Making a C1 and C2 Tricorder (knowing exactly what any cob does at a glance)

Creatures 2 could easily have become my favorite game in the series.
But as has already been pretty well explained, it was way to frustrating on many levels.

One of the major reasons I never really got into the game was the overwhelming quantity of new game items, plants and foods .
No guide existed at the time to explain their effects, and even today the few that exist lack in completeness or precision.And without any reference it was a very frustrating experience not to know what could or could not be eaten.I'll admit it, many of my C2 Norns never ate anything beyond cheese carrots or nuts by fear of the unknown.

Writing such a guide might be an option, but what about the various additional cobs one might not be aware of , or all future additions?
Can we be a little more clever about that?
What if we got a tool that simply told us what a cob does by hovering the mouse over it ?
That would be a creatures Tricorder of sorts, that we will learn to build together in this article.

Finding out what is what in Creatures 1 & 2

One of the most frustrating aspects of trying to understand C1 or C2 cobs might just be the first step you need to take.

Say you are looking at an object, and wonder "What is this object's classifier so I can look up it's scripts ?"
Or the other way round ? What if you find an interesting script and wonder which object it governs?

I've found no easy way so far to answer those questions, and got tired pretty quick of trying to manually look up my targets each time.
 
Cross referencing the various online lists of classifiers didn't cut it either: many of them are at best incomplete when not downright wrong.And they are limited to the standard game items, with obviously no way to reference every single COB ever made.

Things don't have to be this way.
Read through this very quick article with me, and grab a tool that makes the job as simple as hovering the hand over an object to get the needed information.

Parsing the Creatures 1 Graveyard file

 
One more victim of my file format reversing spree : the "The Graveyard" file containing all entries of C1 cemetery.

Parsing it will allow us to retrieve/edit/add all entries from this game file.

Understanding in game stores (Doctor's page and Aprodisiacs). aka "Health" and "Aphro" files.

There are two "stores" in Creatures 1, at least that's how I call them.

Those are the panels allowing you to inject additional items to the world through the Doctor's page and the aphrodisiacs page from the reproduction kit.

The C1 "Stores"

In this post I will show you reversing of those stores file formats, so we can replenish, parse, and edit them.

Parsing the Creatures 1 "TheRegister" file. (extracting Norn birthdates and owner information).

This will be a real quick article about parsing the Creatures1 "TheRegister" file.
This is like a primitive version of the C2 history files. It's the file that holds all creature information saved when you register a creature's birth.

They contain information about the Norn such as name, parents, date of birth and all owner info.

There's nothing really fancy about reversing and understanding the file format, so let's get this done.

Investigating Creatures 1 Teleporters

Alright, despite having loads of stuff in store, maybe I'll take a break from gory reversing stuff for this post, before I loose all of my readers (yeah, something like "both of them") :)

So why not take this opportunity to study something more generic? what about investigating how C1 teleporters work?

A happy Norn family, ready for exploration of time and space.

It only requires a bit of CAOS reading and your favorite C1 CAOS tool.

Connecting to the Creatures DDE interface from python

We've recently seen how easy it is to connect to the C1 and C2 DDE interfaces using VB.

This time we will show how easy it is to connect to those interfaces using python, which will prove useful in upcoming articles.

Connecting to a DDE server from inside python is can be a quick and easy process.
The hardest part is in acquiring the correct modules to do so, (which can be a real pain if you take it from the wrong side), there are also a couple specifics that make debugging the first DDE connections unreliable.
Fortunately I've sorted those perks out for you,and will show you the single quickest and easy way to connect to the Creatures 1 and 2 DDE interface from python.

Connecting to the Game: accessing the DDE interface with 3 lines of code. (Tutorial)

We've been studying a lot of stuff lately, most of it involving running CAOS commands against C1 and C2 games.
C3 has a convenient built-in CAOS console, and various third party tools also propose that feature for C1 and C2.

But how would you go about implementing this kind of connectivity inside your own programs?
The simplest way to connect to a running C1 or C2 game is through the DDE interface (Dynamic Data Exchange). Also it REALLY is simple even if you barely know anything about programming, so this might be worth checking out.If you never programmed anything and don't have any development tools handy, you could initiate a DDE connection even from inside an Excel macro using VBA.Also the C1 and C2 DDE interfaces being strictly identical, you'll be writing code only once, and be able to use it in both games right now, without any change.

By sending the game some basic CAOS commands and reading their results you can reproduce all of the game functionalities and then some more: reading a Norn's needs and chemicals levels in realtime, selecting Norns and Grendels, carrying them, monitoring their brains,etc...

This time I show you a very quick overview to get you started in pumping CAOS in and out the C1 and C2 games.More advanced use cases or details will come in futher posts.