Abyss Dragon Rebuild
My major Creatures project at the moment, genetically speaking, are the Abyss Dragons. They started out humbly enough. I was tinkering with Amphibian Draconian DNA and happened upon a color that I thought looked particularly good in the Deep Abyss metaroom (one of my all time favorites, at least of the few this stupid computer is willing to allow to work - no idea what's wrong with so much of the stuff I download because it works for everyone else and I've tried all the suggested fixes; some stuff did help, like I was able to get the Genetics Kits to work, but the problem with some agents and metarooms just plain acting like they don't exist has never been solved and it sucks.) It's 0 red 0 green 127 blue 128 bleed. With the color variations in the underlying Draconian sprites, it looked really neat on that map.
Then I started tinkering with the Amphibian genome more, improving their ability to act as predators (as opposed to merely normal Norns with the ability to digest meat and a preference for it but who were still perfectly willing to spend a lot of time browsing on other foods even despite getting little nutrition from it, which is what the basic Draconian is like, essentially.) I kept using the blue color to distinguish my edited test individuals from my normal Amphidracos. Eventually, due to the improvements being successful, I began to favor my edited dragons over the originals. That was when I began thinking about them in terms of being a genetic breed. I kept going with the improvements and changes I had in mind, and when all of my own additions and alterations were working as I wanted them to be, I released them as a genetic breed on CreaturesCaves.com.
Unfortunately, in the process, I failed to notice a lot of flaws in the base genome I was editing. Some may have been mistakes or bad design choices on the part of the original Amphidraco creator (I have yet to figure out what all the uses of chemicals 110 and 111 were about - they may well make perfect sense if understood in total). But most are probably flaws left over from the original official build. I've noticed several people say that they think the released C3DS genome is rushed and sloppy in some ways compared to the C1 and even the C2. The genetics engine seems to be better and more powerful, but in terms of the actual genomes released, I can't help but agree to some degree. In trying to upgrade the Abysses I ran into a couple of these flaws, and the more I worked the more I discovered.
So in the end I threw up my hands and gave up entirely, as much as it pained me to do so. Now I'm trying to decide whether to use a CFF or TWB genome as my new basis for work on Abyss Dragons 2.0. In some ways, the TWB system is very attractive, but in others, I get flashbacks to my early days raising Draconians and how frustrating it was that they shivered constantly and I couldn't do anything about it. Of course, with TWBs I -can- do something about it, but still, worrying about temperature stopped being an interesting dragonish gimmick and became an annoyance for me a while ago.
With that said, now that I've conceptually broadened the project to include more than one color, maybe I should make more than one variation, too. One might be based on the Magma TWB genome and be a fire dragon that prefers the bottom area of the Abyss, near the vents, or other warm places. I'm not too concerned about interbreeding since I tend not to much like interbreeding anyway - the jumbles of sprites just look bad to me after the mixing gets too much. The base official breeds don't mix too badly for the most part, but even there sometimes it just looks damned odd - spotty chichi legs on a harlequin body for instance. (Then again, I think slapping a Grendel tail on an otherwise normal C3DS Norn looks pretty cool, so maybe I'm not one to talk.)
So that's what's on my mind right now. Advantages of CFF versus TWB is temperature won't be a worry and if any later CFF edits are missing from TWB I'll get the advantage of them. Plus I already started editing a CFF Chichi genome before I realized TWB was an option.
On the other hand, TWB is based on CFF and probably does contain everything important. And I didn't get THAT far in changing the CFF Chichi genome. It's not that big a deal to start over again.
Back to the first hand, part of me really doesn't want to do those edits a third time. :p So we'll see, I guess. I'm going to muse on it while doing other things for a while. Hopefully the brief distance from the problem will help me resolve it.
Then I started tinkering with the Amphibian genome more, improving their ability to act as predators (as opposed to merely normal Norns with the ability to digest meat and a preference for it but who were still perfectly willing to spend a lot of time browsing on other foods even despite getting little nutrition from it, which is what the basic Draconian is like, essentially.) I kept using the blue color to distinguish my edited test individuals from my normal Amphidracos. Eventually, due to the improvements being successful, I began to favor my edited dragons over the originals. That was when I began thinking about them in terms of being a genetic breed. I kept going with the improvements and changes I had in mind, and when all of my own additions and alterations were working as I wanted them to be, I released them as a genetic breed on CreaturesCaves.com.
Unfortunately, in the process, I failed to notice a lot of flaws in the base genome I was editing. Some may have been mistakes or bad design choices on the part of the original Amphidraco creator (I have yet to figure out what all the uses of chemicals 110 and 111 were about - they may well make perfect sense if understood in total). But most are probably flaws left over from the original official build. I've noticed several people say that they think the released C3DS genome is rushed and sloppy in some ways compared to the C1 and even the C2. The genetics engine seems to be better and more powerful, but in terms of the actual genomes released, I can't help but agree to some degree. In trying to upgrade the Abysses I ran into a couple of these flaws, and the more I worked the more I discovered.
So in the end I threw up my hands and gave up entirely, as much as it pained me to do so. Now I'm trying to decide whether to use a CFF or TWB genome as my new basis for work on Abyss Dragons 2.0. In some ways, the TWB system is very attractive, but in others, I get flashbacks to my early days raising Draconians and how frustrating it was that they shivered constantly and I couldn't do anything about it. Of course, with TWBs I -can- do something about it, but still, worrying about temperature stopped being an interesting dragonish gimmick and became an annoyance for me a while ago.
With that said, now that I've conceptually broadened the project to include more than one color, maybe I should make more than one variation, too. One might be based on the Magma TWB genome and be a fire dragon that prefers the bottom area of the Abyss, near the vents, or other warm places. I'm not too concerned about interbreeding since I tend not to much like interbreeding anyway - the jumbles of sprites just look bad to me after the mixing gets too much. The base official breeds don't mix too badly for the most part, but even there sometimes it just looks damned odd - spotty chichi legs on a harlequin body for instance. (Then again, I think slapping a Grendel tail on an otherwise normal C3DS Norn looks pretty cool, so maybe I'm not one to talk.)
So that's what's on my mind right now. Advantages of CFF versus TWB is temperature won't be a worry and if any later CFF edits are missing from TWB I'll get the advantage of them. Plus I already started editing a CFF Chichi genome before I realized TWB was an option.
On the other hand, TWB is based on CFF and probably does contain everything important. And I didn't get THAT far in changing the CFF Chichi genome. It's not that big a deal to start over again.
Back to the first hand, part of me really doesn't want to do those edits a third time. :p So we'll see, I guess. I'm going to muse on it while doing other things for a while. Hopefully the brief distance from the problem will help me resolve it.
If you're planning on using a CFF/TWB genome, I'd recommend reverting the brain edits; namely, the ones Evolnemesis said are supposed to make them act less robotic. In my personal experience, I've never seen the positives of those edits, while I've consistently had creatures with them start acting dumb (e.g. refusing to eat even when hungry).
ReplyDeleteThat may just be my personal experience coupled with the fact that I don't particularly like the CFF as a whole and the fact that I'd prefer a creature capable of taking care of itself than one with a "personality" if the two are mutually exclusive. If you've had better luck raising CFF creatures, then by all means go ahead.
I haven't actually raised many CFFs, but my attraction to them as a base is that most of not all the problems in the current genome are already fixed, which spares me a remarkable amount of work, compared to repairing the current one. The other advantages of using CFF are also attractive. But I've not spent a lot of time raising CFFs or TWBs so I can't say for sure if that's going to be an issue for me or not. I guess I'd better run a bunch of demos with the base genomes to see how they perform unmodified before I make any serious decisions.
DeleteWith that said, a lot of the edits to the Abysses focus on making them more effective as predators, as I mentioned in the post, which means they tend to be better at feeding themselves at least than whatever the base genome was (I've done this same set of edits, more or less (with variations), a few times now). I do not think the two are mutually exclusive but I do think that there may be some more balancing needed. I will experiment. Thanks so much for the comment! I have a lot of respect for your work and I value the input of all of you who have been doing this for so much longer than I have.