CCSF 2017 is Live

The Creatures Community Spirit Festival for 2017 has kicked off! Go to https://ccsf-2017.blogspot.com/ to find all the goodies.

Journey into CAOS

I've been completely tuned out of the internet over the past little while because I've been busy with exams in real life, and now that I'm done with them I come back online to see the CCSF is in less than a week. Exciting, but I feel bad for not having anything to contribute, so what is my immediate reaction? Let's rustle up something to contribute, of course. I only have four days but I'm sure I can pull something together, right...?

I will give you the disclaimer that there is a chance these plans could still all backfire horribly, so if you never see a contribution from me please don't judge me too hard...

Now, I'm not going to tell you what I'm working on (that would ruin the fun) but I what I will say is that it involves some CAOS - which, for the record, I have never used before, so even though I do have some minimal experience with other coding languages it will be interesting to see if I can get my head around it quickly enough to pull something together in time. But the relevant part (and why I'm writing this to begin with, other than so everyone knows I'm not 100% dead) is that I found some really cool CAOS resources that I thought might be super useful for anyone else who's interested in learning how to code in CAOS. These are just a few starters, I might add to the list if I find some more or even make a dedicated page for it, but here are the links:

http://www.gamewareeurope.com/GWDev/downloads/cdn/creatures_caos_guide.pdf

https://creatures.wiki/C1_class_numbers

https://creatures.wiki/C1_Chemical_List

http://web.archive.org/web/20000929002121/http://www.dreamscape.com/lummoxjr/creatures/cobtutorials.html

http://creatures.treesprite.com/Slink11.html (look for COB Author's Guide)

Happy coding everyone! May you fail less at it than I have so far :)

Theme Updates

Just a quick note... you may have noticed some slight changes to the layout of the blog. Namely, I've added a lovely list of links to other blogs and sites in the Creatures community, I've set up tags on all the posts to help you find specific subjects more easily, and I've adjusted some of the CSS on the blog posts to make them a tad easier to read. Happy reading :)

Operant Conditioning

I don't know how many of you are familiar with real world psychological theories but there's one theory called operant conditioning that I was musing over the other day (actually I had to learn about it for school but whatever) and I realised with that it actually fits the Creatures model of learning surprisingly well.

Treba's Adventures

Happy new year everyone!

All right, let's get back into this: as you might remember from my last post, I've been playing around with this new Norn of mine, Treba. You can read about her here. So far there hasn't been too big a difference between her and other Norns I've raised, but so far she's only been alive for half an hour and most of that time was spent in the company of other Norns, so it's too soon to really say whether or not the changes I've made will have had a big impact on her behaviour itself. So, it's time for the next instalment in Treba's life.

Treba the One-Drive Norn

Looking through some of my recent posts... I haven't done a crazy genetic experiment in a while! Time to change that.

A while ago I was reading one of Jessica's posts on Discover Albia and it got me thinking: what would happen if you ticked "Winner takes all" in the drive lobe? It would mean the Norn could only feel one drive at once, but how would that actually affect the Norn in a practical way?

I think you know where this is going...

So, in this Norn I'm only going to make one single change: switching the drive lobe to WTA. If you're not familiar with what that option does, it makes it so that only one neuron can fire in the lobe at once, and the neuron which has the strongest value will be the one to fire. In the context of the drive lobe, it means that only the most pressing need will registered by the Norn.

Meet Treba, a cute little Cheri Norn whose wellbeing and happiness I have probably just permanently destroyed. But we'll see how she turns out.