Docking Station is quite interesting, i completely missed this one (now that i remember, someone mentionned it somewhere in this thread last year)
a few notes :
the online server is long dead , and if you use the shortcut to Docking Station that is installed on your desktop, by default it is pointing to InstallBlast.exe that will try to connect to the non-existing server, after a while of it failing to do so, you'll then access the main menu.
So instead of using that InstallBlast.exe , launch the game by using engine.exe (that is too in the game directory) it will lead you into the game main menu directly without the trying to connect anywhere
Additionally, you want to play offline too, as online is dead, be sure to either install the DS Offline Option mentionned on the
Docking Station download page , or install the C12DS free expansion that contain apparently the offline option too .
The game by default will launch windowed, but it will require you to set your desktop to 16bits colors. If you don't want to do the 16 bits then reset it to 32 bits every time after playing, go to the game directory
for me it is in
C:\Program Files\Docking Station\
open the user.cfg with a text editor and change
FullScreen 0
into
FullScreen 1
so instead of windowed it will launch full screen, and you will not have to set your screen to 16 bit color manually, i wish it was possible to keep windowed while keeping your 32 bits color desktop, but apparently not possible.
Oh and make sure to get the C12DS expansion, as Docking Station was made to be connected to Creatures 3, if you don't have C3, as a standalone Docking Station is rather limited in scale, only 3 or 4 "rooms" and that's all, nothing to really explore or discover and then it gets boring quickly.
At least with the expansion you'll get some more world for those silly norn things to explore.