Notes:Creation

This page contains notes for the game Creation.

.Lev File Format

Creation splits its actual map data and level Thing content out into two separate files, much like Syndicate Wars. However, the actual .lev files seem to use a simplistic preliminary format based on that of Magic Carpet's Thing data. Level files seem to have a fixed size of 28KBs. They pad out the entries with zero bytes until this size is reached. It's unknown what the actual Thing limit is, the older level file BDEFAULT.LEV has 339 Things defined.

The file begins with what seems to be a two byte header. This contains the number of Thing entries within the file. After this there seems to be a blank 10 byte entry. It's not know exactly when the entries begin or end, but it's likely at byte 12, giving an even number. As such each entry begins with zero bytes. Each entry is 10 bytes long. Things only seem to be positioned in two dimensions like Magic Carpet. They must therefore be hardcoded to be either ground-based objects (plants, fungus), or sea creatures (arbitrarily placed at some fixed height above the terrain).

Thing Entry

Things are defined as follows.

Variable	Offset (hex)	Length hex)	Notes
Unused1	0x0	0x1
Thing Type	0x1	0x1
Thing SubType	0x2	0x1
Unused2	0x3	0x1
XPos	0x4	0x1
YPos	0x5	0x1
Unused4	0x6	0x1
Unused5	0x7	0x1
Unused6	0x8	0x1

Thing Types

The following Thing types have been identified. There may be more that are unused.

Name	Thing Type	Thing SubType	Notes
Player	2	0	Seems to only be one per map. Adding more does nothing, so probably the start position is hardcoded anyway
Dolphin	2	1
Killer Whale	2	2	These seem to be invisible. There's some mechanic where time elasped or distance travelled (seems to be the latter) must be met where the game then teleports Daisy the killer whale to the player's position, so it's likely linked to this
Fish shoal	3	2
Plants	6	2
Fungus	7	1