Time’s Up…
on Sunday
I’m afraid that’s it for this year’s Creatures Community Spirit Festival, I hope that you all enjoyed the festivities! This was truly an amazing CCSF, one of the best yet in my opinion, and I feel honoured for having been given the chance to act as official organizer for it (or to be a little more accurate, I’m glad that I seized the opportunity when it presented itself).
I hope that you all kept our theme of ‘time’ in mind during these past two weeks. Many people wondered what was meant by the theme, but the beauty of having such a broad theme is that it’s open to a lot of interpretation. We’ve all got different views on what ‘time’ means to us. Personally, I like to think that time is what you make of it.
I would like to say a big thank you to the following people for their submissions this year, I can talk about organizing all I want but we simply couldn’t have had a CCSF without Amaikokonut, Azumizai, Borg12345, C1anddsaddict, Crystalnorn, Dan, ElasticMuffin, Emzie, Ghosthande, Grendel Man, Malkin, MuppetBoy, norngirl, Norniff, nornloverian, Officer 1BDI, Panda_mist, pirate-rob, RProgrammer and Vampess, and I’d also like to say an absolutely massive thank you to Starscream for the brilliant CCSF website. All of you, please keep an eye out for an e-mail or PM from me over the next week or so, as Amaikokonut has helped me organize a small token of appreciation for your efforts.
Finally, thank you to rest of you for simply being here and enjoying the releases, previews and events that have been a part of this year’s CCSF. We couldn’t have a CCSF without you guys either, and I appreciate all the comments that people have made both here on the CCSF website and elsewhere in various CC forums.
Day Fourteen Release: C3/DS Breed
on Saturday
With just over an hour to go before this year’s CCSF comes to a close I’ve got a surprise release from Emzie to share with you all known only as the Cheese Ettins. I’m under the impression that she’s kept everybody in the dark for this one, so hopefully this is a nice surprise for you all. Emzie gave me the following short and sweet summary:
“The Cheese Ettins are a brand new breed of ettin. Be sure to keep them refrigerated or they’ll rot! In warm temperatures, they become sick but cooler temperatures will heal them.”
If you’d like to download Emzie’s Cheese Ettins you can do so by simply clicking here.
Day Fourteen Release: C3/DS Cheats
on Saturday
Ghosthande just sent me a quick e-mail with something that she felt was worth sharing with you for this year’s CCSF, and I agree with her so here we are.
For those of you who do not frequent Ghosthande’s excellent website, Breeders Beware, you’d do well to note that a new page has popped up over there – the Cheat Sheet! As Ghosthande describes it:
“This page is meant to be a comprehensive list of the cheats I find myself using, including some of the better-known ones like “kill hots”, as well as ones that I or other players came up with from scratch. In fact, you are welcome to contact me if you would like to submit a cheat that you feel should be here! I do hope that you will find them useful. I know I have!”
For those of you who would like to check Ghosthande’s Cheat Sheet out, you can find it at http://www.family-gathering.org/bbw/cheats.php.
Day Fourteen Release: DS Agent
on Saturday
And the releases keep rolling on! As I’ve promised multiple times throughout this year’s CCSF, if you can get me your release before the end of today, even if you send it to me at 11:59pm, I will put it up on the website.
This next release comes from ElasticMuffin, who quite amazingly managed to polish this cool little agent off just in time for a beta to be released in this year’s festival. You’ll see why I find it amazing that he managed to get this done in time when you read this excerpt from the readme file:
“These toys are great fun for your Creatures and can be fun for the Hand too – try to collect them all! For creatures, these will act just like normal toys that animate when clicked. Almost all current Pokemon are represented here – all 493 of them!
To release a Pokemon toy from its PokeBall, just activate it. Click the toy once it is released to see its animation.
To put the Pokemon back in its PokeBall, simply hover the Hand over the Pokemon and press Enter on your keyboard. The Pokemon will promptly vanish back into its ball for safekeeping.
If you decide you wish to release an extra Pokemon that you no longer want (but don’t want to get rid of every toy in your world), first put it back into its PokeBall. Then, with the Hand over the Pokeball, press Enter again. The ball will fade away and the Pokemon will be released.
ALWAYS make sure you are careful when releasing Pokemon – it cannot be undone! So be cautious not to hit enter if your Hand is over the wrong Pokeball.”
493 Pokemon! If you are eager to see ElasticMuffin’s Collectible Pokemon Toys v.0.1 Beta in action (I know I am, because that is a lot of Pokemon!) you can download it here.
Day Fourteen Release: Artwork + Preview
on Saturday
But wait, there’s more! Here’s a whole bunch of the very talented norngirl’s artworks for your enjoyment. As with every art-related release so far, please click on the thumbnails to view these pictures in their full-sized glory.
“This pic was made specialy for the CCSF,i had in mind that the theme is about time and also there’s a lot of the different anniversery’s going on,so i choosed to draw a pic of c1,c2 and a ca norn, wapred into a ds world docked with c3 (explaining why all the c3 norn breeds and 2 chichi couples are greeting them) The warp itself is a bit different looking from the normal ds warp,so i decide it’s kinda a time warp,wich drags in the norns from the past :3″
In addition to these pieces of art, norngirl has also generously decided to share a couple of previews for some of her future projects:
If you enjoy norngirl’s artwork you should check out her deviantart at http://norngirl.deviantart.com/. In her own words, norngirl “loves to draw various stuff,like klonoa,digimon,monster rancher etc,
is doing art trades too and [she] also [has] quite a lot of creature art scattered here and there and more will certainly come ;P”.
Day Fourteen Release: Tutorial
on Saturday
Next up we have a tutorial from Malkin, who teaches us how to work with Jagent, an earlier release in this year’s CCSF from RProgrammer, so if you haven’t checked that out yet then now is a great chance to.
Beginner’s Guide to Monk
“Hi, welcome to the Beginner’s Guide to Monk, part of the Jagent development suite by RProgrammer. (available at SourceForge) The example agent we’ll be using today is the Liam SDR Dolls by Trix that were released for the CCSF 2006.
Please ensure that you’re using the most recent version of Java, as Jagent 2.0.x requires Java 6, and will work on any system that supports Java 6.
To Decompile:
In ye olden days of C1, cobs would come in their component parts, and you would have to move each sprite, each sound, and each cob script into its proper place within the Creatures folder, and you were grateful, too! For C3 and DS, agents can contain images, sounds, scripts, and information about where agents inject inside one file – the agent file. To extract the components of an agent, you must decompile it. Open Monk and set the type of file you’re working with to “PRAY Source”. Then drag and drop the .agent file onto the white square, where it says ‘drop files here’. (Figure 1) Shortly afterwards, a folder will appear in the same directory to which you have your source agent file in. (ringed in dark green in Figure 2) It will contain the sprites (s16/c16), sounds (wav), code (cos), catalogue file, and a txt file. (Figure 3) The txt file is your pray file, it is what you need to master in order to compile agents. (ringed in yellow, Figure 3) Please note that although we started out with one agent, we have three different scripts for the three different dolls. (ringed in light green, Figure 3)
To Compile:
First, you must understand how to PRAY. To do this, there are tutorials available on Sarako’s Home Sweet Albia, Hausmouse’s Creatures 3 Page and the Creatures Development Network. Your pray file can be saved as a .txt file. Have all the files you plan to compile together in the same folder as the pray file. Double-check that you’ve got all the files included in the pray file as “inline files”. This is, I believe, the most common mistake with pray files. Set Monk’s mode to “PRAY Chunk” and drag and drop the pray .txt file onto the drop pad. (Figure 4) It will create a new agent in the same folder as the pray source.
Congratulations, you have now begun your journey with Jagent!
Jagent was created by RProgrammer (root@rprogrammer.net)
This tutorial was written by Malkin for the CCSF 2009.”
Day Fourteen Release: C3/DS Agents + Updates
on Saturday
RProgrammer has contributed a very impressive amount of agents/updates for this year’s CCSF, and all in the one zip file!
To save myself the danger of making this post far longer than it needs to be, I’m simply going to copy small parts of the help files as I’ve done for previous releases so that you all can get a decent idea of what it is you’re downloading.
“The Address Book Line consists of a few quirky little agents which are all related to DS Communication. Due to the finicky nature of the warp, they don’t always work as intended (and they also have bugs xP)”
“Creatures 3 / Docking Station always keep track of the time and date for every world, though the game may not always display it to you. If you inject the Calendar agent, it will show you the time, date, and season of your world.”
“The Camera2 (Camera Squared) is a quirky little agent which provides a camera that you can control remotely. (at the time I wasn’t using Docking Station) Besides being remote-controlled, the viewer is portable and the camera has the ability to “influence” objects which are touching it.
Along with the Camera2 are some addons I made:
CamInv Allow the RC Camera to pick up things and carry them
CamSpeed Control the speed of the RC Camera
CamTran Set up teleporters so that the RC Camera can move between metarooms (it can’t use doors).”
“The floating alarm is just a simple little agent (one of my first) which has a connectable activator that will set off an alarm. The alarm floats with the screen like the GUI, hence the name “Floating Alarm”.”
“Forces of CAOS is a new subsystem for Docking Station (and theoretically any game using C2E with DS compatible CAOS).
Some would call it magic. And not in the sense that no one understands it.
You see, it works like this:
The pointer says something (like it would to a creature) in no particular place, and something happens.
Here’s an example:
“erthei jimmy” would bring a creature (or anything else named jimmy) to the hand (unless it would teleport into a wall, which would be bad).
In this example ‘erthei’ is the Force. Hence the name Forces of CAOS. (And no, it is not a mispelling).
In case you’re wondering what in creation an erthei is, erthei is Greek for “come”.
By convention, Forces are named in Greeklish (since you don’t have αβγδε… on your keyboard)”
“The Inventory2 (Inventory Squared) is like the game inventory, but stores agents textually. When an agent is loaded into the Inventory2, the agent is frozen in time and hidden from view; its name is then posted on the display so that you can view the contents of the inventory quickly and select what to unload at your convenience.”
“… A blueprint created by Ports and Prints (PnP), called an Active Blueprint, has the ability to automatically reconnect all the agents in the machine as well as transport them to the blueprint’s current location (if they can be moved). The active print also internally records the connections of the machine in detail, allowing other agents to extend it with more behaviors, such as Cloning and Replication…”
“Normally, when the pointer speaks, an ORDR SHOU is issued so that creatures will “hear” it. When a creature speaks, agents have their 126 script called so that they will hear it.
Verbose replaces a game script with a modified version so that, when the pointer speaks, agents will be able to hear it just like they do when creatures speak.
Some agents rely on this ability and won’t function properly without it.”
To download everything that you see mentioned in this post, just click here.
Day Fourteen Release: Website Launch
on Saturday
Today is the final day of the Creatures Community Spirit Festival of 2009, and just as we began on a very important day in Creatures history we’ve managed to end on one too. Fifteen years ago today, Michael Hayward first demonstrated the original Creatures prototype to Warner Interactive. This is yet another critical starting point in the history in Creatures, and some could argue that it was the most critical starting point, as without obtaining help of publishers like Warner Interactive releasing Creatures to the masses would have been nothing more than a dream in the minds of it’s creators.
But let’s put historical fun facts aside for now and get into today’s releases.
First up we have a new website from Starscream, the Creatures Object Repository. This site is a human-maintained directory of agents and where to find them, and for those of you who sent in your xml files (which you could obtain with the help of Starscream’s Agent Journaler) they will be a great help to Starscream in tracking down agents.
Starscream has high hopes for this ambitious project, and is happy to allow others to help if they would like to volunteer.
As some of you will no doubt notice, the last update was in September, but to be fair, Starscream has been quite busy with other projects (namely creating and maintaining this year’s CCSF website). I’m told that there will be updates over the next week or so once the CCSF has ended.
You can find Starscream’s Creatures Object Repository at http://mobilefieldbase.com/cor/, please check it out if you get a chance to.
Day Twelve Release: C3 Update
on Thursday
“Edible, Squishable Balloon Bugs – this is an edit to Creatures 3’s Balloon Bugs, making them more interactive for your creatures. Creatures can now push, pull, eat and squish the bugs, making them much more entertaining overall, especially for Treehugger, Bondi and Draconian Norns, and Grendels of all kinds.”
- Malkin
To download Malkin’s Edible, Squishable Balloon Bugs, click here.