on my hand-me-down Windows 98 at some point, but she had XP and an LCD screen!).

Norns were never as cute as the roly-poly adorable kitties of Catz. But I still played for hours with my copy of DS (soon with a whole bunch of add-ons, of course).

Eventually my parents bought me the Creatures Trilogy for my birthday, but DS - now with C3 docked - was still my favorite. We also borrowed a copy of Creation: Life and How to Make It from the library and I read it together with my dad. I was already learning how to program - mostly how to do things with numbers - and this was an introduction to a new and different way of thinking and coding to me. We skipped the neural network chapter at the time because it was too advanced for me, but the parts about feedback loops and coding an environment and getting emergent behavior rather than hardcoding everything, those stuck with me.

I liked playing with the creatures and taking care of them and breeding them - genetic systems have always been a huge, huge source of fascination for me, and continue to be so - but as time went on, I was inspired by other community members to start investigating some of the science background behind the games. At this point I wasn't quite getting into CAOS - though I do remember trying - and I only poked at genetics, but I did set up some experiments within the game to see what would happen.

Besides watching my little colony in the Meso, I have fond memories of one particular little norn who I hand-raised. I taught her words by hand, though I was frustrated by not being able to teach her verbs. At some point I think she must have refused to eat or otherwise do what I wanted her to do and out of frustration I started slapping her a whole bunch. Much to my surprise, it turned out that a creature could die from slapping. Oops.

There's a lot of genomes out there for C3/DS besides the ones that come with the game. I've noticed that new people especially sometimes get confused by what the differences between them all are and which ones they should use in their worlds, so I wrote this guide to the more popular genomes to help clear things up.


Standard: These are your bog-standard creatures that come with the game. Usually, people take the default Chichi genome as being the default. This is because it has additional genes to deal with the networking features introduced to DS as well as some biochemistry tweaks compared to the original C3 breeds, and as it came with the free game DS, it was also the most widely-available genome back in the day. Note that the default C3 norn breeds (Civet, Bruin, and Bengal) have an additional 'expressive' variant available to them in the egg creator – if you use the standard genome, you will probably want to use this one to play, as it's actually a fix. Originally, the norns did not make the appropriate facial expressions to express their mood properly, and the expressive variants are a fix for this.

The standard genome has quite a few bugs in it, and some of the other genomes are attempts at fixing these bugs, while others simply aim to introduce new features.

Gizmo: Gizmo norns were an early fix for many problems in the standard genome. They have many modifications, but to summarize: they have a rebalanced biochemistry, a modified reproductive system to make them less likely to become super-breeders, and changed instincts to make them survive better but also to try and make them less 'pre-programmed'.

Because of these many changes, they probably won't interbreed well with other genomes, though it won't necessarily be fatal to try.

Amanora: Amanora made some beautiful new breeds for C3/DS, the Dream Norns, Butterfly Norns, and Flora Norns. These also used a modified base genome that included changes to the pigment and pigment bleed genes so that creatures would keep their color throughout their whole life (normally creatures can mutate so that they change colors in different life stages), and changes to the pose genes to reduce the chance of getting creatures with limps and other bad movements.

Unfortunately, because of these changes, her breeds can't interbreed well with standard creatures – they're likely to produce sliders. Because of this, Amanora used to have a pack with this modified base genome for all the official breeds, but this no longer appears to be on her site.

CFE: The name stands for 'Creatures Full of Edits'. These are a major fix that was widely adopted in the community and by breed makers. There's a lot of changes, and these include: working friend-or-foe lobe that allows creatures to make friends and enemies, better memory and learning, a new brain lobe that allows creatures to perceive the elevation of an interesting object (so they don't go after things they can't reach), as well as several fixes to prevent behavior loops. They also cannot get stuck on a life stage or live without eating, and will not mutate to severe limps.

CFEm: These are the same as CFE creatures, except they lack a few of the changes: they can still get stuck on life stages, mutate to live without food, and their gait genes will mutate like a standard creature's genes will.

CFE and CFEm creatures are compatible with each other, but breeding them with standard creatures might result in weirdness and is not recommended by the creator. Some older breeds may not have CFE conversions available, but some do.

CFG: The name here standards for 'Creatures Full of Gizmo'. As one might expect, they combine both the changes from the gizmos and the CFEs into one genome.

As with the gizmos above, interbreeding these with normal CFEs probably won't work out that well. You might have better luck interbreeding them with this following genome:

CFF: This name stands for 'Creatures Full of Fixes' and builds upon the CFE genome. It includes both additional fixes as well as new features. CFF creatures will be aware of being full (so they don't just eat everything in the ship in one go), will react when drowning, and shouldn't breed as quickly as CFE and standard creatures do. They will also hallucinate when ingesting chemical 130, and are meant to act more curious and try more random things.

Evo: The Evo norns are an offshoot of the CFF project. They are meant to mess around with objects more and have a shorter attention span than normal creatures.

CFF creatures are relatively compatible with both CFE and CFG creatures. Evo norns can be interbred with CFF norns. A couple of older breeds have CFF conversions available.

TWB: This name stands for 'True Warmblood'. These creatures, based on the CFFs, have a real internal body temperature, unlike normal creatures. This body temperature is affected not just by their surrounding temperatures, but also things like the creature's diet and activity levels. They also have a few other changes related to instincts, fixing and finishing the hunger system, and fixing some other issues.

Because of their extensive changes, they do not interbreed well with other genomes.

Spice: In this genome, based on the standard one, pigment genes are spread out through the genome, rather than being all bunched up together. This means that offspring inherit a mix of the colors of their parents, instead of only inheriting all of their color genes from one parent. This means that, for example, a blue creature and a red creature can have a purple child, instead of only a blue or a red child.

Spice norns should not be interbred with other genomes because of how their genes have been re-arranged.

Colortrue: This genome is based on the CFE creatures and was inspired by the Spice norns. Similar to the Spice genome, Colortrue genomes have been changed so that the children inherit a mix of the colors of their parents.

Colortrue creatures should also not be interbred with other genomes.

Farbe: This genome is also based on the CFE genome. Farbe creatures have been changed so that their pigment genes cannot mutate, but their pigment bleed genes can, which allows for more realistic and better-looking color mutations.

Farbe creatures can be bred with standard CFE creatures.


These are only some of the more common genomes; there are many others out there to try, such as the Curiosity Norns, not to mention a whole host of new breeds that come with their own unique genomes.

...so what should you choose? That can be a difficult question, and it depends on a lot of things. What features do you prefer? What are existing breeds available in? How compatible will different breeds you like be?

Remember, though, that you don't have to choose just one genome and stick with it. If you don't want sliders and severely messed-up babies in your worlds, you can either keep creatures with incompatible genomes in separate areas, or use different genomes in different worlds. For example, I usually use CFE creatures, but I have one world full of Colortrue norns, and I'm trying out the TWB creatures in another. I even have some Amanora genome creatures in a very old wolfling run world of mine.

I would seriously recommend getting at least the CFEs or CFEms; they are a great improvement over the standard genome in terms of learning and behavior, and the vast majority of newer releases are based on them or a genome based on them. If you really like the idea of the Gizmo biochemistry changes, you can get the CFGs. Whether you want to get CFFs or Evos is dependent on how much you care about the additional changes to their behavior. Maybe you are interested in the realistic internal temperature of the TWBs. And, if you really care about realistic color mutations or inheritance, Farbe or Colortrue creatures might be best for you. On the other hand, if you really like the look of an older breed, you might be stuck with the standard genome or a modification based on it... unless you or someone else converts it, of course.

The best thing to do is to try several of these genomes out, and then observe your creatures to see how they behave and what you like!