Is it the end of the Creatures series?
Creatures was a game I used to play starting from Creatures 1 up to Creatures 3. It was basically an artificial life simulation, a 'world in a box'.
The game engine simulated a virtual world and each entity in the world had a 'digital DNA' that described how they moved, thought, and reacted to different world stimuli. Their brains were defined as a neural net so they learned over time to adapt to their environment. The parameters for the brain could be modified by 'tinkering' with their digital DNA using a genetics editor or through selective breeding.
The engine itself had a scripting language that enabled you to create new objects (called COBS), edit event scripts in the world (controlling weather, creating new rooms, etc) created new plants, new food and many other things.
Creatures 3 was the most sophisticated version with a huge world and thousands of interactive agents written in the scripting language (called CAOS - Creatures Agent Object Scripting).
I originally played it and thought it was 'neat' but didn't do too much with it until third party tools (and eventually official ones) became available for tinkering with the game engine and the genetics of the creatures. Then a whole new avenue of game play became available.
I'd venture to say that Creatures was my first introduction to an image based programming system.
I did a lot of exploration of ideas with Creatures at my site, Creatures Developer Resource. I delved into how to improve the genetics of the creatures, writing about and eventually implementing some of those ideas.
From the looks of the Creatures site, things are slowly closing down. Which is a shame because it was a nice series of games that made people thing. There was a huge community behind it at one stage.
A couple of people in the community even ended up working for the company that created Creatures. Lis Morris and Ash Harman (aka Frimlin) spring to mind. Ash used to live in New Zealand and I remember how he always wanted to work for Cyberlife, the company that created Creatures, and he got his dream.
The original creator of the Creatures series, Steve Grand, went on to form Cyberlife Research (no releationship to Cyberlife) exploring the boundaries of artificial life.
Another colorful Creatures Community personality was Sandra Linkletter, aka slink. Unfortunately there was a rift between her and Cyberlife and one point and she removed all her fine work. You can read her comments on the later state of the Creatures series through her C2 limericks page which culminates in:
There once was an AL called norn
In the mind of Steve Grand it was born
Through a marketing ploy
It became a mere toy
The AL from the norn has been torn
Farewell Albia.
And then there is the late Max Jerome, aka SteerPike. The king of Creatures art and creativity. His passing was a sad moment in the community and was sorely missed.
One of my favourite sites was Bibble, created by Helen who now has a weblog joining Ash in the weblog addicts club I think! Although he as a second weblog now for interesting links (Frimlins Links) which is always an interesting read.
Finally, one of the developers of the Creatures games, Francis Irving, also has a weblog where he is currently writing about his explorations of Vietnam. Francis also created TortoiseCVS, the best CVS client available for Win32 systems. And it's open source.
Since it seems Creatures is fading away, and I no longer actively develop or use it, I thought I'd post these brief notes to say my goodbyes to what was a great series and definitely one of my favourite games.
12:53:46 AM 
|
