Creatures Caves

I don’t really play much since the good old Windows XP times. Sometimes I try to start a lasting norn breeding session, but at one point the game always crashes and becomes unplayable.

GOG versions of creatures are more buggy then using old DS installation with C3 CD and patches.
The problem with the GOG versions is that they create additional user folders(in My Games) which create confusion and path errors.
But lets be honest, in the 24 years I played creatures, I never had a bug free time, Creatures games where always buggy. There are also a lot of bug causing cobs/agents/breeds around.
I hope that one day the Linux versions(OpenC) will be fully functional and bug free.

But the whole creatures engine needs some updates. We need a messiah, a skilled programmer, someone who modifies the whole game or writes a new one based on the engine, a total conversion.

While the artificial intelligences have been modified and becoming a top seller for companies to sell us their product and bomb us with endless advertisement, artificial life has never evolved in its complexity.

Creatures lacks the ability to evolve body parts, size, and other traits. Also their reproduction system is not realistic, because it is not genetically determined. They cannot become live bearers, hermaphrodites and so on, because they lack genetic base for this, its based on scripts that cannot evolve. They cannot become a species based on genetic incompatibility over time, their species is determined by scripts. They cannot evolve their brain physiology, the game crashes if that happens.

The environment does not stimulate evolution, because the worlds are too small, have no lasting ecosystem and do not reward complex behavior or niche strategies, but biochemical immortality.
Evolution does not work the way we know it without species competition and co-existence, support, parasitism, symbiosis, so the other lifeforms in the game must be able to evolve too.
Today's computers have the power to simulate a far more complex worlds then the systems of the late 90s but the creatures games are not optimized for modern machines.

A game world for a sandbox game can easily be totally modifiable like in Terraria, Starbound or Minecraft, the same would be nice for a new creatures game. 2D is a nice base and there would be no limit to design gigantic and complex 2D worlds full of life, even solar systems. Imagine a whole planet, completely changeable in structure, flora, fauna, with oceans and volcanism, weather system, natural disasters.

Creatures was once thought as an experiment for artificial life and intelligence, but I think it has reached its goal. It is nice for people who never played it, for them it seems magical, alive, mysterious, but for the veterans I think there are only the limitations of the project to be seen after over 20 Years.

But its strange that it got never a successor in all that years, why? The same goes of all robot pets and other virtual pets. They never evolved since Aibo and Tamagotchi. The Petz game series was also a dead end.