Addicted to CAOS - A Creatures Blog

I had been really excited for CCSF last year. I didn't have much to contribute, really, just a very very basic agent that most people probably don't have much use for. But I was going to try drawing or writing or at least blogging. Something to participate. But life decided to throw me a spitball, as it often does. I ended up so preoccupied by major crises that I stopped playing Creatures or going online much at all for... jesus. More than six months, now that I think about it. Life just didn't give me enough of a break to think clearly enough to have time to do anything that wasn't urgently survival-based. (I guess I know how Norns feel now...) So I missed out, and I was sad about it even as I knew it was going on. I mean, it started ON MY BIRTHDAY, EVEN. Gahhhhh. Now, here it is, late May 2017, and I can't sleep. A run of dragon testers is going and I don't want to interfere too much, but if I watch, I end up interfering. So I'm leaving them alone as...

Scattered eggs along bottom of Artemia Sea in the middle. First to hatch is a black-and-red male named Akirou. He seems pretty typical, pushing toys and checking out the other eggs while glancing quickly at other things in passing. Next a very dark female named Almodis. She seems very interested in plants, pulling them frequently. Then she checked out a beast, ate a critter, and went back to pulling on and hitting plants. It's a good thing the plants can't be uprooted or killed or this might be problematic behavior. A double-knockout-blue male by the name of Acorn is the third to arrive. He seems a little scatter-headed. Doesn't focus quickly on any given thing. He did eat a few Zander Fish, though, so he'll probably be fine in the long run. I've set their limit to 20, with a starting population of six. Since they're supposed to be wolfing I can't keep too close an eye on all of them, but will do my best to keep an eye on both them and the clock so I kno...

So. I'm feeling a little burnt out today. Not on Creatures, but on projects. Geat_Masta has a whole new set of edits for me to try, and they sound very exciting, but looking at the instructions, they keep turning into a blur of nonsense. So I'm taking that as a sign that part of my brain needs a break. Instead, today I decided to do something fun and silly with the game - a Random Event Run. Essentially, you set the game up for a wolfling run, but roll on a table at certain intervals (I'm going to do it every 15-20 minutes or so of real time because I'll actually be sitting here for a lot of it, watching and recording the events). Whatever comes up on the table, I do as an interference in the run. Otherwise I have to be 100% hands off after the Gen1 eggs hatch. I finally got the program to run an undocked world, so yay! There will be less lag to start, and hopefully it'll be a longer time before the game world gets too laggy to be playable anymore. So I set up...

From correspondence between myself and Geat_Masta. I may edit this into an actual post later. But for now, a lot of this was stuff I meant to bring up in a post anyway, and I figured it may be of interest to others besides us, especially Intyalle and Savannah (the other people currently testing the brainedits for me.) "BTW, my running hypothesis as to precisely what's going on in their little brains is that the edits are allowing the Comb lobe to make connections between concepts. Normally what it does in part is make connections between decisions, or between decisions and states etc., to form concepts. For example, the Norn feels hungry for protein. It eats a critter. It receives protein, and its hunger for protein goes down. The Comb lobe records this as the beginning of a concept: "Hungry for protein + eat critter; result, hunger for protein reduces; good!" The more often the Norn eats critters and experiences a reduction in H4P, the more the concept "eat c...

Aian and Ascyzier playing together. These are two of my favorite genetic colors possible with the Draconian sprites. (The Gargoyle arm looks great with the blue... only okay with the black and red. Alas!) I especially like the burning orange eyes Aian has.  Lately, I've been focusing on water environments. Not sure why - just kind of felt like going back to their roots for a while. The issues with the flying agent have something to do with it, but not everything. Grendel_Man's Swimming Agent v3 is very pleasant to watch, too - they do some things they didn't do in v2 - these funny little bobbing motions as they move sometimes, for example. Development continues. As usual, plagued by multifarious issues, but on the whole, things are going well. A couple of people have been helping me test them, which has helped me make progress faster. It's also helpful in that it helps me know when I'm actually seeing changes in them and when I'm just imagining things...

Okay, I know I said I was done for the day, but this was too funny not to share. So. These are Lawful and Hyaena, the males of the small starter colony. In general, each of them gets along well with the two females, but they've mostly ignored each other. In spite of that, they apparently have decided they are not fond of each other. Jealousy over the women? They're a bit young for that, especially by dragon norn standards. And besides, I'm not sure Norn brains are complex enough to generate anything similar to jealousy. But that sure is what it looks like to my human brain lol Anyway, the Norns were going along, living life. The two women were chasing prey and generally having fun together in the corner where the blue carrots grow - one had even decided to sample a blue carrot despite their usual lack of culinary interest in anything that doesn't emit CA 19. The boys were kind of off to the side, within earshot of the girls but separate enough from both the g...

Sucks how when life gets difficult, things one loves tend to fall by the wayside. Like Creatures and blogging about it. But look at that - here I am again! I had to reinstall my game, so I lost a lot of stuff, but I've been able to restore a lot. All my work on v2.1 of the Dragons is gone, alas. So I'm going to go back to v2.0 and start from there again. 2.0 is pretty good. All I could think of to do to them right off the bat was to get rid of the old "predatory" instincts and replace them with the nice Prey Scent functionality I had created shortly before life went to poop on me. I had to use my notes on this blog to reconstruct that, incidentally. Lucky thing I posted so much of it here! I also learned a bit more about CAOS in the process. Apparently INST is not 'install' but 'instant' - it instructs the engine to execute the following commands in a single tick. And SLOW is what closes the INST. My brain didn't seize up horribly when I look...