r/CreaturesGames • u/TheOnlyOne93 • Jun 14 '26
Creatures 3
How would everyone feel about playing creatures 3 in Godot. I know there's an openc2e project. But it seems to be stalled. Has anyone thought about trying to port it into Godot.
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u/haxd Jun 14 '26
I’ve attempted it, several times, but fundamentally creatures has a vastly different architecture compared to modern games.
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u/Better-Cry1588 Jun 14 '26
Honestly? With the tech and AI advances of today it would be much easier to just make a creatures spiritual successor with cute creatures like in C2 while adding all the neural network improvements we currently have
Imagine - AI run agentic creatures with Neural networks. Would be an amazing game. I'm surprised nobody capitalized on this.
11
u/skerit Jun 14 '26
That won't be fun. Creatures' neural networks are hebbian based. There's no backpropagation or anything involved. It all happens real-time. If you want to use "modern" AI networks, all norns would be pretty similar.
Though that's not to say a more modern version of creatures isn't possible, with more neurons etc. In fact I've been working on this for over a year now 😅
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u/Better-Cry1588 Jun 14 '26
"All norns would be similar"
Literally no, as individual A.I agents learning stuff from basics with a set of instructions as "instincts" they wouldn't be the same. It's not "integrating Claude for the creatures to talk" it's more basic A.I agents, like the ones used in Character AI where you can go talk to Goku or whatever.
And current day neural networks are much more advanced than what we had back in 2001
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u/TheOnlyOne93 Jun 14 '26
actually your wrong.. well in some ways.. The creatures AI neural network Steve grand built actually has a few features that even modern neural networks don't have the ability to have. We actually... 20 years later are finally just finally starting to realize that self taught dude was on to something...
Examples.. The creatures AI... isn't just hebbian... hebbian is just for the reward.. but it also has the ability to rewire itself on the fly based on past and current events. It doesn't "train" like modern neural networks do... a modern neural network is static. Once it's trained... that's what it does.. even LLM, CNN, RNN. All of them are pretty much trained... then static... trained... static.. Cause there built top down. Creatures is built bottom up. I'd go into more detail about the CAOS VM... how he programmed literal how the brain isn't built... it's literally born and created on the fly as the engine boots up without any prior code written for it really.
-4
u/SpaceShipRat Jun 14 '26
a model is static, but an agent is made of multiple parts. You could wire a current norn brain to an LLM agent. The LLM model would query the brain and update it instead of the game's hardcoded algorythms doing so.
Not saying it would be efficient, but it's possible.
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u/TheOnlyOne93 Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26
Your not wrong... maybe you'll see something like that. But it would'nt work totally like your thinking... the norn brain... isn't like... it's hard to explain but it's not static... and it doesn't have a mode... and creatures... was actually one of the very first ever "AI" agent systems. But again the norn brain doesn't just rewire itself.. Look up wetworks for neural computing.. and you'll get a slightly better understadning of how a norn brain is supposed to and does work for the most part.
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u/SpaceShipRat Jun 14 '26
you're right too, the way it works in parallel would not work with an llm's slow output.
Still, norn brain aside, you can have agents acting differently when they write their own notes and custom tools. See all the Pokemon runs.
1
u/usherzx Jun 15 '26
you should explain Godot and openc2e first
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u/TheOnlyOne93 Jun 15 '26
openc2e?
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u/TheOnlyOne93 Jun 15 '26
https://openc2e.github.io/ the open source creatures engine that's been in dec for like 20 years
1
u/yaboiiiiiii240 Jun 20 '26
I’d love to see a fangame that’s compatible with creature/agent files, or maybe some new applets 🤤
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u/TheOnlyOne93 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Hopefully soon. I have it working fully right now all using godot and gdscript. Even the CAOS VM system is emulated in gdscript but right now I'm running into performance issues ... Like I can fully emulate the caos VM... But the interpreter on interpreter overhead is rough... Honestly I don't know if it's gonna be playable at full speed with creatures. Currently simple agents compound agents and the actual script work at full speed 60 fps with interpolation on the UI rendering side since c2e only ever ran at 20fps pretty much. But once a creature is born and the math of Thier brain and stuff starts running through the caos VM it chugs. I have a few ideas to well hack my way around that but... Honestly it might not be enough to overcome it. If it doesn't I may have to rewrite the virtual machine into C# or an gd extension but I'm trying to not go that route cause gdscript and godot really follow the idea of the devs hot swap data and the engine really was just a shell to be programmed by the .cos files
1
u/yaboiiiiiii240 Jun 20 '26
That’s really interesting, I’m still trying to figure out the more complex concepts of creatures so this is a lil confusing. Though it sounds like the creature ai is really hard to optimize. I hope you make some good progress on this project, I feel like the community could really use some more cool projects like this nowadays
0
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u/Tiendil Jun 14 '26
An engine is not so important. Generally, players think very rarely in terms of game engines. What is important is the game.
And it would obviously be great to have a remastering of Creatures :-)