C12DS



C12DS is an addon metaroom for Creatures 3 and Docking Station, faithfully recreating the Creatures 1 Albia in all its glory, with several new useful features. The project was also known as C1 to DS and the C1 Metaworld before 'C12DS' was coined in an announcement news post by AntiNorn. It was begun in July 2000 and released five years later, August 2005, at the end of the CCSF.

Download links can be found below.

History
Since the project's inception, the team underwent many changes under Lacota. Currently only Lacota and Clucky are working on the project.

Started July 12th 2000, C12DS was Lacota's dream, brought on by a conversation with Hex, who had expressed her distaste for the gloom of the Docking Station artwork. The first three months of the project were led by Lacota and Apollo, completing what was then called the "Beta 1". This was a collection of uncompressed agent files, and an entire metaroom layout consisting of 150 rooms plotted by hand (this was before the Room Editor became available).

There was a slow period of around a year. This is when Clucky entered the project. The project went through several ups and downs depending on the availability of people on the team. On Boxing Day (26th December) 2003, the Public Beta was released. Work slowed to a crawl as members became fewer and fewer; however, the persistence of Clucky and Lacota has kept the project going.

The C12DS project was at one point brought to a screeching halt due to some legal questions that were raised. The issue was solved with the following requirements, in an agreement with Creature Labs:


 * Only things found in the Freeloader.com version could be used.
 * It must require either Docking Station or Creatures 3 to be installed.
 * It could not be sold for a profit.

C12DS was released after five years of effort on the 14th of August, 2005, as a part of the Creatures Community Spirit Festival.

For Christmas 2007, the C12DS Christmas Pack was released, containing many agents from the original Christmas Pack.

Contents
In its final, released state, C12DS contains:
 * C1 Life Kit Contents
 * Nine Norn breeds, including the Dodgy Norns and 8 original Creatures 1 breeds.
 * One Grendel breed
 * The Disc effect seen in the first and second games (seamless world wraparound)
 * The SAM is back
 * Identical or better reproduction
 * World Switcher compatibility
 * The original music converted to MNG format
 * A readme full of interesting tid-bits about the history of the project as well as some things that didn't make the cut
 * The project mascot, Eem-Foo

Breeds

 * Banana Norns (Geat K)
 * White Haired Pixie Norns (Geat L)
 * Horse Norns (Geat M)
 * Purple Mountain Norns (Geat N)
 * Forest Norns (Geat O)
 * Ron Norns (Geat P)
 * Santa Norns (Geat R)
 * Dodgy Norns (Geat Y)
 * C1 Grendel (Grendel H)

Credits
During the five years of the project there were two main groups of people, seperated at the point where Clucky joined. There was little overlap between the two teams.

Team 1

 * Lacota - Coder and Project Manager
 * Apollo - Lead Programmer/CAOS (also a beta tester)
 * Data - Coder
 * Helen - Coder
 * Fizzstickle - Image Conversion
 * Skywalker - Breed Conversion
 * MNB - Breed Bug fixing
 * C2BMike - Dodgy Norn sprites and original BLK file

Team 2

 * Lacota - Creative Director and Project Manager
 * Clucky - Lead Programmer/CAOS
 * Don - Breed Re-conversion

Beta Testers

 * Don
 * FosterMum
 * Sharon
 * TreeSprite
 * ElasticMuffin
 * GreenReaper
 * bdonlan
 * A few other Siners

Older links

 * C12DS Release Thread (currently unavailable)
 * Preview shots and download (including the beta patch which fixes many bugs) at The High Tech Hand
 * An inside look at C12DS via an interview with Lacota