Designing farting norns (Tutorial)

Many colored alternative breeds exist for all of the creatures games.

In this tutorial I will show you how to design a new breed for C1.
But not one that involves making new sprites for new colored or punk Norns, but rather one that implements new Norn behaviours and possibilities.
Using those techniques one could add loads of interesting behaviours to Norns such as :

• Adding a kicking stance and associated behaviours to fight off Grendel more efficiently
• Making Norns that can reinvigorate and heal by resorting to meditation
• Enabling actual telekinesis in Norns ( yes, this IS possible with some work )
• Making jumping Norns
• Mimicking more realistic life behaviour ( digestion, elimination ... )
• ...

But this time we will be:

Making Farting Norns:

Generating arbitray In-game eggs from CAOS commands, while also investigating the Norn reproductive system.

Okay, so in a previous article we've seen how to generate .egg files from genomes with a custom tool.
Even if it may be a nice skill to add to your toolbox, it might not be the most practical everyday tool to inject genomes in your game.

Wouldn't it be more practical if we could directly create ingame eggs from arbitrary genomes/couples as if they were just laid ? This is not only possible but also quite easy.

Some available tools such as the Genome injector on the awesome CDR website already perform that feat. ( Be sure to check out the whole site, as it is definitely the single most complete and comprehensive resource on writing C1 and C2 custom programs )

From there we could go the easy way, as Chris conveniently included a detailed description of the CAOS magic involved in spawning C2 eggs from genomes in the readme file the genome injector ( thanks for that Chris ! ).

But I'll rather show you how you're supposed do find out that information by yourself when starting from scratch, as it will serve us better in the long run when investigating other undocumented game features.
We will be doing this for C1, as Chris' tool only seems to work on Creatures 2.

We will use the CAOS language,it's documentation and some external tools to try to understand what exactly happens during the whole Norn reproductive process, so we can mimic it with a custom and more practical tool.

Generating Creatures 2 Egg files with Python

The Creatures 2 .egg file format is one of the few well documented aspects of the game series.

Why bother writing about it on a blog about investigating undocumented game aspects then ?
Well, the ability to generate .eeg files is a pretty simple skill that might prove an interesting addition for anybody writing Creatures tools.

The aim here is just to show how quick and easy it is