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Development Forum Of Blargs and Borgs    Coolpikaaa      7/27/2013 Associated timezone based greetings everyone! I've come out of lurking in the shadows of the CC because, unfortunately, I seem to have a problem, and believe there are enough talented users around that someone may be able to help! I love the Borg Norns. I think they are a great addition to the creatures universe, and they in their various incarnations have always been a favorite since their premier in C2. Recently, I've been doing a few wolfing runs, and sometimes throw the Borg in at the end, just to watch the interesting little creatures that develop from Assimilation. Unfortunately, while they have all the powers, gadgets, and intimidation of the real thing, the Borg are missing a very, very important part. They don't have sprites! All these creatures are walking around Assimilated, but missing any of the mechanical tellings of a true drone! So I got to thinking. What if we could update them a bit? Keep all the hard work and skill that the Biolab Team put into them, but also add that little extra so they are more "complete". I figured how hard could adding sprites to an already "done" breed be? So I contacted a friend that deals in such matters, and we got to work. Figuring that before new sprites were made, we should maybe learn a bit about how everything goes together, we decided to convert the old C2 sprites to the C3 format as a fitting touch. The automated converter in the Spritebuilder tool seemed to work without a hitch, we threw them in the folder, then edited the Borg genetics so it looked for slot W sprites, which is what we set them to. That's where things stopped working so smoothly. The sprites didn't display any differently and shot off errors, so we figured it was the whole conversion thing, and simply tried setting the genes to Chi-chi sprites which did the same. We thought we should try forcing the game to reload the files, in case it was still trying to use the old stuff, but realized we didn't exactly know how to do that. So we tried editing just one norn, starting a new world, recompiling the agent... nothing. We've hit a wall, and basically, I'm wondering if any of you know where we just might be able to start on trying to get this to work. Do any of you know how to get a breed to point at a new set of sprites? I'm pretty hopeful someone does! We're really looking forward to having actual Borg looking Borgs take over our ships.   Mad_Doodles   7/27/2013 Hello there, CPs parter in crime. Who likes errors? Well no one but have one anyway: Error That's what happens when we do any of the above. Simply swapping the sprite slot results in nothing, but anything deeper than that gets this error, and then a crashed game. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Prodigal Sock Ghosthande     7/27/2013 Do any of you know how to get a breed to point at a new set of sprites? You open the genome in something like the Genetics Kit, and track down the "Creature: Appearance" genes. There are five of these genes: one for head, body, arms, legs and tail. Each specifies the species and letter of the breed slot for that body part. It should not be causing errors, especially if you're trying to set it to something that is confirmed to be stable, like the ChiChi sprites. If I understand correctly that's what's happening? I suppose in that case you could try making a plain, ChiChi clone and make it use your sprites; that would at least help you confirm if your sprites are OK and it's just the Borg Norns messing up for some reason. I'm not sure how you'd go about fixing the breed, though; my best advice would be to try to get in touch with Annex, who had been planning to redo the sprites some time ago. I can imagine he'd be interested in talking to someone with similar goals, and might have more of an idea of what's going wrong/how to fix it.   Mad_Doodles   7/27/2013 You're right in thinking that's what's happening, and thank you the advice of trying to mess around with a plain Chi-Chi. This seems *really* obvious thinking back, but hey, messing around with stuff at four in the morning will do that I guess. (Yay time zones!) Apologies for posting an image that was too large for these forums, that's usually an okay size but clearly not here and I'll bear that in mind in the future. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Coolpikaaa   7/27/2013 Thanks Ghosthande. We'll have to try when we get a spare moment and see what comes up. Do the appearances change automagically when you start up the game with altered genetics or do you know if we have to force it to reload or something?   Prodigal Sock Ghosthande     7/27/2013 You shouldn't have to do anything fancy to make it register that there's been an update to the genome file, because it will re-read the genome for each Creature born. However... It does save an individual Creature's genes, and it can and will cache the sprites themselves. This means a Creature already born will not change appearance if files are replaced. So if you replace sprites, you will want to start a new world and hatch a new creature in order view the sprites there, just to be 100% sure the game is looking at the new version and not caching the version you overwrote. It sounds a little tedious, but it's saved me a lot of headaches.   Mad_Doodles   7/27/2013 Slow and methodical, that's the way. I'll have a play around later and report back the results. EDIT: Well editing the chi chi genes with normal sprites worked out great, and even more interestingly I found out that some of the sprites I converted got corrupted. The game crashed when trying to load the male C2 Borg Norn head. I'm going back to the convertion process to see if I can fix that. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Coolpikaaa   7/27/2013 You got 'em to work a bit, eh? Hmm. I wonder why the Borg won't take them?   Mad_Doodles   7/27/2013 I've got editing creature appearance down, however I'm having issues with the Borg Norn sprites. It's friggin' WEIRD. Basically the game will not accept that they're there. They should be taking up the Norn W slot, but what happens instead is that it goes to the nearest available slot, which seems to be the Treehugger one. Other slot W sprites do work however, I downloaded the Indio Norns to test this out and they show up just fine. The Borg Norn sprites WILL work however if I make them override an existing sprite set, such as the Chi Chi. SO I can make them replace Slot D (for example) but they will not register as Slot W. I'm on the verge of making a crater in the table with my face. EDIT: It's just occurred to me, they WERE working before, they were just corrupted so it crashed. Now they won't take at all. I'm really really puzzled. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Coolpikaaa   7/27/2013 Weird. Maybe it's the sprites themselves? Did any Birg bits display when you tested the chi chi?   Mad_Doodles   7/27/2013 When I replaced the Chi Chi sprite file for a Borg sprite, yes. When I tried to point the genetics to a separate Borg sprite file, nope. What I may do next is try to make a set of slot w head sprites to test what happens, so I'll extract some I know work, and repackage them as slot w head sprites. If those work it's the C2 sprites, if it doesn't work then it's... well something else. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Coolpikaaa   7/27/2013 So by editing the Chi Chi itself, you got The Borg sprites to display? Just not the head, cause it's broken? Neat! I think in that case it might be the head that ruining the whole bunch.   Mad_Doodles   7/28/2013 I feel I've been unclear, sorry about that. The Borg Norn sprites work just fine *if* they've replaced existing sprites. So for instance: a01d is the head sprite for the Chi Chi. a01W is the head sprite for the Borg Norn. If I convert a01W into c16 and re-name it a01d, the Borg Norn head shows up just fine (although the placement is a little weird at times, I'm hoping that's just because the C2 sprites aren't displaying well with C3 sprites). However, if I try to point the genetics to Norn slot W, rather than Norn slot D, I get treehugger sprites. Even if the Borg Norn sprites are in c16 format. So yea, I'm stumped. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Prodigal Sock Ghosthande     7/29/2013 How are you saving the sprites? What program? What operating system do you use? And also, have you browsed to the Docking Station/Images directly (not using the sprite program, but something like Windows Explorer) to verify that they are actually there? I had a similar issue when I started breedmaking because Vista kept saving the files in a "hidden" folder instead of the real Docking Station/Images folder, so the game couldn't find them... DS knew they weren't "there", but Vista would display them as though they were whenever I'd look for them using my spriting program, so it took a while to figure out what was going on. Various versions of Windows, not just Vista, have this User Account Control thing that tries to "protect" the computer's Program Files folder from the user's attempts to change or add files there. I ended up setting all my C3/DS programs to "run as administrator" to make it work.   Mad_Doodles   7/29/2013 I'm using SpriteBuilder and Windows 7 64bit. I have UAC turned off so I don't think it's that. Everything looks fine in terms of installation. What me and CP are currently doing is extracting all of the C2 sprites to get at the raw Bitmaps, then importing them into SpriteBuilder again to create brand new, fresh C16s. I'm hopeful that this will solve the issue as other Slot W sprites do seem to work, as proven with previous tests. I have my half ready to go so I'm just waiting on CP but you know, real life first and all that. On a separate note I shall be trying to contact the original creator about making this "fix" public, unless there's a general consensus that it's fine since A) We're not taking credit for the original work and B) It's all assets used in the original files, just moved about a bit. Until then this will remain a personal project, mostly born out of curiosity. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Mad_Doodles   7/30/2013 Well. It sort of worked. Sort of. At lot of that is going to be Body data issues, although the fuzzy green is beyond me. It should look like this: So yeeeeea. The female sprites also caused a crash just like the one posted earlier. Interesting that I did manage to confirm that the game just flat out won't use the s16s, I was correct in that regard! So, I have two options available to me. Try to convert the files one by one, since I think it was the batch convert that caused the errors (but showed up correctly at least). Or I could just go ahead and make new sprites pretty much from scratch. If I were to do this are there any relatively blank Norn sprites that I would be free to use as a base? It would cut down the work dramatically. Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.   Prodigal Sock Ghosthande     7/30/2013  1 Oh, you're batch converting? Batch convert can cause problems, especially since it tends to "choke" on large files, or on groups of files. I've had it work successfully, but only when I converted each head sprite file separately. The "fuzzy green" is what I call green spew. It can be common in breed making, depending on how you make sprites. It's annoying, but one of the least worrisome problems you can run up against when spriting, IMO. As far as plain sprites for C3/DS breeds, I'm not sure. Someone did make a "bald Norn head" sprite set years ago for adult Norns, which was just sort of a plain tan color and lacked hair, but I'm not sure where/if you can find it now. Otherwise, a lot of people seem to use the Bengal Norn as a base. It's unfortunate that there's no official plain-jane breed for C3/DS like we had in C1 and C2.   Mad_Doodles   7/30/2013 Well I was batch converting, but I gave up on that for the reasons we've been discussing. Thank you for the information on green spew, I'm sure that will prove invaluable! Doodler, painter, baker and ridiculous idea haver.

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