skerit / albian-command

A Creatures 2 wolfling run monitor

Albian Command

An application to monitor your Creatures 2 norns

Warning

This is an early version of the application, please make backups of your worlds & norns before using it.

Features

• Automatically name new creatures
• Make creatures remember their name
• Pickup a creature
• Teleport a creature to a favourite location
• Teach the entire language to a creature (but have it remember its own name)
• S16 sprite browser
• Name manager
• Game speed changer
• Decentralized P2P warp implementation

You can observe your creatures in the Creatures tab. Actions include: Pickup the creature with the hand Teleport the creature to a favourite location Teach Language will make the creature know the entire vocabulary + remember its correct name Export will export the creature to a predefined directory, making it show up in the Stored tab. It can also be warped from that tab Inseminate can be used to make a female creature pregnant Pregnancy options are available for pregnant creatures There is also the Game speed slider on the bottom left: it can be used to change the speed of the game.
Stored creatures (the ones you Export in the Creatures tab) can be sent to other on-line users. Just click the creature, click the Warp to ... button and select the recipient.
Creatures Warped to you will end up on this tab. Click on the creature to see the optional message the sender added, and to Import it into your world.
Certain settings can be changed in the settings tab.
Albian Command comes with a bunch of names preloaded, but you can delete these or add your own.
If you want to use the warp, you'll have to register a username on the Network tab. Once a username has been chosen, click on the Register on the network button to claim it. Then you will receive a long password/passphrase. This can never be changed, so keep it somewhere safe. If you lose it, you'll lose access to your chosen username.

Project history

I started this application back in 2016, after only a few days of initial development it was largely forgotten about until februari of 2018.

It took an entire week of development to reach a usable state, version 0.1.0 was released on the 17th of februari 2018.

I chose to use NW.JS v0.14.7 because it was the only version that still supported Windows XP. I mainly play Creatures 2 in a Windows XP VM, it's also the lowest supported version of the GOG release.

Albian Command is actually split into 2 parts: this NW.JS frontend and the creatures library written in JavaScript & VB6.

Yes, you read that correct: the creatures library uses a VB6 executable to interface with the Creatures 2 application. The source code is also fully available in that repository.

Project future

I hope to add many more features, like:

• Automatically unpausing eggs
• Automatic exporting & importing of creatures
• Warping to off-line users
• Contact lists
• Some sort of crash management (because we all know C2 likes to crash)

Author

You can follow me on twitter: @skeriten

License

GPL-3.0