Robin Duckett

#projects

What I have been up to

A short list of the personal projects I have had on the go lately.

I have not written much here for a while. Here is the short version of what has been keeping me busy lately.

  • Ported the C2E engine behind Creatures 3 and Docking Station to iPhone, iPad and Apple Silicon Macs, and it is now in TestFlight.
  • Published c2e-shaders, a set of CESHAD shader packs for the Community Edition engine: pick-up agents for a magnifier, fireball, glowing crystal, plasma orb and water droplet, plus full-screen bloom and CRT sources.
  • Started the same treatment for the 1998 Creatures 2 engine, so Albia and its norns run natively on an M-series Mac.
  • Modernised the pristine Creatures 2 Windows sources (MFC 6, DirectDraw, Visual C++ 6 project files) so the original game builds and runs on a current Windows graphics stack.
  • Recreated NetNatsue, a cross-platform stand-in for the lost Babel networking libraries, so the source code of Docking Station available on Archive.org can be built with networking support again.
  • Built natsue-biotech-theme, a single-file sci-fi biotech skin for the Natsue creature-server web UI.
  • Built a 5,606-neuron GPU simulation of a fairyfly wasp brain in Rust, trained by evolution and R-STDP.
  • Created a Farming Simulator mod that lets you paint your vehicles any colour.
The magnifier agent.
Injecting shader agents.
The plasma orb.
The Docking Station Ark shown as a wide cross-section against a starfield, running full-screen on macOS, with an Astro Norn name label visible.
The same engine on an Apple Silicon Mac.
A native macOS window titled Creatures 2 showing a cross-section of Albia with its underground caves, ocean and wooden huts.
Creatures 2 as a native macOS app.
A dark sci-fi web interface headed EEMFOO-WARP, showing a norn named Alvin with a general stats panel, two photos, and a numbered event log running from egg through to adult.
The biotech theme on a Natsue server.

There is a longer post coming about the fairyfly brain.