Jymn's fussy little edits

[(Designer)Jymn]

Welp, I'm pretty new around here, but I've been playing around with zoo color palettes for a long time and I thought I would be brave and post some things. I know it's not as exciting as brand new animations, but some of the BlueFang colors are... well...they could be better. I've never shared any Zoo stuff before so let me know if there's any problems or changes needed with these files.

 

It's five degrees fahrenheit where I'm at right now, so let's start with some arctic animals.

 

It's been done many times before, but I have a reindeer recolor here and I think it's pretty good. There are various breeds of reindeer across the arctic on three different continents, and they change color seasonally, but none are bright orange! So I cooled them down.

You will need to remove the original reindeer.ztd from your updates folder because it is a default replacement--I mean "Hack" in the ZT1 parlance, though it feels weird to call a recolor a hack. If you wanna use my .pal to make a non-replace version, be my guest but personally my adopt menu is full to the brim as it is.

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Reindeer are actually the only deer species that isn't significantly dimorphic: Females have antlers to dig through the snow looking for food. But I made these just slightly color dimorphic (males are redder) because I think it looks nice to have some variation in the herd. The babies are dark brown, which seemed to be the most common color for them based on my exhaustive research (scrolling google image search for about five minutes)

Plus one exciting little thing that makes this recolor feel less unnecessary: have you ever watched a baby reindeer fly? Their stars are beige instead of yellow! That's because the baby reindeer takes it's star color from the wrong place on the .pal file, AND it puts star color on random places on its body, which becomes super noticeable if you try to make it look less like a traffic cone. Luckily I found the baby's star pixels and gave it its own .pal so it can use magic properly.

 

I did edit the .ai file a little. They ask for some elevation and a tiny bit more rocks and foliage now. I also made them more tolerant of other things such as grassland, coniferous and highland scenery; other ungulates, and birds. Since I tend to have big reindeer exhibits, it's fun to have a nice eagle or something soaring around.

And they like the elephant shelter in addition to the stable. Because options are nice. And I don't get enough use out of the elephant shelter, and the door is actually about the size of the stable door anyway.

 

 

 

Jm_ReindeerImproved_Hack.zip

[(Designer)Jymn]

You know Magnet? The polar bear. I think he's a nice looking polar bear.
But normal polar bears look good too, so I want both.
And I want baby bears to be born, because duh.
So I need at least 3 bears.
But polar bears don't like to live in groups.

You see my conundrum.

So I made something I've been wanting for literally decades: Magnet as the male polar bear. Regular polar bears as the female.

It was really very easy to do, and polar bear males are in fact bigger anyway.

This is a replacement hack for the polar bear.
It has a custom male icon so you won't have two "magnet" icons showing up in your menu.

 

A few very slight changes were made to the polar bear .ai. They still don't ask for foliage but they are no longer affronted by coniferous and highlands items, as polar bears often venture south into wooded areas (Sometimes cross breeding with grizzlies). The only truest desire I changed is that they would now like a bit of elevation, though they can certainly do without it.

 

Note: male polar bear version of magnet does not play with magnet's ball, but can now use the icy keg (uses default polar bear animations)

 

Updated: 1/5/23 to like some user-made shelters, have male bears use the icy keg, and tidy-up the files (now requires magnet.ztds, that you almost definitely already have)

Jm_PolarBearDimorphic_Hack.zip

[(Designer)Jymn]

Have you ever read the info text for the yeti in this game? It's really interesting and detailed with references to Yeti's hiding in the forests of the Himalayas and making themselves nests out of branches.

...

But the Yeti will have a meltdown if you place one single shrub in its exhibit.

 

Now I know mjmannella already fixed this by making the Yeti a proper highland animal, and you can check that out here: https://zootekphoenix.com/forums/topic/25477-mjmannellas-projects/

but I still have three problems:

1. I dislike making drastic changes to an animal's suitability needs because then if you open any of your old zoos you will have very unhappy animals.

2. I like to put polar bears and arctic wolves in with the yetis.

3. The yeti color palette is hideously ugly. Seriously, it looks like someone peed in the snow.

 

My solution to all these problems? Two breeds of Yeti!

 

The Abominable Yeti, which is a hack that replaces the default yeti, has unchanged exhibit needs and can continue to live with the arctic animals. I did fix the map to point to the Himalayas though. Also, it is WHITE, so it looks good in the SNOW! (Abominable yeti will conflict with mjmanella's version, or any other yeti hack you may have)

 

And the Highland Yeti, which is a new animal in the highland group and has the same exhibit requirements as the snow leopard because I thought that would be a cute pairing. Highland Yeti is yellowish, like the snow leopard, but a milder more reasonable yellow.

->

Both breeds are very faintly color-dimorphic, just for fun. Male Abominables have some blue and female Highlands have some purple. By the way, they now like the ice age cave just as much as the normal snow cave.

Also, although Abominable Yeti still doesn't *want* trees, it will tolerate trees much better than the original and can share an exhibit with its highland cousins.

 

*fixed

One silly little hiccup. I did not use APE to make Highland Yeti, (I can't get any version of APE to run right at all) and I do not know how to make his info text and tooltip show up. Like absolutely no idea whatsoever. I wanted to give it the text from the original yeti, if someone could teach me how...

 

 

Jm_YetiHighland.zip Jm_YetiAbmn_Hack.zip

[(Designer)Z.Z.]

Those look awesome.

Nice work!

:)

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

Wow, great work!   I like the color variations.

 

So glad you are here Jymn.  

[Fern]

These would be better if they were not hacks.

You should use this version of APE http://www.ztcdd.org/DD/DownloadFiles/ZTABC/APExp3-2.zip

Will pass your files to Jay.

Also many people do not have winrar. Winrar will save in zip format if you ask it to.

[(Designer)Jymn]

Okay, I will make them zips when I have a moment

 

I do have that version of APE, it won't load animals for me, I know that sounds strange, it just won't. I used to use APE back in the day...it might be something about my computer. Dunno.

 

Anyway, although I would be willing to make non-replacement versions if there is demand for them, I disagree that they would be superior. I do not want a better reindeer sitting next to an incredibly similar but profoundly ugly reindeer. I just want a better reindeer. I would like to make every single dinosaur dimorphic at some point (birds so often are, think how fun that would be?) I do not want to double the dinosaurs in my catalogue. It already takes FOREVER to scroll through (thankyou Hawkeye)

So, I will definitely continue to make default replacements, but if people would really appreciate non-replacements I can provide two options for people to choose from. I could try to run APExp on my partners laptop maybe... But I was really hoping someone knew how to do info and tooltip by hand, because it is my only sticking point for making new animals APE-free.

[Fern]

What version of computer are you using?

Did you read the instructions?

[(Designer)Jymn]

Okay, so I had an real interesting evening with this. In an attempt to fix whatever had gone wrong with APE, I uninstalled and reinstalled the game. The good news is, it worked! (Thankyou Fern, for spurring me to do so) The bad news is, whatever I had messed with that was making APE unhappy was apparently also what was allowing Highland Yeti and Better Reindeer to work. Highland Yeti was still present in any zoo I had saved it in as an animal you could see walking around and pick up, but wasn't in the adopt menu. Reindeer had become invisible, but were still listed (without icons) in the animals list. So I'm not sure what I had done, I made the other yeti breed (the 'ole .pal swap method) years ago and I had even less of an idea what I was doing then than I do now.

 

But I figured out the reindeer needed it's config files, and I had apparently misplaced it's .ai file somehow. Literally no idea how, but it is fixed.

 

And I used APE to make a new highland yeti which worked. So I tried changing its ztd name to the old name and using all my old files except the UCA and...it still worked.

 

So, in attempt to figure out what the magical difference was between my first try and what APE produced I went through the darn uca line by line and literally all I could find was cNameID = 19000

I don't know what that number means or where it comes from or why I can change the animal's .ztd name without breaking it...but there you have it.

 

Hopefully the new files work for everyone, they're working for me.

 

[Fern]

Jay already says he has picked up some problems with a quick look so expect a few notes sometime soon.