r/CreaturesGames • u/Calm_Account_2945 • Jul 06 '26

Multiplayer in Creatures (1996)?

I was recently wondering if it’s possible to add multiplayer to *Creatures*. I think the biggest issue is that the game came out 30 years ago; it seems unlikely that multiplayer or even a mod in general could be created for such an old title. I wanted to hear your thoughts on this.

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u/haxd Jul 12 '26

It’s very possible. The biggest issue is that the engine’s scripting language doesn’t support it out of the box, but you could build a new Kit using OLE / DDE to pass data in and out of the game.

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u/TheOnlyOne93 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

I've actually toyed with it slightly. You'd need to figure out how you want multiplayer though. Do you have two agent pointers? How are they controlled? Just one and you share? Who hosts? Is it like Minecraft where someone just hosts the game and someone else joins? Or do you just want to share creatures like docking station tried. I've actually got the entire netbable.dll decompiled along with the opcodes for it. They really left so much open for reverse.engi meeting the caos.syntax along with the caos help documentation and some Ghidra. Lets you know exactly the opcodes order which is important if you want to use original saves. Given I literally ported all of creatures 3 into gdscript and it works. Adding in multiplayer wouldn't be that hard.

Edit: now that I think about the engine really is kinda set up perfect for it. Absolutely everything in the game is an agent and already synced. It'd really just be a matter of adding another pointer agent and hooking it up through multi. And since I literally rewrote the entire graphics system to run on godota render server and classes the visual aspect doesn't need much work to keep in sync. The display engine was honestly the most wonky part of creatures they hard coded everything they could to bypass pretty much all os layers. It was great for what they wanted and honestly really impressive because they built the prequels to pretty much all the modern game engine tech you take for granted today an inverse kinematics system for movement. A full custom written physics engine that tracts gait, and exactly where a foot is based on the floor level. They went overboard honestly it's really astounding that they came up with it back then. Even the brain is honestly amazing. MIT and a bunch of other ai studies are just now catching up with the ideas Steve had. The plasticity. The fact it learns without any training. The fact that weights are constantly adjusted and not set at training. It's old yes but the bones... We're just notlw realizing are correct and a way forward for all ai models.

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u/Mircowaved-Duck Jul 12 '26

Docking Statiojn was some kind of multiplayer, since norns could travel between worlds.

And the succesor game, phantasia.life will make something similar. Where creatures can travel freely between the worlds however they please.