Vondell's Current Projects

[(Designer)Vondell]

Glad to be here Jan. :)

Now I'm working on the fun part!

 

 

[(Designer)Vondell]

Now off to composite the images in Photoshop! :)

[(Designer)Vondell]

:)!

[Fern]

It is possible that the Animal Configuration Checker is being used with a 64-bit MS Windows version. The version of the Animal Configuration Checker at ZKL probably only works with 32-bit MS Windows versions. I have an Animal Configuration Checker version that supposedly works with both 64-bit and 32-bit MS Windows versions, and some others have said it works with 64-bit versions, but I have not verified that myself, which is why I have not put it at ZKL yet.

For animals that use the in-game anteater as the base, usually the hinddig folders are unused and can be deleted, assuming dig_hind has not been added to any behavior sets in the ".uca". If the hinddig folders are deleted, then any "dig_hind = hinddig" line should be removed from the ".uca".

I recommend setting cFootprintY to 2 for the tortoise. Most land animals in ZT have cFootprintY set to 2. It is unlikely to make a difference for 2 animals sharing the same space, but could make a difference when the animal is near foliage or other objects in the exhibit. However, usually a greater reason for any unusual looking graphics in an exhibit is because most people creating animals do not center the animal images in Zoot grid lines.

Most people do not rename folder names for an animal. So icanteat and planteat would be left. They would not conflict with other things because they are inside a unique folder: 493793c5. I would have expected a lsmantea folder as well, which would also be left. Having these folder names allows one to see what animal was used as a base.

The lsmantea folder would contain the icon to use in the animal list inside ZT, which is different than the purchase menu list. But when loading a purchase menu icon into APE, APE incorrectly loads the purchase menu icon as the animal list icon as well. For in-game animals, purchase menu icons have backgrounds while animal list icons do not. Zoot can be used to load animal list icons. Animal list icons are usually smaller versions of the E view of the animation associated with the idle action. In-game animals use adult graphics for the animal list icons, even for the young. Sometimes I create an animal list icon for the young as well. If I do for something based on the anteater, I would create a lsyantea folder, create a lsyantea.ani file in this folder similar to lsmantea.ani, use Zoot to load the icon, and update the ".uca" to have a [y/Characteristics/Strings] section with cListImageName and cPrefIcon lines.

Usually new icons and plaque are created for user made animals. So usually there will be 2 ".pal" files in the icanteat, lsmantea, and planteat folders: a n.pal file and another ".pal" file. When there is a n.pal file, then the other ".pal" file is not used and should be deleted.

anteater.pal should be deleted if all subfolders in the m and y folders have ".pal" files. If one of those subfolders does not have ".pal" files, then that folder is probably using anteater.pal. Some recoloring approaches would still need an anteater.pal file, although it would contain different colors than the in-game anteater.pal. Some recoloring tutorials are not clear and have caused conflicts. For example, they might use anteater.pal in the original anteater folder, but rename the anteater.pal file. Some people believe they should use that same renamed file name, when they actually should be creating a new renamed file name.

I would not recommend using the 493793c5 APE ID, due to a minor problem in ZT. One of the first 3 characters should be a letter. Otherwise ZT will not recognize it when someone tries to have their animal like this animal. So when APE creates such IDs, they should not be used and one should use APE again until a better ID occurs. Sometimes one has to wait a while before a letter shows up in one of the first 3 characters. If animations have already be loaded, it is also possible to use APE to import an old ID into a new ID. But when animations have not been loaded yet, it is best to wait a while and start from scratch, checking if the new APE ID has a letter in one of the first 3 characters before loading any animations.

Since APE makes ".uca" files less efficient each time a ".uca" is loaded, it is often useful to save a ".uca" file before loading a ".ztd" into APE, then putting that saved ".uca" file back in after using APE.

I also follow Sundance's Uca Guide for any animal I configure or review. But that guide is not perfect. One thing it says is to make an animal like itself. But that is not the way in-game animals work. In-game animals are neutral to itself. "neutral" can be confusing, because family and genus IDs also have to be taken into account. For the anteater, for example, the [cCompatibleAnimals] section does not have the anteater's genus ID of 5124, but it has the family ID of 5214 with a value of -5 and the anteater's ID of 5042 with a value of 5. The "5" balances the value of "-5", making the anteater "neutral" to itself. This approach prevents an animal from liking itself in situations when it shouldn't, like if the maximum number of animals per exhibit is surpassed. This approach makes the in-game anteater be neutral to itself but not like any other Edentates. I feel this is not a good approach, because then one user made anteater will not like
another user made anteater. A better approach, in my opinion, is to set the anteater's genus ID of 5042 to the value of 5 in the [cCompatibleAnimals] section instead of setting the anteater's ID to the value of 5. That way the anteater would be neutral to itself and all other user made anteaters, but will dislike any other Edentates. This is the approach I took when creating APExp 3.2. If one wants their anteater to be neutral to all Edentates, then they can leave out the genus ID, family ID, and anteater ID from the [cCompatibleAnimals] section.

- Jay

[(Designer)Vondell]

That's all very helpful! Much appreciated! Lots of new information that's not in any guides or tutorials yet. Bless you Jay.

 

I'm slowly piecing everything together. Ran into a couple speedbumps earlier as I was working things out with the young animal list icon. I think I'm just gonna opt out of that and leave it the way ZT does it.

 

Now I'm just working on fixing rotations and testing ingame to make sure it behaves properly (I keep running into a situation where it reproduces too quickly.)

 

I've got my animal ID all properly renamed, I figured since I was changing it anyway I'd drop the number string and go with vALDABRA, and it seems to be working fine. I realized how to mass word-replace in WinHex about an hour's worth of manual editing too late! Yeesh.

 

Here's a question for anyone with an opinion on it: is it common practice to use the animal family names that MM (or DD, or CC) introduced on animals that would not otherwise need any information from MM? Aldabra tortoises are Testudines, which is an available family name thanks to the Green Sea Turtle from MM, but giving it an accurate family designation would be the only thing preventing it from working in non-MM or -CC games.

 

Is the tradeoff for accuracy worth it? I guess it's not something people run into very often. If I kept it vanilla-ZT-friendly I'd have to call it a Dinosaur, which seems a little silly, but I guess people make those kinds of compromises all the time.

 

A decade after release, is it safe to assume most people playing these days are going to be running CC or at least MM?

[jbl89]

I think you could even use the MM family ID, and use it in regular ZT . The only internal thing would be that the family is nameless. After all, as far as I'm aware, you can't see those "family" and "genus" names anywhere, and their names are used inconsistently anyway. Just to group likings of animals.

[(Designer)Vondell]

Oh, gotcha! That's good news.

 

EDIT: Bleugh, rotations are killing me. I think my next project might be a utility path that matches up with Zoot's grids so it's easier to make sense of position adjustments.

[(Designer)Vondell]

Ok, I finally got them placed right, probably. Now I'm just watching them for behavioral quirks. Hopefully I'm close to the finish line here. I've gotta write up the animal info description as well.

 

There's no way to make these guys move any more slowly than value 1 right? The babies move at a pace that's almost jarring even at 1 because they're so small, but that will probably just have to stay.

[jbl89]

I'm not sure, it depends how the game is coded, what kind of number it takes into account. If they programmed it like how the game is intended to be, they'll probably use bytes (resulting in speeds of 1-255). Then 1 should be the slowest speed. If they however for some reason took another "kind" of number, you might try 0.5 or something, but it won't make too much of a difference anymore - depending how much decimals you might have after the comma after all.

 

I do wonder if this slow speed might impact their ability to find food in time though.

 

Can't wait to exhibit this creature, love the look of it! :)

[(Designer)Vondell]

I'm assuming it's a whole-integer deal, like most everything else in the game. No matter, it's not particularly jarring during gameplay, it's only weird once you sit and think about the scale of it.

 

If everything goes right I should be sending it over for testing by the end of the night, although a lot of times with projects like this "the end of the night" goes well into the morning for me.

I'll probably send over my Switchgrass for release as well, since it's sitting finished and ready to go too and compliments the Aldabra Tortoise very well.