Loading and Still Loading a C1 World
Discover Albia has been dark as of late, courtesy of a very odd issue. Shortly after my last visit to Albia, the game suddenly refused to load. If there’s one nightmare an avid Creatures player like me always wants to avoid, it’s just this sort of situation! I took some time off to work on other things, in the hopes that it was just a temporary issue that would resolve itself. When that didn’t work, I went in search of every sort of fix I could think of. I put hours into getting the game to run again, to no avail.
The only slight glimmer of hope in all of this was the error message: “The system cannot find the file specified.” Digging deeper, this is the title image that’s right where it’s always been. Very frustrating! Yet the other positive is that I tried to run the game with other world files, all with the same result. That means Creatures 1 is nonoperational right now, but my Norns and Grendels are safe and sound! I will be making another effort to fix this issue shortly, possibly with a fresh reinstall.
In the meantime, feel free to catch up on some of the older archives of my adventures with Creatures! I have a storyline to continue posting about, although my main goal is to get back into Creatures 1 again. My only hesitation with a reinstall revolves around the fact that I have so many downloads and custom files in various locations. Mapping those files out will take a lot more time. Stay tuned for more updates! I may not be posting at the moment, but Discover Albia is certainly poised to have active posts again in the future! Here’s to a bit of luck in solving this very odd problem!
I wondered why you’d suddenly gone quiet! It’s unfortunate about the install, but at least you’ve not lost the creatures.
It’s quite a frustrating situation, and I know this update isn’t the greatest. It does look like I’ll need to do a reinstall, but everyone will be double backed-up just to be on the safe side! Hopefully I can get things up and running again within the next week or so. Creatures 2 runs fine, so it’s definitely something with the Creatures 1 files. Part of me thinks it’s my virus protection software, which was updated just before this error happened. C1 has some rather generic file names, like “Launcher.exe,” which I think is sometimes picked up as a potential virus program. I’ll get it working, and will have a much happier update to share when that happens! I also shouldn’t be away for so long, and I apologize for that bout of silence!
Wow, I’m so sorry to hear this bummer of an error struck your game! But so glad to hear your world and creatures are intact. This sorta thing is more what one would expect to get out of C3/DS and especially Creatures 2 (Oh, Creatures 2.) Nonetheless, sometimes a break can really refresh you and I’m glad you haven’t given up. ^^ I always love reading your creatures updates–you put it so eloquently. Not to mention, though I played the game way back when I was a kid, only recently watching your tutorial video did I learn you have to teach norns WHAT objects are, not just the vocabs. No wonder my norns tend to be… not too bright! For all those years, too!
It’s true, sometimes anti-virus programs really dislike creatures — Avast recently was randomly complaining about my Creatures 3 Genetics kit… but malwarebytes didn’t have a problem.
One more thing… I’m not sure if this is true for C1, but my DS has broken in a similar fashion and I’ve had to fresh install. Sometimes I just copy the images, sound, body data and objects and works upon reinstalling, just to save time redownloading all those COBs again. Not sure if it’ll work, or if that’s a smart thing to do, but jus throwing that out there! If all else, it could be tried before a full clean install.
Anyways, sorry to ramble! So awesome to hear you’re hangin’ in there and looking forward to reading your stories too!
I appreciate your very kind words! And I’m certainly glad the tutorial videos are useful, even to those familiar with Creatures. I hope to get more of those up when I fix my game. I’m going to be doing something similar to what you mentioned with backing up (and double-backing up) all of the files I currently have. Likely tomorrow will be a big day for trying to get things working again. I’m confident that I can get it working again: The trick is just to figure out exactly what to do to get there! Hopefully that just requires a quick reinstall and moving of some files!
I hope it gets fixed!
Thanks, Chip: Me, too!