Kreatures
This article is about a project that is in development. Information may change significantly as the project progresses. |
Kreatures (working title) is a project run by Geat Masta which aims to create a spiritual successor to Creatures. Kreatures is the name of the engine not the game.
History[edit]
Geat_masta's original plan for Kreatures was to acquire the Creatures IP and release the next entry in the series. Based on early development footage, it would have used the same sprite-based creatures as previous games, but animated in such a way as not to require separate images for each position a body part can hold.
This idea was abandoned because once the creature animations are tweened to 60FPS they break; the genome cannot hold enough keyframes for a modern game. Therefore the creatures must use 3D models and armature animations; furthermore a day/night cycle was desired and sprites would look out of place against the changing lighting of the background.
He later decided to rework Kreatures into an original property Lifaundi—-named for the prior Lifandi project—-featuring different Creatures for the player to raise. Lifaundi has been referenced as a mixtures of several different types of games with only the creatures-like parts being made public.
Engine features that have appeared in preview videos or public comments include:
- Creatures use diploid genetics
- 2^36 possible creature types rather than the 4 in C3/DS
- 65536 breed slots (with variants each breed slot is equivalent to 255 C3/DS breed slots)
- Procedural textures
- Gender system allows for clownfish-like gender transitions; as well as reptile like temperature sex determinism.
- Plants are based on L-systems
- Networking capabilities allow connection to web browsers
- Room specific gravity strength/direction
- Metaroom defined day/night cycles and orbits
- Ring worlds like albia and metarooms like C3/DS supported natively
- Metarooms may be nested inside vehicles
- Agents are designed to be installable by other agents for example:
Package::Install( title:“Lifts”, author:“john doe”, where: my_new_metaroom, details: “”” [{ “type”: “bamboo lift”, “where”: [1, 2], “buttons”: [ { “metal button”: [1.5, 2] } { “wood button”: [1.5, -1] } ] }]”””);
- Agents have been sandboxed to prevent name conflicts or script number conflicts.
- Metarooms have been sandboxed to prevent overlap.
- Rooms can flood with water.
- Gadgets may send water through ports.
- Connectable gadgets have been fixed to be turing complete.
- ports may send 4 variables at a time instead of 1.
- A water table is simulated with water soaking into the ground and fertilizing it
- 24 CA variables
- 5 different ground nutrients that don’t count as CA variables (ph, mineral, nitrogen, thermal, vitamin)
- 4 room properties that don’t count as CA variables (thermal, humidity, oxygen, pressure)
- atmospheric current simulation creating wind flows.
Features present that may be cut:
- Ability for creatures to remember sequences of actions (remembering push button after push button causing stupidity spiral)
- Body part assembly (depends on procedural animation vs traditional animation)
Features that have been cut from the engine:
- Different types of fluid such as oil and lava
- Procedural creature bodies similar to petz (doesn’t mutate well)
- State variable rules in brain (doesn’t mutate well)
Related Links[edit]
External links[edit]
- Geat Masta's YouTube Channel - Video updates on the project
- Kreatures - Development thread (No longer updated)
- Spil & Creatures Intellectual Property- Discussion about obtaining the Creatures IP
- particle system editor for the game
- Information about genetics systems in the game
- List of different script functions available in the engine