Particle's Projects

[(Designer)Particle]

Let's have a multiple choice test:

 

 

The object in this picture is

a) a 3 week old hot dog

b) a poo

c) a lump a lump a lump that is in my head

d) a stone bench

 

Seriously though, does anyone actually ever use that ugly thing?  I can't even put it in my zoo I think it is terrible.

 

So I thought well let's see if making a colorswap version makes it any better.  I did not have much hope though.  And when I finished, I wasn't surprised to find that it still looked ugly, just... now it was more colorful:

 

 

Well we could discuss the stone bench, but I don't think there is much point to that.  I'm sure someone will be like "I love the stone bench" but let's move on.  Instead let's talk about palettes for a minute.  The stone bench picture above is a great way to look at the palettes side by side.  You have all 24 colors right there.  You can see that some of the palettes are very dull, and others have a lot of contrast.  The one with the arrow over it is called "bone" and it is super washed out.  It is very hard to make anything look good at all with the bone palette.  Also notice on the right hand column, you have 2 colors that are basically red.  One is faded, the other has contrast.  Technically the bottom one is slightly more pink, but in practice, you can hardly see it.  These are examples to me of things that bug me about the default palettes.  There are more things I could mention, like overall, we could use a dark green, or maybe another lighter purple, I'm sure everyone would have ideas on how to fix this.

 

I think this is all very interesting because we can change these palettes if we want.  It would be a hack, and it would revert back to default colors if you removed the hack with no problems because the save games will just always save the values as color=12 or whatever you choose, so in other words this would be a safe hack to use, and also, you could even possibly choose between different ones, like I want to make a high contrast palette, and Cricket suggested a pastel palette, and that also makes sense to me.  So this is now on my list of things to do, it will be pretty easy really (because of ztstudio's ability to edit palettes) but before I do it, I will try to get a list of the ones I'm thinking of fixing or replacing, so that I can get some input on that before I do it.

 

But to start I'm just going to use the bone palette as an example of what I would do.  I would replace that with a high contrast white palette.

[(Admin)Cricket]

I'm one of those that occasionally uses that ugly stone bench.   It works well in a Halloween-themed zoo.  I do like the other colors available in that palette.  They would make that bench so much more versatile.  It would definitely be nice to have a palette with high-contrast colors to choose from.  I've always been partial to bright and bold colors.

[HeatherL]

On 10/6/2020 at 1:04 PM, Particle said:

But is there anything that I can do to make it so an animal does NOT need to be placed in an exhibit?  

I personally don't have a problem with making a small exhibit area for them & breaking the fence to release them to wander about. 

If they are still configured as animals, would they need to be fed by a zookeeper?  What about poo cleanup? Or is that part of what you're trying to modify?

Peacocks and squirrels-Oh, my!!!

Borsato's raccoon would also be a good choice, and Jordan's skunk, as both animals would be wandering about any self respecting zoo in real life-whether they were welcome or not!

[HeatherL]

I've always thought the bench looked more like an ugly rock or poorly designed fence. I never use it.  When I first started playing I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be.  Imagine my surprise when a guest sat on it!

[(Designer)VeganCannibalism]

I always liked the idea of a stone bench in my zoos, especially since the tooltip says it's apparently carved with the images of dinosaurs. But yeah, the finished product in the game looks pretty... rough. A fresh coat of paint seems to help quite a bit though!

 

And oohhh, replacing palettes sounds like a great idea! I'm a huge fan of olive green, myself. :D

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

Just catching up in ths thread,  WOW.  No, really, WOW.  You are 'boldly going, where no man has gone before'.    The savannah flowers are some of my very favorite, and to have them in different colors; oh my, nirvana.  

 

 

[(Designer)Particle]

2 hours ago, HeatherL said:

Borsato's raccoon would also be a good choice, and Jordan's skunk, as both animals would be wandering about any self respecting zoo in real life-whether they were welcome or not!

Yes!

 

1 hour ago, HeatherL said:

Imagine my surprise when a guest sat on it!

I know right?

[(Designer)Particle]

1 hour ago, VeganCannibalism said:

I always liked the idea of a stone bench in my zoos,

To be fair to Bluefang and their artists, shrinking things down to very very small is tough.  Just for fun I tried to do a stone bench myself to see what I could do and I only did one angle of this so far, but this is what I came up with.

 

 

What do you think, is it any better?  I was not convinced.  I did this like a week ago, and my thought at the time was, maybe I could make it better, but I can see now why the one they came up with is so hard to see... here is what I used for basis of the art:

 

This was on some 3d model site, just a free bench, not anything special.  But at full size you can see it just fine, shrink it down and all the stone turns into gravelly pixelized nothing.

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

I think the open area between the slats is what gives the wood and aluminum bench more detail and you can actually tell what it is.  

[(Designer)Particle]

25 minutes ago, Savannahjan said:

Just catching up in ths thread,  WOW.  No, really, WOW.  You are 'boldly going, where no man has gone before'.    The savannah flowers are some of my very favorite, and to have them in different colors; oh my, nirvana. 

To be accurate, I'm currently going where only JBL has gone before.  We have to give him credit for this, I'm just following his tutorial, and using his tool to do it.  That being said, I'm happy to do this, I'm having fun.  :)