Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[3]

I have a suggestion involving creature classes, mainly related to syndromes, which may find use elsewhere as well.

It might be worthwhile to include a series of creature classes that are respective to certain physical (or even mental) characteristics - say, a CREATURE_BLOODED for creatures with blood, CREATURE_BLOODLESS for creatures without blood, CREATURE_INORGANIC for inorganic things, CREATURE_MAGICAL, perhaps even ones for alignment, mental/physical attributes, etc.. The purpose of doing this is so when a creator decides to make a syndrome that is supposed to only affect specific types of creatures, there's a decent chance that there's already a creature class which covers the creature's attributes. This also assists when it comes to mod compatibility, since a creator can just add whatever class to a syndrome and whoever else's creatures will have the correct class already added.

[Deon]

Can you have multiple classes? I didn't try to make it yet.

[3]

Well, I presume so. I'll test something out.

Edit: Yeah, seems to be working.

[Captain Mayday]

so you'd like me to duplicate the Allow_sickness variation for various other creature classes?

[3]

Essentially, yeah, and possibly add the appropriate classes to each of the quick tissue creature variations.

[Captain Mayday]

Perhaps instead of doing it that way, I could just create an _UNCLASSED suffix to a copy of the existing ones? That way you could just define whatever in your own mods.

Edit: this is the way I've decided to go. Guessing at what people might want as their classes would needlessly bloat out the creature variations, and really, adding a [CREATURE_CLASS:WHATEVER] to a creature is no great hardship.

[3]

Yeah, you're probably right, although there'll still be the issue of cross-mod compatibility... which shouldn't be that much of an issue anyway, since if someone's planning on merging mods, they've probably thought of that sort of thing already.

Thanks.

[Captain Mayday]

Have violated my own rule of not removing anything. Removed the Shadow body template, and the underbelly body part.
The reasons for this decision:
Shadow body is easily constructed from the CV for Six Tendrils and the body with head flag body part.
Underbelly was a legacy from LL, replaced by a more specific allocation of tissues rather than appending body parts.

[Captain Mayday]

So, I'm looking at further suggestions, or any requests for assistance in using this.
We're about 7 days off me deciding this is more or less done enough to give it a version 1 version number.

[Solifuge]

Do your plans included expanding on the available color patterns, as in "descriptor_pattern_special.txt" at all? An expanded set of color pattern templates for stripe/spot combinations, or even general color presets (say, a "Blue_Skin" variation that includes Cobalt, Cerulean, Azure, Teal, etc. tissue colors at varying probabilities), would be really convenient, rather than specifying the same earth-toned colors for 50 different animals. Also, variations like "Albino", which would set hair to white or pale yellow, skin to white or peach, eyes to red, etc. could be used to create pigmentless Cave Creature variants, or approximate genetic albinism using POP_RATIO and castes.

On a semi-related note, with the removal of the "underbelly" part, can the color of the underbelly still be specified/differentiated? It's a little nitpicky detail that bugs me about DF, but it lacks different colors for the underbellies of animals, which is extremely common in nature, from reptiles and fish to mammals and birds.

[Captain Mayday]

Doing that is actually exceedingly difficult.
The 'underbelly' body part was a legacy item of my own that did not function as intended. It is still possible to do what you suggest by using various amounts of coverage of layers of hair.
I believe I've done something similar with one of my creatures in the Legendary Lands mod, and it wasn't easy to set up.
As for your request for Albinism, I'll add it in as a variation. The request for expanded colour patterns falls outside the scope of this mod, so although I like the idea, I won't be adding it in.
Please feel free to create a heavily expanded descriptor_pattern_special.txt for general use, though. I'm sure that I could find use for it in my other modding.

[Captain Mayday]

Aha, it appears that I have actually allowed for the front stripe on creatures with my body detail plan as follows:

   [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:ADD_TORSO_TISSUES_WITH_DIFFERENT_TISSUE_FRONT_STRIP] #generally soft:hard for soft underbellies.
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY:ARG2:1:TOP]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY:ARG2:1:LEFT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY:ARG2:1:RIGHT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY:ARG2:1:BACK]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY:ARG1:1:FRONT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY:ARG1:1:BOTTOM]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_UPPER:ARG2:1:TOP]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_UPPER:ARG2:1:LEFT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_UPPER:ARG2:1:RIGHT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_UPPER:ARG2:1:BACK]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_UPPER:ARG1:1:FRONT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_UPPER:ARG1:1:BOTTOM]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:ARG2:1:TOP]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:ARG2:1:LEFT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:ARG2:1:RIGHT]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:ARG2:1:BACK]
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:ARG1:1:FRONT]   
      [BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:ARG1:1:BOTTOM]

So that should suffice for anything with a different material.

If we're just talking about using the same material, with a different colour in a strip down the front, then you'll probably be looking at this sort of thing:
      [SELECT_CASTE:ALL]
         [SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:ALL:HAIR]
            [TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:RED:1]
               [TLCM_NOUN:hair:SINGULAR]
         [SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_UPPER:HAIR:FRONT]
            [PLUS_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:HAIR:FRONT]
               [TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:WHITE:1]
                  [TLCM_NOUN:underbelly hair:SINGULAR]

This seems to work.
There is no way for me to do this for every possible colour combination, however. You are welcome to the method, though.

[Solifuge]

Nice! I've relatively little experience with new creature modding, but I'm glad you pieced that together. Once I have a chance to fiddle with this mod a fair bit, I'll probably slap together a general use colors/patterns mod.

[Captain Mayday]

There's a lot of examples of using VBASE in various ways in my Legendary Lands mod.

[StephanReiken]

The main problem I have with this is that DF won't allow you to load a template and take off parts from castes, then apply current template. As soon as it gets to the castes, DF seems to [APPLY_CURRENT_CREATURE_VARIATION] regardless if you want it to or not.