Magical transformation of bezoar goat´s young

[Hawkkeye666]

I made a bezoar goat for ZT, and I have problem with it. For some reason (probably tied to bugged undeletable folders in my TMP folder) I could not properly do animations for bezoar goat´s young, so I decided to put them into .ztd manually through APE. And this happened: In APE, I correctly see goat´s young as they should be, but ingame, instead of it, I have young of walia ibex (animal I made before). I was quite confused, because path in .uca file is correct for goat. When I have both animals in updates folders, they work correctly (except having young walia ibexes instead of young bezoar goats), but when I take walia ibex out of updates folder, bezoar goat´s young are invisible ingame. I cannot fathom why this is so - I cannot find even a trace of walia ibex folder in goat´s .uca. Would you have any idea why goat´s young are so changed ingame? Thanks for answers.

Both .ztds are included  in this post.

walia ibex.ZTD bezoar goat.ZTD

[Fern]

From Jay: For Hawkkeye's bezoar goat, the reason the young are not showing as expected is because the animals/hwbgoat/y/.../*.ani files have "dir1 = hwwalia" instead of "dir1=hwbgoat".

[Hawkkeye666]

Thanks, now it works correctly. And I have another mystical transformation, this one left me totally dumbdfounded. I have made Ocellated Turkey, and sometimes, they change into... MSC3323´s great white pelecans!!! I checked their folders, and they have different names. I checked turkey´s animations in APE, and also .ini of its animation folders, and no traces of pelecan. I copied behaviour from animal also based on warthog to turkey´s .uca - and they still sometimes transform. Strange, except having them in my updates folder, I´ve never done anything based on MSC3323´s pelecans. Also, my turkey is based on warthog, while pelecan on flamingo. Turkey is icluded in attachment.

Thanks very much for help. I am still totally confused of many aspects of making animals for ZT.

ocellatedturkey.ZTD

[Fern]

You are forgetting to add your initials to the ztd names.

I have an idea what this problem is but I need to check it first.

[Fern]

From Jay: For the turkey, I put ocellatedturkey.ZTD in the dlupdate folder, went into ZT, created an exhibit with a male, female, and young, let it run for more than 1 game month, and I did not see any problems. I saved that zoo. I then added Great_White_Pelican_by_msc3323.ZTD to the dlupdate folder. I then went into ZT, reloaded the saved zoo, and let it run for for more than 1 more game month. During that time, there were 4 occurrences where an adult turkey changed into the pelican for less than 3 seconds and then changed back. I did not have the pelican in any exhibit, although I did look at it in the purchase menu. I do not know what causes the problem. The turkey ztd does not use the pelican APE ID anywhere and the pelican ztd does not use the turkey internal name anywhere. So it is not a conflict. The checker says there are no errors in either one and there are no frame count mismatches in either one. I used Zoot to look at all graphics and ani files of the turkey, and they were all as they should be. The Animations sections match the animation folders for both. But I did not look at the entire uca files line by line to see if there was anything unusual in one of them. At this point, I can only assume that ZT is getting confused by something, although I don't know what that something is, or even which ztd is causing the confusion. I noticed a couple slightly unusual things, although I would not have expected them to cause ZT to get confused. The pelican has txt files for German and English. The German one has German language symbols in it. Also, that txt file and the turkey txt file do not have end of line characters at the end of them.

[Hawkkeye666]

It is even weirder. I am 90 percent sure that just males get transformed - I´ve never seen female turkey/pelican, while I see males quite often.

This is maybe irrelevant, but I copied habitat, suitable objects, animals and preficon from Genkicoll´s Keel-Billed Toucan (they are sympatric in south-western Yucatan).

For now, I just use female animations for males (there´s not big difference except the width of tail feathers). But I am quite intrigued what can cause this transformation.

PS: how can I add end of line characters at the end of .txt file?

[Fern]

From Jay: The ".txt" files are not causing the turkey to pelican problem. The ".txt" file for ZT's yeti does not have an end of line character at the end. And to confirm the ".txt" files are not causing the turkey to pelican problem, I changed the ".txt" files in both to be single sentences with an end of line character at the end of each, and the turkey to pelican problem still occurred. But just for information, when one is using an editor that does not automatically add an end of line character at the end of a file, putting a blank line at the end of the file without any spaces will cause an end of line character to be at the end of the file, although that should not be necessary for the ".txt" files for ZT.

I also did other tests to rule out other possible causes of the problem. For example, I also replaced all "[BehaviorSet" with "[m\BehaviorSet" in both animals in case it was something I did with APExp 3.2. The problem still occurred, so it is not that either. I believe the turkey animations were loaded with ZT Studio. So I used Zoot to resave all animations, but it still occasionally turned into a pelican. Therefore, it looks like it is not a ZT Studio related problem. The uca is based on ZT's warthog. So I compared the uca line by line with one I created based on the warthog using APExp 3.2. All of the differences were okay.

Whenever I saw the turkey turn into the pelican, it was always the adult turkeys and all but one time were definitely the male adults. For one time, there were a male and female adult near one another. At the time, I thought it was the female adult that changed, but since they were near one another, it is possible it was actually the male, especially since all of the other times were the adult males. I do not know what is meant by the "For now, I just use female animations for males" comment. I did make a change to the turkey uca that appeared to stop the problem, which might be the same thing as meant by this comment. I changed "m = animals/hwoturk/m" to "m = animals/hwoturk/f" in the uca. That makes ZT use the adult female animations for the adult male. I then tested it in ZT for 4 game months and it never changed to a pelican. For the last game month, I had lots of the turkeys in the exhibit... as many as was allowed via the Zookeeper Recommendations. So this could be done for the turkey to prevent the problem, and then the "m" directory can be deleted with all its contents. I would have preferred finding a cause rather than a workaround, but the workaround is better than nothing.

I wonder if the canvas (background) size for any frame of any of the male animations is too large (or too tall) for ZT to handle. It is not worth me saving all frames and checking all of their sizes to see what the largest used size is. It is also possible to narrow down to which animation is causing the problem by editing every frame of every animation to give the animation name. But that is a huge effort and not worth the effort.

The "f" directory has 20 animation directories in it. I suspect a number of those folder are duplicates. If so, it is possible to change the uca to use only the unique ones and then delete those directories that have duplicate animations of the unique ones.

The cTheString has "The Ocellated Turkey" instead of "the Ocellated Turkey". "smaller relative of" could be changed to "a smaller relative of the" in cLongHelp.

The [f/Animations] and [y/Animations] sections could be deleted, since they match the [m/Animations] section.

I would not have any lines in the [cCompatibleAnimals] section. The "v = 5211" / "v = 15" pair of lines causes the turkeys to give a smile when another turkey is added, even when the Zookeeper Recommendations says there are too many animals. Similarly, the "v = 5042" / "v = 5" pair of lines are not needed to allow the turkey let anteaters be in the exhibit with them.

All versions of APE and APExp make the animal list icons the same as the purchase menu icons when loading new icons. But the animal list icons for the animals that come with ZT are not the same as the purchase menu icons. One can see what those look like in the animal list (the one that shows which animals are in the zoo, rather than the purchase menu) in ZT to understand the difference. If a designer wants the animal list icons for their animals to look different than the purchase menu icons, Zoot (and probably ZT Studio) can be used to load a new animal list icon in the ls... directory. It is also possible to create different animal list icons for male, female, and young by using lsm..., lsf..., and lsy... directories.

When APE/APExp creates purchase menu icons when loading new icons, it incorrectly makes them 35 pixels high by adding black lines at the top and bottom. The purchase menu icons for the animals that come with ZT are only 32 pixels high. It is possible to use Zoot (and probably ZT Studio) to load purchase menu icons that are 32 pixels high.

[Hawkkeye666]

Yep, that´s what I did with animations and icons (switched males to females).

Animations weren´t loaded through anything, I made them according to Hendrix´s scripts and put them into .ztd file. File was then once saved in APE.