Amaikokonut and CAs

Recently Amaikokonut over at Naturing::Nurturing did a couple of posts covering CAs in Creatures 3 and Docking Station, including how they work and how to create them for 3rd party rooms and agents.

For anyone creating addons, or just wanting to understand how their Creatures navigate the world I cannot even begin to express how important this is. Watching a Norn starve to death despite there being a hoard of apples a quick lift ride away is incredibly frustrating. As I'm constantly trying to find ways to get Norns to migrate around the world, this has been a bane to me for years.

But, thankfully that can now be a thing of the past! This article assist future developers in creating more accessible rooms and agents. You can read the article here:

http://naturingnurturing.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/cas-and-you.html

This information is so vital to the well being of your Norns, I think I'll be putting a permanent link somewhere on my blog so people can find it long into the future.

But amazingly, that's not all! Anyone familiar with Amaikokonut's work will have heard of 'Magic Words', essentially a list of commands the Hand can 'speak' into the game. Well, she's added commands to the Magic Words agent that allows you to manipulate the world. This mean that any 3rd party rooms that don't have correctly set up CAs can now be manually edited in game to work correctly!

I've already started editing my C2toDS world and the Norns have instantly started navigating to the top floor for apples and to the lower floor for a feed of seeds. I've been so frustrated with my Norns for ages, trying to get them to move about the world in an intelligent way and much to my amazement they're actually pretty darn good at it when the room is set up right.

The Magic Words addon can be found here:

http://naturingnurturing.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/magic-words-room-edits.html?showComment=1337416824827#c5780797895292512610

I'd also suggest learning some of the basic CAOS commands in the first article (CAs and you). For example:

outv prop grap mopx mopy #
-Where the "#" is a number from 0-19.

Will allow you to see how much of a particular CA is present in a room. This was particularly useful as I've found the cheese in C2toDS doesn't emit a protein smell, meaning the Norns can't find it unless it's in front of their face!

A full list of the CAs can be found here:

http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Cellular_Automata

Again I can't emphasise just how important an understanding of CAs is to developers. If you want Creatures to be able to navigate your rooms, or be able to sniff out food items you create you NEED to include this code.

Seeing this stuff in action has got me extremely excited. I for one, am off to try and create a C2toDS world where my Norns can successfully navigate from one corner to the other.

Creatures 1: Gen3 - Clowen

Sorry for my leave of absence over the last couple of months. I'd kind of reached a point where I needed to play some other games for a bit, but rest assured Creatures is still on my list and I've been lurking around the community, keeping tabs on other blogs and waiting impatiently for more Creatures 4 news.
Judging by the post over at Fishing Cactus patience will be rewarded in the next few weeks as we'll hopefully be getting some further insights into the game as we get closer to release.

As for my little C1 world of Albia, it's been given a reboot and is ready to receive the next generation of Norns.
You'll probably notice a few new additions to the world over the next couple of posts. I've started reading a relatively new Creatures blog called Jessi's Creatures Documentations which you should check out if you haven't already. It's an interesting read, but most importantly there's some lovely new COBs available. They not only function well but they look really cool too!

On the topic of blogs, I've added Grendelmans My little hole to my watch list too. Far from being a new blog, but one I didn't realise existed until recently. Also very much worth a watch and with an overhaul to the website layout the new downloads sections would be well worth a visit.

Okay, that's enough pimping others blogs, time to get back to my own!

As you know I've hatched all the Gen3 Norns and placed them into their respective family trees. As of yet though I haven't done a genetics breakdown on anyone, so this post we'll take a look at Clowen, the daughter of Stephanie and Totem.

Although Stephanie was a Horse Norn and her ancestor was Pollen, a PMN, Clowen has completely inherited her father's appearance and is a Pixie/Forest Norn.
She has also inherited her grandfather's (Heartly's) eating habits. Her hunger drive rarely if ever rises, but thankfully she still has a drive to eat periodically and doesn't seem to starve as a result.
Looking at her genetics more closely I'm starting to think I may have misinterpreted Heartly's eating genes. I'll be doing a closer look into these genes in this generation and will get back to you all on what exactly it all means.

Although she hasn't travelled from the garden yet, Clowen seems quite at home with her new environment.

She took a bit of a shine to the new addons to the world, in particular the Muggy COB from Jessi's Creatures Documentations. Essentially this fella is a great brute of a dog, although they have a great temperament. They'll generally hang around and keep your Norns company, but if interacted with they'll wander about looking for interesting objects to dig up. Sadly my Muggy hasn't managed to find anything yet, but he hasn't had much chance to practice yet.

You'll also notice the pink flowers in the background. Also from Jessi, this is a new plant added to the world. They grow randomly when injected and drop the flower head when clicked on, which can then be eaten.

I've added a few new food COBs to this world as I've recently discovered some of the old ones I was using were a little buggy. Hopefully you've already seen this news via Jessi's blog, or at Discover Albia, but the random starch injection bug has finally been tracked down to its source.
Unfortunately that source was the extra carrot COBs I had installed, including the Muddy Carrots near the incubator and the Parsnips on the Island. These have now been removed, so hopefully this bug will no longer be present.

GENETICS:

Since we're now getting deeper into the generations I'll be skipping over some of the old mutations we've seen but I'll still make sure to mention any new or interesting mutations.
I'll also be taking a leaf out of Jessica's book at Discover Albia and colour coding the mutations, with underlines being the changes in the gene. I'll keep the colours consistent to reduce confusion. Hey, genetics are confusing enough!


Green: Good Mutation | Blue: Neutral Mutation | Orange: Bad Mutation | White: Original Gene
Mutations from Parents:

These mutations are completely new.

RECEPTORS:
45: Creature, Drive Levels NFP, chem=NFP, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=255, features = Digital
45: Creature, Drive Levels NFP, chem=NFP, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=255, features = Analogue




From memory I think the difference between Digital and Analogue is that they're reverses of each other. In other words Analogue increases the chemical while Digital reduces it. Keep in mind though that you could reduce a decrease chemical such as hungerDecrease, just to add another layer of complexity.

I think this gene should reduce Clowen's Need for Pleasure (NFP) chemical when her NFP drive reaches a certain level, but I have noticed she seems to have a frown on her face even when all her usual drives are met, so I could be wrong on this one.


STIMULI:

103: 'I've activated1' causes sig=0 GS neu=255, int=0 => 3*TirednessIncrease + 16*BoromDecrease + 0*None + 1*None

103: 'I've activated1' causes sig=0 GS neu=255, int=0 => 3*TirednessIncrease + 16*BoromDecrease + 0*None + 0*None

This gene adds tirednessIncrease and boredomDecrease when the creature successfully pushes an object. The mutation here changes the 'None' chemical from 0 to 1, essentially making this a completely irrelevant mutation. Should the 'None' chemical mutation in the future though, this could change things up significantly.

That sums up all Clowen's new mutation. Here's a couple of interesting ones that she inherited.

Inherited Mutations:

REACTIONS:
146: 1*Glucose + 2*Hexokinase => 4*CO2 + 8*Activase
146: 1*Glucose + 2*Hexokinase => 4*CO2 + 1*None

I'm pretty sure this was a new gene that came with the Forest Norns. I've only included it because I'm not entirely sure what it does.

320: Antioxidants will no longer reduce aging.

68: Doesn't receive punishment for being bored.
145: Does not receive hunger when changing glycogen into glucose

I'll be returning to gene 145 in a later post as I think there will be some interesting things to discuss about it. What I think has happened is that the Forest Norn genes related to glycogen/glucose conversion have mixed with the original Norn genes in such a way that the Norn no longer feels hunger. Technically you'd think this would be amazingly detrimental to the Norn as it should stop them eating, but judging by Heartly and Totem's success in life it seems to have actually been beneficial. We'll try and figure out why this is true another time.

Creatures 1: Gen3 - Family Tree

Just a quick update to throw up the new family tree for Gen3. Still haven't made a decision as to who will make it into the next breeding round so all the Norns have been left uncoloured.
Not sure if I just missed some tools or if there was an update to SpiderScribe but I've tweaked the layout just a little.
Rather than nametags the Norns names are now displayed in their pictures along with a '(F)' or '(M)' for their sex. This cleans up the layout a lot and means less nodes for me to build!
There also seems to have been a few extra colours added, so red is now deceased, yellow is a non-breeder and white is currently alive and available for breeding.

I've got a good chunk of pay from my biggest job recently (being a freelancer I only get paid once a month and the pay varies depending on how much work has been done) so I've been spending some of it on new games!

If you're into pretty games I'd definitely recommend 'Trine', both 1 and 2. I played the original a year or two ago and recently finished the second. It's a puzzle game with a bit of sword slinging. Amazing graphics and frankly it's just fun to play. Only about 8 hours to get through the whole thing, but at $15 ($7.50 when I bought it on special) it's well worth it.

I've also spent the weekend playing 'Tera', a new MMO about to be released. Can't say there's anything amazingly special about the gameplay, but again it's incredibly pretty. I haven't played an MMO since World of Warcraft and it was quite enjoyable.

There's a two week break before Tera is officially released, so I've got some Creatures time coming up. Looking forward to getting back to the fluffy little critters.

Creatures 1:Gen3 - Hatchlings

It's taken me a couple of nights, but I've finally gone through and hatched each Norn for generation 3!
There's 21 Norns in total, 12 males and 9 females (very good balance of numbers). Although I haven't gone through and done a full genetics analysis yet I have taken a quick glance and there's some interesting stuff in there.
From Norns who reach breeding maturity earlier to Norns who become cold while relieving crowdedness to a rather nasty brain mutation, this generation promises to be exciting.
One thing I've noticed is that Totem's genetic appearance is quite prominent in this generation. There's a whole heap of Pixie Norns with Forest Norn legs. Although it's a combination I really like it'll be a little difficult to tell them apart.
But that's okay, I intend to add a little genetic diversity to this generation by adopting one or two Norns from the 'CreatureLink' over at Discover Albia. Hopefully that'll be enough to keep appearances unique.

So, in no particular order here are the candidates for Gen3, followed by their parents names.

Clark - Stephanie, Totem

Bucca - Causty, Techie

Raiden - Causty, Techie

Shizzan - Enza, Totem

Pix - Enza, Totem

Milton - Mayflur, Totem

Mia - Causty, Techie

Hannah - Mayflur, Totem

Spunk - Enza, Bonza

Trish - Stephanie, Totem

Sprinkles - Causty, Totem

Ryan - Stephanie, Totem

Elton - Beatrice, Trillo

Stubbs - Mayflur, Bonza

Davis - Mayflur, Bonza

Toff - Enza, Bonza

Seebal - Mayflur, Techie

Totlet - Unknown, Totem

Clowen - Stephanie, Totem

Desirey - Causty, Totem

Joe - Causty, Totem

Much to my amazement Trillo seems to have only had the one child. I'll be double checking this as that just seems wrong, but that's what the genetics files say.
Beatrice too only has the one child, however I know I have two photos of eggs she laid, so that's definitely not right.
There is however a Norn with an unknown mother (Totlet), so perhaps that's Beatrice's other child? The genetics files don't match up, and although I have a genetics file for Totlet's mother, that file doesn't have any parents so I have no way of figuring out who she is. Apparently I'll need to be more careful with my record keeping.

So, we welcome the newest Norns to Albia and wish them luck. Naturally I'll be spending a little time with each of them once I've restarted the world and I'll do a breakdown of them and their genetics then.

EDIT: I went ahead and cloned the unknown mother via the Genetics Kit. Thankfully the Norn that popped out has a very distinct appearance and there's no doubt it's a clone of Beatrice. That's not surprising as Beatrice was cloned when I added her to Gen2 (she had been part of the previous wolfing run and had died there). How exactly she ended up with two children that linked to the different genetics files I have no idea, but there's no doubt it's her. Mystery solved!

Creatures database tool

At some stage I'm sure most of us have thought about doing it, while others have gone ahead and done it in some form or another. Some use spreadsheets. Others have created family tree making programs. Myself I've been using an OpenOffice form to record my creatures information.

This nifty little tool by Telinome has served me well for the past year or so. Anyone who's interested can download a copy here.

As awesome as this small database has been though, I've always found it restricting. Mostly in terms of not having a 'search' function.

Since I started playing with it a year or so ago (March 31st, 2011 to be exact!) I've been considering rewriting it in a different program to give it a few more features and make it more user friendly.

Ages ago I considering writing it in Adobe Flash, but soon gave up when I learned about Flash's limited ability to write to files, thus making it extremely difficult to actually save the database when you'd filled it in. Only mildly limiting.

For the past month or so I've had the urge to get back into some programming and tonight I decided to pick up this project again. Using a combination of HTML, XML and PHP (those are all web coding languages for those who don't know) I've started building a tool to record, save and recall all my Norns in a similar fashion to what Telinome's form does, just via a web browser instead.

So, after about 3 hours coding tonight I've finally managed to get the damn thing to print:

001
Tiggy
Arch

Which corresponds to: Experiment 'Number', 'Name' and 'Owner' respectively.

Yes that's right...3 hours!
...

Don't hold your breath for a Beta release. This could take a while...

The next trick will be getting it to record input from the user and then print it, rather than having the database premade.

Creatures 1 Gen2: Case study

And just when you thought Gen2 was done and dusted. It turns out there was another Norn who I'm pretty sure I never mentioned. Technically this Norn is from generation 4, although this was an early attempt at a wolfing run that ended in the species extinction.

This Norn is the child of Tabby and Billy. Billy was a third generation Norn and the son of Jake and Beatrice. Jake was a second generation Norn who, unlike Beatrice never made it back into the gene pool. His parents were Pollen and Tony. But that's enough family tree.

This poor Norn had some major genetic problems and was immediately exported. Because of this she is now known as 5MIU, her genetic file.

If anything 5MIU was unlucky to not be a stillborn. from the few minutes I've spent with her she appears to be blind, mute and crippled. Her eyes are perpetually closed and she hasn't spoken a word yet, nor has she taken a step anywhere.

Amazingly though she is still alive and I'm pretty sure she's not deaf. She seems to have small responses to sound and will look towards the Hand when spoken to. With her eyes closed I'm assuming she can't see, but she will swing back and forth as if looking at the Hand when it grabs her attention, although her 'Creature View' is permanently fixed on herself. Aside from this I haven't been able to get her to interact with anything else.

Clearly a very sad case. She will however serve for a very interesting look into genetics. Hopefully we can find what went wrong with her.

GENETICS

LOBES:
She has three mutations from a regular Norn in her LOBES section. When compared to her parents only two of these mutations show up, so clearly the issue for her is in Gene-120 or Gene-122. Of course it could also be a combination of genes from elsewhere.

120: 5 0 Emb B MutDup Lobe #= 6 Loss State Rule: chem3 end end 0 end end, Loss= 5
120: 5 0 Emb B MutDup Lobe #= 6 Loss State Rule: chem3 end end end end end end end, Loss= 5

We can fairly safely rule this gene out as being the cause. Anything after "end" is ignored, so for all intents and purposes, this gene is identical.

 121: 6 0 Emb B MutDup Lobe #= 7 State Rule: state PLUS type0 PLUS type1 end end end, WTA= 1
121: 6 0 Emb B MutDup Lobe #= 7 State Rule: state PLUS type0 end end end end end, WTA= 1

This gene was inherited from Tabby and appears natively in her genome. Lobe #7 is the attention lobe. Despite her many defects 5MIU has she is still capable of paying attention to things.
Having a read over at CDR (Creatures developer Resource) it appears the second gene is actually a bug in the game that was fixed by a workaround in the source code. Apparently the Norns released later on had these gene fixed and this gene now works as intended.

But, in a nutshell what this gene does is calculate the current state of the Norns attention (State), what object in the world is the most stimulating (type0) as well as taking into account anything the Hand has just said (type1) and direct the Norns attention to the most stimulating object.

With this understanding the original Norn genome would have prevented Norns from paying attention to the Hand!...hmm, I'm not sure they actually fixed it...

Gene-122 was a bit of a doozy to figure out. The gene itself reads:

122 Different in File 1   7   0 Emb   B Mut          Lobe #= 8  at X=11 Y=5 is 42 neurons wide and 18 neurons high.  Perflags=0. State Rule: anded1 end end end end end end end , WTA= 0 Dendrite Type 0: Input Lobe=0, Min#=1, Max#=5, Spread=1, Fanout=2


Which has a few extra neurons, but once again it's the same as Tabby's and shouldn't cause a problem. But wait, is it actually the same?

By shear dumb luck I hit the 'Toggle Details' button in the DDNA-Analyzer and found there's a whole heap of hidden details I wasn't aware of. Using this I was able to do a direct comparison between 5MIU and Tabby's genes. There were two discrepancies.

5MIU:  Lobe #= 0  at X=11 Y=5 is 42 neurons wide and 18 neurons high.

Tabby: Lobe #= 8  at X=11 Y=5 is 42 neurons wide and 18 neurons high.

I think this gene actually gets automatically corrected and replace the 'Lobe#0' with an 8, as that's the way it reads in standard mode, however if I'm wrong this could certainly account for a major malfunction. It would mean that instead of having these neurons associated with the concept lobe where they should be, they would instead be attached to the perception lobe. (Opening the genome in the Genetics Kit does in fact fix this gene, so this is not the problem).

The other difference was this chunk of code:

5MIU:  State Rule: anded0 end end end end end end end WTA = 0

Tabby: State Rule: anded1 end end end end end end end WTA = 0 

 Here is what CDR has to say about 'anded'.

anded 0: If all type 0 dendrites are firing then this will be the value of the sum of these dendrites. If any of the type 0 dendrites are not firing then this value will be 0.

anded 1: If all type 1 dendrites are firing then this will be the value of the sum of these dendrites. If any of the type 1 dendrites are not firing then this value will be 0.

Now, I'm kind of guessing here, but what I think this means is that instead of type 0 dendrites (stimulation from world), type 1 dendrites (Hand talking) will be calculated. What this might mean is that 5MIU is incapable of being stimulated by the world around her and will only react to the Hand.

This in fact seems to be the case. 5MIU will periodically spin around without reason and aside from that she will only respond to the Hand.

Doing a very quick Google search there doesn't appear to be an exact match to a human condition, however a vegetative state comes pretty close. Technically these coma patients don't respond to any stimuli, however there is no real world counterpart to the Hand. They can also have their eyes open, which 5MIU doesn't, but this seems to be a pretty close example.

So, a very sad case of a Norn indeed. However the story doesn't end there. I figured as long as we're being all sciency and investigating genetics, why not put the theory to the test? So I opened the Genetics Kit and 5MIU's genome, found Gene-122 and changed the State Rule from 'anded0' to 'anded1'. I imported the egg into C1 and hatched it.

Much to my amazement and relief out popped a little girl Norn who immediately opened her eyes and looked towards the egg that is still flying in the Albian skies. As far as I can tell, she seems to be a perfectly normal Norn, although with a hit of Tabby's genes I'm sure she'd be smarter than the average Norn!

 Here she is walking around the Garden with Gregor, learning to speak English. I've named her Miu and she is available for download on the 'Norn Download' page.

Creatures 1 Gen2: Finale

I'm afraid it's all done and dusted. While I played last night the final three Norns, Trillo, Stephanie and Totem all passed away.

I was very happy to snap this last photo of them all together. Even Gregor (who has continued to call himself Enza) managed to make it into the shot. And yes, would you believe that is yet another egg laying beside Stephanie. More on that later.

I was also quite happy to grab two quick shots of Trillo and Totem as they both passed the 12 hour mark. This generation has been quite long lived indeed. Hopefully it points to a stronger gene pool for Gen3.

Long life isn't all that's promised to Gen3, as Totem was at it once again with his libido. Being the only female left in the world, Stephanie was the icon of his affection. At 12:20 and 12:24 hours respectively this was a very late stage for another egg.

I took a quick look at Stephanie's Ageing chemical, afraid this egg might share the same fate as Totem and Causty's child. The chemical was extremely low, but I was confident she would have enough time.

Much to my relief this turned out to be true and Stephanie gave birth to the final egg for generation two. Gregor witnessed the momentous event and took to watching the egg grow while Stephanie rather quickly jumped on the boat and left the Island for a brief moment.

The egg had  barely reached hatching age and been moved to the holding place when Trillo took his final breath and fell asleep for the last time. Although he had been a fantastic eater all his life, Trillo's last hour or so had been a bit of a struggle. Still, the vast majority of his life was amazing and I've no doubt some of his children will continue the gene pool for a long time to come. He died at 13 hours and 10 minutes.

If you looked closely at the above picture of Trillo you would see that there is a sleeping Stephanie on the level above. Less than a minute after Trillo's death, Stephanie fell into the long sleep and followed Trillo on one last adventure. Although Stephanie had quite a bit of trouble eating later in life, she had an adventurous streak since birth and had traversed the whole of Albia in her time. She died at 12 hours and 40 minutes.

With Totem being the last Norn and having an extremely low Ageing chemical it was clear his time was nearly up as well. I knew it would take a lot out of him, but I wanted to take him back to his place of birth and see if I couldn't get him to meet one of his children before passing. I bundled him into the boat for his final adventure.

A little slow on his feet, Totem took his time getting to the piano. I would have liked to hear him play one last tune, but he assured me time was of the essence and kept walking.

A quick stop over in the garden and Totem recalled all the wonderful times he had spent here, eating Feverfew and playing with the bouncy ball. He was only 12 hours old, but his story was so long it broke the speech bubble. But that was okay, his goofy smile said it all.

We finally arrived at the kitchen where Totem had taken his first steps. The warmth of the fire and the memories lit his face with a grin. This is a Norn who spent most of his life with a smile. I can only hope his children are as lucky.

I picked an egg at random and hatched it, hoping beyond hope it would by chance be one of his. If you look closely at the young Norn there can be no doubt she is his. Aside from being female she has identical body parts. She is most certainly a child of Totem.

The ancient was very happy to see her, giving her a tickle and following her on her first steps.

Regrettably the moment was short lived. The newly hatched could not have been more than three minutes old before Totem took his last breath. He was 12 hours and 48 minutes old at his passing. He wore a smile all his life and many of the eggs below the incubator belong to him.

Totem will be dearly missed, but his spirit will live on in his children, as will all the Gen2 Norns.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next post we'll start hatching the rest of the Gen3 Norns, get their genetic information and export them ready to start a fresh world! I won't do a full run down on their genetics yet, but if I find anything of special interest I'll make a note of it.