Creatures Caves

Yeah, the egg autogenerator only kicks in when the population drops below 4, so if those four don't feel like starting families, it does get a little stale. Maybe I'll look into changing it a little.

Finally found it in me to put the stream up again. I still keep having these delusions the DS warp will actually be active again one day. Finally got around to writing a simple wiki page too! And I'm hoping to redo the website eventually, possibly making use of my PHP-learnings to help things work a little more smoothly.

I'd still like to work towards making adoption and other interaction possible; I'm just unsure how to go about it right now.

Initially I planned on just doing it all through the DS client-- you would basically inject a client agent that could "talk" to the server agent running on LNA, provided both parties were online and the DS server was up. Adoption requests and other interactions could be sent that way. Unfortunately there's a little too much lag between when the video happens and when you actually see it for tickle/slap buttons to actually be effective, but functions to drop food in front of a certain creature, teleport a stuck creature, and so on would certainly be viable.

But with the volatility of the warp server, as well as registrations being down, I'm starting to wonder if I should be aiming outside the warp server. I have no idea how I would go about this as of yet, but if I really got my head into it, I would ultimately like to write an external application that both can send CAOS lines to my DS client and read data from a webserver, so instead of having to be online in and run a certain agent, it would be a matter of just clicking buttons on the LNA site. There could be a lot more possibilities that way, maybe even a way to upload norns that will be automatically imported into LNA so creatures can be sent in regardless of the server's status, and vice-versa.

Now that's an incredibly lofty goal. I know it can be done, but I'm not even sure how to start. But for the long term, if DS registrations stay down, it may be the only way LNA can maintain its purpose. There is the question then, if so much effort is worth it, especially considering the low interest in Creatures and the even lower interest in watching and controlling a video stream of something you can just play for yourself.

My inclination is to just work on the client-based stuff for now, and tackle the more ambitious stuff when the server inevitably goes down, assuming I maintain interest. Even though I dislikes the idea of putting effort into coding a clunky version of something I hope to replace, there's a very real possibility that a web-based LNA interface will just flat out never happen, considering the amount of work involved, while a DS-client-based one is already well underway. And you guys -know- how bad I am about taking my time on huge projects, hah.

I guess I'm just rambling at this point, but I would like you guys' thoughts. Maybe I should just bide my time and see how C4 affects us?